Mr BURKE (Watson — Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and Leader of the House) (14:34): I thank the member for Cunningham for raising an important and tough issue. Today, at the National Press Club, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett announced the formation of Taskforce Pompilid The purpose of this taskforce is to deal with a form of exploitation and sadism that we all wish we didn't have to be aware of. This is effectively because of an online network where the perpetrators are principally young boys and young men from Western, English-speaking backgrounds and the victims are overwhelmingly young girls who've had a history of low self-esteem, mental health disorders, self-harm, eating disorders and other attributes that might lead them to seek connection online. The method has been that victims are pressured initially into providing compromising or sensitive information or images. Once the images have been provided the victims are blackmailed into escalating acts of violence targeted at themselves, at their siblings, sometimes at strangers and sometimes at pets.

In establishing the taskforce the Federal Police are bringing together officers from their cyber, counterterrorism and intelligence divisions and also from the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation. And I do want to pay tribute to the officers who work in that particular division in Brisbane and in particular to Peter Dutton, as a former minister for home affairs, in seeing that established.

Legislation that passed the other place this morning, the new telecommunications bill, gives new powers that the AFP and other agencies will be able to use to infiltrate and destroy some of these child exploitation networks. In terms of the scale, when you consider that we have largely not spoken about this to date, since July 2023 the Federal Police has received just over 100 reports of sadistic online exploitation. Some of these reports have been received from our international law enforcement partners, some from the United States centre and some from members of the public. It's resulted in nine international and three domestic arrests.

While the Australian Federal Police are doing their work with the taskforce, parents and children will often ask what they can do. The four pieces of advice from the Australian Federal Police are: stop the chat; take screenshots, especially of the offender's username; report and block the account; and screenshot your own account information. Of course, all this information and the capacity to report is on the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation website, accce.gov.au. The best thing anyone can do, whether they're involved or they know a friend who is, is to tell someone about it. Tell someone. It is not your fault.

The commissioner mentioned today that, while it has always taken a village to raise a child, sometimes it takes a country to protect them. People who are feeling threatened or exploited by these networks need to know that the Federal Police are there with them, protecting them; the government is there; the entire parliament is there; and the Australian people stand together with the work of the Australian Federal Police.