The eSafety Commissioner has commenced consulting with industry, stakeholder groups and experts on a potential age verification system that would better protect children from online pornography.
Commissioner for eSafety, Julie Inman Grant said the consultation process would inform a ‘roadmap’ on age verification and would align with a month-long public consultation on updates to Australia’s Restricted Access System (RAS) declaration, which had been in place since 2007 to help protect children from exposure to inappropriate content.
Ms Inman Grant said an age verification roadmap and updates to the RAS were intended to better shield children from online content that they were not mentally, emotionally, or developmentally ready for.
“Inappropriate content like violent or extreme pornography that young children may encounter by accident can be distressing and even harmful, while for older children who may seek out this material, the risk is that it will give them unrealistic and potentially damaging ideas about what intimate relationships should look like,” Ms Inman Grant said.
“Age verification, as overseas experience has shown, is a complex issue, so it is important that all sections of the community are able to be heard,” she said.
“No one measure taken in isolation will be a silver bullet in addressing this problem.”
Ms Inman Grant said the combination of a suite of protective measures could provide a powerful defence for children when it came to exposure to inappropriate content online.
The Commissioner said updates to the RAS declaration would require services to place R18+ material behind a restricted access system so it could not be accessed by children.
The eSafety Commissioner’s 13-page discussion paper Restricted Access System Declaration Online Safety Act 2021 (August 2021) can be accessed at this PS News link, further information about submissions at this link and the call for evidence at this link.
