Launch of ‘Safeguarding the future of digital Australia in 2025’ report speech

It is a great pleasure to be here at the launch of this Intel report ‘Safeguarding the future of digital Australia in 2025’.

It is also very timely because it comes as part of Stay Smart Online Week.  This is a major effort on the part of the Australian government - working with industry players, businesses and other stakeholders - targeting particularly consumers and small business to raise awareness of, and encourage people to take action in relation to, staying safe and secure online.

The theme of Stay Smart Online Week this year is “On The Go.” In other words, increasingly our online actions are through the use of mobile devices. Rather than sitting down at our desk with a laptop or a desktop computer we’re out and about, pulling out our device many times a day, many times an hour, in some cases several times a minute – and considerations of passwords, security codes and so on can sometimes be forgotten. We’re encouraging people to remember all of the important, obvious but necessary steps to preserve your online safety and security.

One of the key reasons why we need to keep coming back and reminding people of the importance of doing these things is that this is a space which is changing so fast. I am leading some work in the area of online safety for children.  This began in Opposition: we carried out quite an extensive consultation exercise looking at some of the policy challenges in improving online safety for children.

As we sat down to look at these issues and compared where we stand now to where we stood in the later years of the Howard Government, 2006-2007, it was obvious that there were two main changes which totally changed the nature of the policy challenge and what we needed to do about it.

The first was the absolute explosion of mobile devices, smartphones, tablets and so on – giving users the ability to access the internet wherever they might be – including, critically in the case of children, places without adult supervision.

The other major change since 2006-2007 has been the explosion of social media. We have moved away from a world where content is generated by professional content-disseminating businesses to passive consumers. We’re now in a world where everybody is busy generating their own content and that changes the safety issues.

Now I mentioned that because it is part of the broader proposition – which is trite but like a lot of things which are trite it is also true – that the internet and the online world are changing at an extraordinary rate. But of course that is the reason why today’s report is timely. With the help of futurist Ross Dawson this report that Intel has produced is looking a bit further into the future, looking to 2025.

Now it’s not a precise exercise – as Ross himself just mentioned to me, we can’t know what the future holds.  Of course of we did there would be no jobs for futurists.  But the trends that Ross and his co-authors have identified in this report highlight the continuity with the issues we are grappling with now and the issues we are like to be grappling with in 2025 and beyond.

I want to call out one in particular of the several themes that have been identified: the notion that our reputation, personal opportunities and identity will be shaped by our participation in social media. Now we all know that’s increasingly a truth, even today. Recruiters routinely look at people’s online profiles in making an assessment in whether to proceed with a candidate. So the party snaps you put up at age 14 on a social media site can define your prospect of getting a job at the age of 20 or 35 or 40.

One of the standard pieces of advice that I give – as do fellow politicians – to anybody who comes along and says “I’m interested in getting into politics one day, what should I do?”, is to be very, very careful what you put on social media.  Somebody somewhere is going to find what you put up, and it might not always be consistent with the personal brand image you’re seeking to present in 10 or 20 years’ time – for example when you go for preselection.

If this is true in politics, it is true in so many other fields as well.  This whole notion of curating and managing personal reputation is already a powerful issue – a big difference between the world that people of my generation grew up in and the world being inherited by today’s teenagers. That trend is only going to continue and get stronger, as this report identifies.

The next theme I drew out of the work that’s been done in this report, and in turn the opinion research that’s been done testing the opinions of Australians about some of these predictions, is that - perhaps unsurprisingly - Australians have some anxieties and concerns about the rate at which technology is progressing and what that might mean. 

It is obviously the case that the internet has massively changed the world for the better. You need only spend even a short amount of time with today’s children and teenagers to be very impressed by their capacity gather information, to structure information, and to make sense of information. They are growing up in a world which is rich with information, they are immersed in a flow of information and data and they have skills in accessing it, in using it, in drawing conclusions from it.  So the benefits of the online world for education, for example, are profound.

But it is also the case that any change creates anxiety. I think that is evident in some of the statistics and research findings in the report: there are anxieties and concerns within the community. One of the figures cited is that half of Australians - in thinking about that future world where your reputation, your personal life and your identity are shaped by participation in social media – think it’s unfair for your financial credit ratings or job opportunities to be based on your online reputation.  That is just one of the many issues that we will need to continue to grapple with as the pace of change only continues.

A lot of the commentary about the online world, about technology, is understandably enough written by and for those who are enthusiasts – those who are early adopters. But it’s also not surprising that those who are not early adopters feel a certain sense of anxiety about some of these changes.  I hasten to add that the mere fact you’re an early adopter does not preclude you from also being conscious of some of the downsides and the risks.

I think therefore that the report Intel is launching today is very consistent with the broader themes of Stay Smart Online Week. Because if we are to capture, as a nation, the benefits of ever-increasing digitisation, of ever-increasing connectivity, then we need to ensure first of all that individual Australians are confident about their online activities and eager to seize their potential. We need to have them focussed how this connected world can bring improved educational opportunities, improved career opportunities, better business opportunities – and of course personal and social opportunities as well.

We also need to guard against the threat.  If we do not do a good job in protecting ourselves against those threats – be they online bullying, be they online scams, be they all the other things that can go wrong – then we compromise our capacity to capture all the tremendous opportunities that the online world is already bringing and is going to continue to bring.

So I am very pleased to be here to discuss this important report and to declare it officially launched.