The Australian: Age the issue as debate urged on smartphones for kids

A CHILDREN’S media lobby group is urging the government to help launch a debate about how old children should be ­before they can have smartphones and similar gadgets.

The comments come as The Australian has confirmed the government is advancing plans to make safety options for smartphones and other devices available for parents.

In a submission on the bill for the government’s proposed cyber-bullying crackdown, the Australian Council on Children and the Media says insufficient attention is given to the role of parents and that more children are on the internet before they start school.

“There is a role for government in setting up at least a conversation about how old a child should be before he or she is provided with a smartphone or similar device,” the submission to a Senate committee inquiry says.

The submission says the group “detects something of an ‘elephant in the room’ in this discussion, namely the number of young children who have unsupervised access to internet-enabled devices’’.

The centrepiece of the cyber-bullying crackdown is the ­appointment of a children’s e-safety commissioner, who will have powers to order big social media services to take down harmful material and to tell ­people who posted the material to ­remove it, refrain from posting it or apologise for doing so.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher said many parents were wrestling with what devices their kids should use and at what age.

“That’s certainly the kind of thing that the children’s e-safety commissioner would be in a position to provide advice to parents about,” he said.

A working group that includes mobile phone companies and internet service providers has met to work on making software available that parents could install on their devices to protect kids from inappropriate material.

The Coalition has ruled out the mandatory filtering once proposed but later abandoned by Labor.

Meanwhile, Telstra is urging politicians to consider compensating telcos for their costs in helping investigations into cyber-bullying on social media under the proposed crackdown.

The company says industry is already compensated for the costs of helping law enforcement, emergency services and national security and wants this cost recovery extended to the office of the e-safety commissioner.