Ms Celene Craig:

The BAI is clear on this. All forms of online abuse are of concern to the BAI. We flagged in our submission and my colleague, Mr. O'Keeffe, flagged in his opening statement that gender-based violence, targeting or online abuse is of particular concern. We understand it is not limited to the women in the public sphere but we take note of the targeting of women journalists and politicians, in particular. While we believe this falls under head 49A, it could be considered to be within scope under category B, harmful online content, as set out in the scheme. We believe there might be some value in giving more specific visibility around this concern. That could be done on the face of the legislation but we also expect that, if the media commission is required to enumerate the different forms of harmful content that might fall for consideration under that category, visibility would be given to gender-based violence or other forms of online abuse that might be considered under the category of sexuality more generally, such as homophobic abuse, etc., which is also quite widespread on platforms. There are two potential ways of addressing this, either to be specific in the legislation or to require that the media commission enumerate the forms of harm that it sees within scope under this category. We have a particular concern about gender-based abuse online.