National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence

Mrs VLAHOS (Taylor) (14:59): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Can the minister inform the house about how schools will observe the 2015 National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence and ensure strategies are in place to address schoolyard bullying all year round?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for the Public Sector) (15:00): I think every parent who sends their child off to school, particularly at the very beginning of their school life, has a passing thought at the very least about concerns of the experience of bullying. We know that when bullying occurs, particularly when it occurs in a serious, persistent and sustained way, it can have an absolutely devastating effect on the development of the child in question emotionally as well as academically. I am sure bullying has existed forever, but for some time now society has named it and has increasingly provided students and young people in particular with some of the tools to respond, manage and deal with their circumstances, to know that it is unacceptable, to have a name for it, and to have strategies to deal with it.

Tomorrow the Bullying. No Way! organisation has organised a national day of action and what that means is that across the state schools will be holding events that will draw people's attention to bullying. I want to stress that although a national day of action is very important and I personally look forward very much to going out to Urrbrae high school tomorrow to see the events that they are participating in, this is very much more than one day a year or a one-off event.

The Bullying. No Way! program, which exists under the Australian Education Council and is the collective effort of all of the states and territories, is a curriculum-based approach that enables schools with their bullying policies to make real and tangible differences to students' understanding of bullying and their capacity to respond to them. What we will see tomorrow are assemblies, art shows, film shows, workshops and generally mechanisms that enable students to talk about bullying, as I said, the importance of being able to name it, and the importance of being able to give students strategies to manage.

I know from my own experience that one of the most important strategies is to empower those who witness bullying who are neither the bully nor the one being bullied but are aware of it. Empowering students to stand by their classmates and prevent it happening is extremely powerful and effective, in my experience. We also know, however, that bullying is changing. The taunting and the experience in the classroom remain a feature of bullying, but now that we have the wonderful world of the internet we are now confronting cyberbullying.

While we have been addressing that for some time—and I know organisations like the Carly Ryan Foundation, which is a terrific organisation, has been providing support to schools on cyberbullying and the dangers of the internet—we are now in a position to make available to all schools a cybersmart program that will assist them in talking to students about how to manage the complex world of social media and the kind of bullying that does not stop at the school gate, the experience that cannot be controlled only when teachers are there but can come home and into the bedrooms of our students who are possessed with these devices that link them to the world.

I thank the member for Taylor for her question. I know how very much she cares, as every parent and every member of parliament cares, about these strategies, and I urge and expect every member of parliament to be paying attention to the national day of action against bullying tomorrow.