Bullying

The Hon. S.L. GAME (15:42): I rise today to speak on the issue of bullying in our schools. Bullying has been described as a silent epidemic in our schools and in our communities. It is pervasive and has devastating impacts on children, families and communities. The findings of the anti-bullying review recently released by the federal government are shocking. The review heard that more than one in four students from year 4 to year 9 reported being bullied at least every few weeks. That is one in four students from year 4 to year 9 being bullied at least every few weeks.

Bullying can be crippling for children, physically, mentally and emotionally. It crushes their sense of self-worth, their confidence and their ability to learn. When children feel safe, they are more likely to venture out into the unknown, and when it comes to their learning they are more likely to raise their hand in class and try out an interesting answer, but when someone is bullied their body releases stress hormones, their heart rate and blood pressure rise, their breathing quickens and the area of their brain that is responsible for rational thinking and decision-making becomes disrupted.

When a child feels that their bullies are in control, they are not going to venture an answer in class. They are not going to expand their learning or take risks to try out new ideas or ways of thinking. This is just one aspect of the damage that bullying does. Many parents are now turning to homeschooling because they no longer have confidence that their kids will be protected from bullying at school.

I empathise with parents who are facing this issue and feeling caught between a rock and a hard place. It is a disgrace that, as parents, in order to get our children educated we have to send them off to school where they are vulnerable and at risk of being targeted and bullied. No parent should have to tolerate that. How are we going to bridge the gap of social disadvantage if we cannot even have the confidence that our kids are safe at school?

To make matters worse, we now live in a world where bullying can happen anywhere. It can follow our kids home and invade places where they used to feel safe. Recent data shows that 53 per cent of young Australians report experiencing cyberbullying. This form of bullying is truly insidious, causing more suffering in victims and carrying fewer consequences for bullies. Technology has allowed images and toxic messaging to spread like never before and to be paraded to a far greater audience. Online material is also much harder to retrieve or destroy. The removed and anonymous nature of the online world only emboldens bullies.

Bullying is not something any child should have to experience. How is it that we have now come to a place in society where over half our young people are prey to some form of regular bullying? Concerns among Australian parents on this issue have grown enormously in the last few years as the horror stories keep surfacing in the media—heartbreaking stories of children who have taken their own lives because of social media and bullying. Parents like Clare McCann, who have lost their kids to suicide from bullying, have not found much comfort in the federal government's anti-bullying review, calling it a master class in bureaucratic evasion. The recommendations of the anti-bullying review and $10 million from the federal government are not enough to meet this crisis.

One area that has been overlooked in our attempts to remedy the scourge of bullying is the need to take personal responsibility. We need to stop treating bullies like victims and blaming bad behaviour on someone's childhood. The truth is bullying is not something that you are compelled to do by external factors, such as childhood experience. You cannot use past disadvantage or trauma as an excuse for being a bully. As human beings, we can only act in the present moment, and in that moment the choice is ours to decide how we behave. Bullying is not inevitable, it is a conscious decision, and the person who makes the decision to target another person needs to take responsibility for their actions.

These truths were highlighted in a recent article by Professor Ken Purnell and Dr Ragnar Perje from Central Queensland University. Their article makes clear that bullying will stop only when we start taking personal responsibility for our actions. Blaming others for our mistakes leaves us with no way to grow; it robs us of our power to change. I agree entirely with the words 'true growth begins with self responsibility'.

As I have already said, announcing $10 million for training and resources is not enough to meet the crisis. We have been throwing money into educating young people about bullying for years now with very little effect. We need to take harder measures against bullying, and I will be looking to introduce legislation on this issue next year.

Every child deserves the right to feel safe in school, and it should not be too much for a parent to ask for assurance that their children be protected from bullying. Yes, parents have a responsibility to control what their kids are exposed to online, and the government should never seek to replace parents, who are primarily responsible, but what is given to us in this chamber is a power to introduce stronger measures against bullying.