Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Hansard source

It's my privilege to rise to speak on the Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Bill 2024. I've been working in this field to try to protect children online ever since about 2016, I think it was. I hadn't been in this building long when a young girl took her life. Her name was Dolly Everett. The bullying that she had been exposed to over a course of months or years really hit a nerve with me, and I thought, 'There's got to be a better way.' So I had a meeting with the DIGI down in Sydney. The Digital Industry Group is a lobby group made up of the tech platforms—Google, Apple, Meta and all of the usual suspects, the social media platforms, that you would expect. I asked them what they were doing to protect young people online, to ensure that we didn't see a repeat of Dolly Everett's very sad death.

I walked away from that meeting thinking that I had just taken part in a meeting with big tobacco. There was no problem. Everything was good. Social media platforms and tech companies were a force for good. There was no problem to see. It was almost like being told that smoking was good for me. I went away from that meeting feeling angry and upset that really no lessons were being learnt. Fast forward eight years, and I found myself on the social media committee, which is sitting at the moment, holding hearings. Last Friday, the committee had before us Meta executives. We had Snapchat and TikTok. They have learnt nothing over the last eight years. You will have heard the chief of worldwide safety for Meta say in that public hearing, in response to a number of questions that I asked her, that she did not acknowledge that social media was causing harm to our young people. That, of course, has been treated with the disdain that it deserves.

A lot of people have spoken out. A lot of families have spoken out about the harm that is being caused by social media and social platforms. I read out a history or a submission from a mother, Emma Mason, who talked about her daughter, Tilly Rosewarne, who was just 15 when she took her own life. Tilly was just 15 years old. She'd been subjected to horrendous bullying at school. She'd made 11 previous attempts on her life as a result of that horrendous bullying. A part of that bullying process was the posting on Snapchat of a photo of a nude girl with Tilly's head superimposed on top of it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Tilly. Emma Mason provided that submission to the committee about the agony and the pain that that family went through when Tilly took her own life.

That evil is happening in every school, in every town and in every city in this country, where young people are being subjected to the most horrendous bullying, where young people are being subjected to revenge porn and where young people are being subjected to a degree of fraud and coercion to part with money to try and make this all go away. These things are now being done by criminal syndicates that are preying on young people, asking them to take comprising photographs of themselves and then threatening that, if those young people don't pay a sum of money, the criminals will distribute those photographs to their parents and everybody on their contact list. A couple of weeks ago, I had Emma Mason and a number of parents come and see me in my parliamentary office. Each had a story of how they had lost a child to the sort of stuff this bill seeks to remedy.

This bill serves a good purpose. But I am a little concerned—I don't want to make this a political speech, because this is too important for politics—as to the motivation for this bill. I don't understand why, effectively, the regime currently in place, with what is happening now, is not good enough or how what is being proposed by this bill will in some way improve what we've already got. I think what parents and in fact the person that is the victim in all of this want the most is not so much a criminal trial; they want these images taken down, and they want them taken down yesterday. Under current laws put in place by the coalition, the eSafety Commissioner already has the power to direct those images to be taken down, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to understand how what is being proposed is going to be an improvement on what is currently the law of the land today.

We can't have this debate and discussion about these issues unless we look at broader issues such as the impact of online pornography on young people. In 2020 I led an inquiry as the chair of the Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee, which ultimately recommended age verification to prevent young people from accessing porn online. This is an eminently sensible concept. We know without a shadow of a doubt that there is a direct correlation between the viewing of hardcore pornography online by young people and domestic violence. The committee I was on heard story after story of the lives of young men and women being impacted by the viewing of hardcore, violent, misogynistic pornography. This is not the pornography of Playboy and Penthouse of yesteryear; this is hardcore, violent pornography, degrading of women, and young people are accessing this porn without any impediment.

All they've got to do is go onto a porn website and tick a box saying they're over 18. That is not good enough. If the people in this House believe young people should be protected, if the members of this House believe the online world should replicate the real world, you can't access porn in the real world until you turn 18, yet online all you've got to do is tick a box saying, 'I'm over 18.' That is not good enough. That's why we recommended that we introduce age verification for both online pornography and online gambling. I wouldn't have thought this was a terribly controversial view, and yet we still don't have it. This recommendation was made in 2000. In November last year the shadow communications minister stood at the dispatch box and introduced a private member's bill to introduce age verification for online photography, for online gambling and for social media. What did those members opposite in the government do? They refused to support it. They refused to support the protection of our kids by introducing age verification. That saddens me immensely.

Then, about a month ago, the Prime Minister had this 'come to Jesus' moment, this 'road to Damascus' moment, where he stood up in question time and said: 'Hey, guess what? We're going to introduce age verification for social media. We'll make it 16.' That is exactly what we tried to do seven months ago, and we were blocked. Why? Why are we putting the lives of our kids, the wellbeing of our kids, at risk? The communications minister said: 'We don't want to introduce age verification for online pornography. We want to let the porn companies, big porn, police themselves with a self-regulating code of conduct.' That's like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Only because parents around this country, supported by News Corp newspapers, started a campaign to introduce age verification for social media and online porn, only because parents around the country were signing petitions and writing to their members of parliament and making their voices heard, did this Prime Minister finally show some leadership and support the welfare of kids. I say that is not good enough. It's time for the Prime Minister to show some leadership in the protection of our kids and introduce age verification for online porn, gambling and social media, at a minimum of 16 for social media. (Time expired)

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