Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sport) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dickon for her question and for her ceaseless commitment to fighting for north-side parents and north-side children. Exactly one year ago today parliament responded to a call from more than 120,000 Australian parents fed up with the predatory grip that social media had on their children. Parliamentarians of all stripes put politics to one side and came together to prioritise the safety and the wellbeing of our kids. In doing so, we sent a strong message to Australian families: we hear you and we've got your back. And we sent a stronger message to the social media companies: time's up.

Over the past 12 months, the Albanese Labor government has been focused on delivery: tabling the rules, publishing the regulatory guidance, working with platforms to ensure compliance and delivering a national awareness campaign to help prepare parents, carers, teachers and students. We're doing our job of delivering and we stand ready to defend any legal challenges that come our way on behalf of the 120,000 Australian parents who asked us to pass this law and to protect their kids from the harms of social media.

But while Labor delivers, the threats to these laws have come from parliamentarians who voted for these laws to happen. For the past six months, the shadow minister for communications and her far-right co-conspirators have done everything they can to erode trust in the law they passed. Yesterday, coalition senators were doing the dirty work of the social media platforms, co-signing a bill to repeal the bill and throw Australian kids to the sharks. They are dog-whistling about needing a digital ID to access social media, despite the fact the Senate passed a coalition amendment which prohibits platforms from requiring ID and any company caught forcing users to hand over their ID faces fines of up to $10 million.

In a comic sign of events to come, yesterday the shadow minister for communications threw her previous coalition leader under the bus, saying that, in hindsight, she probably would not have supported the law. There's a predictive text feel to their chaos, but we will not accept that chaos misleads young Australians. If the current Leader of the Opposition supports protecting children from the harms of social media, then she should stand up and join the government in backing Australian parents and making sure this law is a success. Anything short of that is a complete capitulation to big tech and to even bigger political threats.

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