Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wentworth for her very important question. The speech of the director-general of ASIO was a very important contribution to the nation's safety and security. We think about safety and security as being about our defence forces. We think about it being the acts of terrorism that we saw with the antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach, but it can also be our safety and security. It can occur, tragically, as we know, in the bedroom of one of the children around Australia, where the parents are not conscious about what they are having access to. That can also lead to a loss of life and tragically has led to the loss of too many young lives.

The digital duty of care will take the principles that we have enshrined with the bipartisan support for our social media ban and look at ways in which we'll consult about how we extend that duty that we have even further. We know that, as the member has said, algorithms drive people towards more and more extreme positions. They start off in a mainstream position—talking about ethnicity, perhaps, or faith—and they end up, over a period of time, receiving in their inbox—not just children. Adults as well, of course, can be impacted by this, with Nazi level propaganda and with calls for violence. We know that, just to name one, an area that is of concern is chatbots. A second is nudify apps. We are seeing as well, with some of these algorithms coming through, increased presentations in our hospitals of young women who have been choked, strangled. We see anal tearing growing at an extraordinary, horrific rate, because what too many young men are seeing online is normalising behaviour that is anything but normal.

We need to be really conscious as a society about this. We need to be conscious as a parliament about this. We need to be courageous about this. I think one of this parliament's finest moments was the social media ban, and that came primarily not from this parliament. That came from parents who'd lost their children and who took those personal tragedies and determined that they would make a difference for others so others didn't have to go through that traumatic experience. This is something that is not simple. It's something that we've worked with. We've increased the funding for the eSafety Commissioner by four times. We've introduced fines of $49.5 million to be available for breaches of the social media ban aimed at young people. But clearly we are going to need to do more, and that's what the digital duty of care is about.

So I encourage people to participate in this. The government's considering as well comments from the eSafety Commissioner and work that will require a further strengthening of the social media ban. I look forward to receiving the same support from across this parliament that we received for the legislation. We're working on that as a priority because this is something that other generations didn't have to deal with, which is why it's complex. We can't allow the power that these companies, which are unaccountable, which get massive amounts of funding, of profit, and have extraordinary power—we need to make sure that Australians are in charge of this. But indeed the global community is dealing with this as well, which is why we should be proud as a nation that at least 16 countries have followed our social media ban. But there's more to do.

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