I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, which the government has decided to ram through the House of Representatives today, even though the bill has been referred to the Environment and Communications Committee and the other place for examination in detail, with a reporting date of 20 November. I would have hoped that by now this government might have learned that approaching critical questions relating to digital regulation and online safety requires careful and methodological consideration, reflection, and interrogation of experts for the impacts and human responses to the reforms that are proposed here. After all, this parliament trusted this government back in December 2024, when the government shunned the wisdom of the proposal which had been put forward by the then leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton, back in June of 2024 to ban certain social media platforms for under 16-year-olds. When, after months of discussion and expert testimony before the joint committee on social media and the Australian society, during which, may I say Labor members did not conclude that a social media ban was required, and, after months of public outcry, the government finally and reluctantly introduced legislation to age gate social media platforms which we knew were doing the most harm, they made us stay late, and it was all very dramatic as they pushed their legislation hastily through the House. That time we trusted the government that it had devised strong and competent legislation to mitigate danger to young people via social media platforms, but, rather than work on the fine detail and create something watertight, those opposite got busy on a world victory tour. 'Look at us—we're global heroes for legislating protection for under-16s from the scourge of online harm.' If the government had given half as much time to the detail and the implementation of those laws as it spent in the departure lounge, maybe we wouldn't be here today where I can say, quite confidently, I do not know a single teenager who cannot get onto whatever social media platform he or she wants, and yet the minister has bundled in here today with haste and demanded that this bill be passed by tonight. Again, the government demands that we trust them. This time we do not.

Everyone knows where I stand on this topic. I got here on my feet for the very first time in this place and talked of today's adolescents who are 24/7 connected to devices, addled by algorithms and autoplay, showing signs of stress and, indeed, in some cases, distress. I cited their self-control difficulties, impulsivity, family conflicts, sleep disturbances, inactivity, concentration impairment and poor language development and the well-documented epidemic of anxiety and depression in teenage girls, which we now know correlates with the high use of social media.

In preparing my first speech, I sat down with some of Australia's then leading minds on the impact of screens on brain development, Sydney based child psychologist Dr Brad Marshall, leader of the Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance, and Pasi Sahlberg, who was then at the Gonski Institute for Education, working on the impact of too much screens in education. I read the works of Jean Twenge, specifically iGen, which details the impacts of social media and screens on the brain and psychosocial development of young people. That 2017 work, together with Generations, released in 2023, are essential reading for anyone with an interest in this topic, and I'm very grateful for the time Professor Twenge has given to me personally to discuss her work.

Soon after my first speech, knowing I had served on the NBN board for a number of years, the tech industry rang and asked me to lead a new parliamentary friends of tech group that they wanted to send up. I said sure, on one condition—that we talk about algorithmic transparency. 'Let me get back to you,' came the hesitant reply, and I never heard from them again. In my first 18 months in this place, I hosted the inaugural Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance symposium in this building, in which child psychology, brain development, education experts and psychiatrists, as well as leading voices in digital health, screen addiction and gaming behaviour, discussed what they were seeing coming out of COVID, and I've had the good fortune to stay in contact with people like AGASA's Dr Brad Marshall.

Last year, he and Professor Wayne Warburton published in Current Psychology a survey of 2,000 10- to 14-year-old students. They found that secondary students averaged over nine hours a day on screens—nine hours a day. Primary school students averaged more than six hours. Both statistics are up two hours or more since COVID, when we fattened our children on their digital diet. They estimated that more than 350,000 Australian children under 15 are at risk of smartphone addiction. We have a problem, but we have nowhere near the sophistication we need to deal with it, neither in the social media ban laws that were passed in haste in this place in December 2024 nor in the legislation the Labor government is trying to ram through the chamber today.

Let me tell you the story of a 17-year-old boy who does not actually exist. He was a fictional teenager with a fresh new Instagram account created by Reset Tech at my request. My fictional teenager searched for and liked 40 Jordan Peterson posts, looking for guidance on how to be a modern man. Within two hours, the Instagram reels algorithm was serving him videos of Andrew Tate. My fictional young man never went looking for Andrew Tate, but Andrew Tate was delivered up to him. While he may be fictional, there are thousands of young Australians for whom this experience is all too real. Today, what we feed Australians online is chosen by a machine they cannot see, built by a company that profits from their attention, while their parents, their loved ones and their mates have no idea what they are being shown. The question that this House should be answering today is: will this bill change this situation for the better? I regret to say that, as drafted, it will not.

It's important to remember that tech itself is not the villain. There is tech for good. There's really good tech—telehealth consultations, for example. In Rosebud, there's the community influencer raising awareness of issues in her community or for a local charity. There were the brilliant young entrepreneurs explaining to the Treasurer how his May budget was going to destroy their business with clarity and conviction that most politicians could only dream about. There is tech for bad—the endless scroll and hours stolen from sleep, sport or friendship. And there is tech for the bloody terrible—the feed that drives a 14-year-old girl to self-harm, this extortion ring that targets a lonely boy and the recommendation engine that walks a young man one video at a time towards extremism. Our job here should be to protect the first, discipline the second and stamp out the third.

The common thread separating tech for good from tech for bad is algorithms. In the context of social media, an algorithm is simply a set of computer instructions which enable a platform to decide what you're going to see next. Every like, every share and every second spent lingering on a video or a photo is recorded and the system uses that record to determine what keeps you scrolling the longest and then serves up more of it. It has no regard for what is true or what is helpful or harmful or even what you've asked to see. The algorithm chooses what will keep your eyeballs on the platform the longest so your attention can be sold to advertisers. Algorithms are not free speech. They are force-fed speech—someone else's idea of not what is good for you but what is good for them and their marketing revenue.

In 2024 I served on the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society with my most excellent colleague in this place the member for Fisher. More than 200 witnesses provided verbal or written submissions to that committee and, as coalition members wrote in our separate detailed comments on the 200-page report, we heard repeatedly that parents do not have a full or accurate view of their children's online lives. Ali Halkic described his son Allem as 'so beautiful and so confident', and he told us that:

… within four to six weeks Facebook basically destroyed us as a family.

Ali believes that had he known more about the danger his son faced online he would have done things differently. Parents are the best judges of how to raise their children, but no parent can parent what they cannot see.

The algorithms that hold our children captive are also damaging for our society as a whole. In the last parliament, I also served on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Radicalisation of young Australians was a key issue of discussion before the committee then and, as we learned from the interview with a former Leader of the Opposition on News 24 last night, it has been an ever-growing issue since his time as the Minister for Home Affairs almost a decade ago. We now know radicalisation happens not in backrooms but in bedrooms, served up by algorithms to vulnerable teenagers spending nine hours a day on their phones.

We know this partially thanks to the heroism of Frances Haugen, the Facebook engineer turned whistleblower whose story is now in Australian cinemas in Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning. I got to know Frances during our last term of parliament, and one day she kindly offered to come to my electorate. On Frances's visit to Flinders, we sat down with a number of senior classes at Balcombe Grammar and we talked about their digital diet as well as cybersecurity and social media. One fact from my discussions with Frances that was indeed borne out both in the Facebook files and in the motion picture now made of her whistleblowing from her time at Meta is that Facebook's own internal research found that 64 per cent of all users who joined an extremist group on its platform were driven there by the algorithm. These people were not searching for hate; they were driven to it algorithmically. Two in three found themselves somewhere they had not set out to be nor where we want them to be.

The coalition has led this parliament's work in identifying dangers inherent in algorithms. The coalition comments in the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society included 13 recommendations. The first was that the Australian government require social media companies to provide easily accessible features for users to control or reset their recommender systems, including to reduce or remove persuasive design features such as infinite scrolling and to have more proactive ability to customise their feeds. Features would favour the ability for a customer to opt in or out of recommended content. Our 10th recommendation recommended that the Australian government should develop a reporting framework that requires social media companies to provide regular transparency reports, including on what data social media companies collect on users and for what purpose it is collected and the type of data social media platforms use to generate personalised content on recommender systems.

This built on earlier work by the coalition highlighting the danger of algorithmic diversion. In August 2023, the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, chaired by my friend James Paterson, found that foreign interference had become Australia's principal national security threat and that foreign adversaries can manipulate content algorithms. Its first recommendation was to require a minimum set of transparency requirements enforceable by fines for all large social media platforms. Authoritarian regimes rely on secrecy, and we must rely on openness. Doing nothing to address algorithmic transparency and choice is not an option. We have known this for a while, and yet this is not what this bill targets.

'My Feed, My Way' is a convenient catchcry the Prime Minister has used to describe his reforms, but it is utterly misleading. Very little in this legislation targets algorithmic transparency and choice. It is buried in an exposure draft relating to user empowerment tools which has been released, giving people the option of an algorithmically curated feed or a chronological feed like we used to have in the late 2000s and early 2010s, before likes and shares and advertisements and scams became the fuel in the engine of social media. Such reforms have been introduced elsewhere and could easily be included in this bill. Like its predecessor exposure draft, this bill remains too imprecise, too vague and too open to manipulation, which tries to hide the provisions of the much-maligned mis- and disinformation bill which was introduced by this government in November 2024.

Dangerously, however, this bill also abolishes unlawful material codes, unlawful material standards and age-restricted material codes, which today require online services to reduce the availability of the most seriously harmful refused classification material through mandatory prevention, detection, reporting, removal and access-restriction measures. The existing age-restricted material codes require online services to prevent children under 18 from accessing or being exposed to specified pornography, high-impact violence, self-harm and other age-inappropriate material through age assurance, access controls, safety settings, parental tools and content restrictions.

Let me be clear. Criticising this bill is not an argument for doing nothing. Doing something is no longer optional, but the coalition cannot support this bill in its current form.