More than five million underage accounts have been deactivated, removed or restricted since our government set a minimum age for social media. At the time we were told it couldn't be done—that the technology did not exist and the kids would find a workaround within a week. Most notably, we were told that Australia was going to embarrass itself in front of the world for trying. But our government persisted, and now more than 30 countries either have legislated or are considering legislating similar laws.

Five million is a significant number, but perhaps what is more significant are some of the following numbers. A YouGov survey found 30 per cent of young Australians aged 13 to 15 are now spending more time playing sport, 27 per cent are spending more time with their families, online bullying in that age group is down nine per cent and exposure to inappropriate and violent content has fallen by 18 per cent. These are early numbers, but they all point in the one way and they are the result of a law that some of the loudest voices in this debate said was unworkable.

We know there are still too many under-16s on social media. Nobody in this government is pretending otherwise. But it's not the law failing; it's the platforms who are failing to comply with the law. That is a different problem with a different answer. The eSafety Commissioner right now is investigating noncompliance by five platforms: Instagram, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat. Some of the largest and best-resourced companies in human history, who can comply, have decided themselves the pace at which they will. It is this arrogance and disregard for the safety of our children that is the case for this bill.

For the better part of 20 years, we have asked these companies to do the right thing through the codes they wrote themselves and then chased individual pieces of content around the internet long after the damage was done. Australia's digital duty of care sets basic safety standards for digital services that we use every day, just like we do for food, for cars and for kids toys. Nobody thinks it's an assault on the free market that a pram has to meet a standard before it can be sold. Nobody expects a parent to test the brakes of that pram themselves. We settled that question a long time ago. The person who builds the thing carries the responsibility for whether it is safe, and the parliament sets the floor so the operator doing the right thing is not undercut by those cutting corners.

The duty in this bill is lifted almost word for word out of the work health and safety law—taking reasonably practicable steps to provide a safe environment. It is the benchmark for best-practice regulation in this country. It is what the European Union and the United Kingdom have both landed on, and there is nothing truly novel about it. The only novelty is that we are finally applying it to an industry that has spent the last 20 years insisting it was worth a special exemption. Under the duty, services will have to do annual risk assessments of the harms their features could cause, put systems in place to stop those features causing harm and give people real choice about what lands in front of them. Failure to comply carries a penalty of a $109.2 million, in line with what we already impose on companies that rip off Australian consumers. There is an efficiency argument here too. One duty set by this parliament in language Australian businesses already understand is simpler to comply with and simpler to enforce than the 17 overlapping codes it replaces.

I have two daughters, aged 12 and nine. My eldest, Gweny, and her mates will be 16 before this duty is fully bedded down. The point of this bill is that it is not my job, it is not my husband's job and it is not the job of Gweny's friends' parents—it's not our job alone, at the kitchen table, to work out whether a product or an online product is safe for our kids. That has never been a fair fight. So here is what this duty requires for children, because a great deal has been said about this bill that's not actually in it.

Every online service—social media, online games, AI chat bots—will have to protect under-18s from pornography, from material that encourages or instructs disordered eating, from material that promotes hostile attitudes towards women and gender equality, from material that glorifies crime or encourages dangerous stunts and from abuse, harassment and bullying. They will also have to protect kids from the design features that keep people, young people, scrolling to all hours of the night. Anyone in this chamber seeking to ignore this aspect of the bill in favour of made-up hysterics is only making our kids' lives harder.

The chatbots are a part of this bill that public debate has not caught up with. I'm currently chairing the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, and we have heard from researchers, unions and industry as well as from the people who build these systems and the people who study them. The honest summary is that these products are being put in front of kids faster than anybody can test or understand what they do to them. That is the most concerning part. The rapid development of AI means that, if we write a law today that covers only the platforms we happen to be concerned about today, we'll be back in this chamber in the years to come writing something again. A duty of care does not need a new industry code every time a new technology appears. That is the whole design of the thing.

The same logic covers the disgusting apps built to generate fake nude images of real people. This bill empowers the eSafety Commissioner to take down apps and websites designed or predominantly used for that purpose, and it defines fake nude material as seriously harmful, so every service has to protect every Australian from it. On average, one in 33 children has reported someone creating a nude image of them, using AI—that is a terrifying thing to read as a parent—and one in 25 Australians has reported being victimised by deepfake pornography. For adults, the duty is narrower, and it goes to serious harm—child sexual abuse material, grooming, sexual violence, image based abuse, incitement to extreme violence, explicit threats of rape and death and terrorist-and-violent-extremist material.

Beyond these incredibly vile behaviours, this bill does not tell a single Australian adult what they can look at. The digital duty of care is not about controlling what adults do online; it is about requiring platforms to give us choice. That is the most underrated part of this bill. These companies make an extraordinary amount of money out of our information and out of our attention. We are asking that, in return, they let us decide what is in our own feeds. If you want your friends and the creators you choose to follow—the app has to let you do that by default, rather than throwing you into an algorithm full of people you will never subscribe to. I think that's a modest ask of an industry that has never once been asked for much.

We can all recall a time when we have been scrolling through a platform and something popped up that made us question why it had. I can remember a few times when something gruesome or awful came across my screen unwarranted. When something does go wrong, people are entitled to better than a web form and silence. This bill cuts the required response time to cyberbullying and abuse complaints from 48 hours to 24 hours and lets eSafety set minimum standards for how complaints and disputes are handled, because an automatic confirmation email—and then nothing else—is not a response.

Last week, the member for Indi was attacked outside her electorate office. While the details of what led to this attack are still to be fully understood, we know—the women in this chamber especially know—that online platforms are not safe. They allow people to live in bubbles that make them angrier and angrier. The people charged with keeping this country safe have also spoken plainly about the environment we are all now living in. The ASIO Director-General, Mike Burgess, has warned that social media is 'promoting discord and inflammatory rhetoric, exacerbating polarisation and creating a permissive environment for violence'. The AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, has said her National Security Investigations team is charging almost one individual a week for targeting Commonwealth parliamentarians and public officials. We've also heard from workers and their unions about the rising abuse that is directed towards them. I'm talking about our frontline workers, nurses, teachers, retail workers and care workers.

This isn't about mean comments or robust political debate; we are talking about serious harm and serious harm only. If an individual can be held accountable by the police for their behaviour, a company that built something that carried it and made it money through amplifying should be accountable too. If you build it, you're responsible for it. That has always been the Australian way.

For a decade, online safety in this country has been bipartisan. The world's first online safety watchdog was built here by those opposite. That was good work, and that deserves to be said aloud in this place. In 2024 this parliament came together again and legislated a minimum age for social media. Every one of these reforms passed with bipartisan support, because some things matter more than politics. That is why the position the coalition has taken on this bill is utterly— (Quorum formed) I appreciate that it's hard to be held accountable for your decisions, Opposition. The claim that this bill censors Australian adults is absolutely false. The claim about test counts is even worse and in my opinion rather dangerous, because it is an argument against truly holding these big tech companies accountable. The test accounts are not about policing what people see online. They're about making sure the tech companies are adhering to what we expect of them.

So right now our government stands on the side of parents and their kids, whilst those opposite appear to be content with siding with big social media platforms. I implore the opposition to reconsider their position. It is not too late for there to be a bipartisan approach, in the same way that we have delivered progress in this space as a parliament over the last couple of years. It is so important that we get this right, not just for our kids but for all of us. We deserve to see a safer, better place online. I commend the bill to the House.