I'd like to begin by sharing the experience of a mother in my electorate of Griffith who contacted me many months ago about the devastating impact an AI companion chatbot has had on her family. Her experience is deeply confronting, and it demonstrates why we cannot leave the safety of Australian children in the hands of technology companies that have repeatedly failed to protect them.

This mother said:

I am writing to you first as a mother.

My eldest daughter was seriously harmed by an AI companion chatbot when she was 12 years old.

I am also a technology founder who builds privacy compliance infrastructure for regulated industries, so I come to this issue from both sides: as a parent living with its consequences, and as someone whose work is in regulatory compliance and who understands what is at stake in getting it right.

In December 2024, my eldest daughter, then 12, was harmed by an AI companion app called Talkie AI.

She was first introduced to an AI roleplay website around the middle of 2024, at school, on a friend's phone.

From there it escalated quickly, and the harm built over an extended period of conversations rather than a single exchange.

During those conversations an AI character told her she was worthless and made references to self-harm.

Reading the exchanges back afterwards, they had the clear hallmarks of grooming and gaslighting.

This is not a historical event that we have moved past.

My daughter is in regular therapy.

The experience affects her every day.

She recognises it as a problem and does not know how to stop returning to it, and what we are managing at home now has the characteristics of an addiction.

Minimising her access helps, but it does not undo the harm already done.

Despite building close to a best-case home environment, including a physical device lockbox, a router with DNS-level filtering, device-level controls, a browser-free phone, and more than 100 AI roleplay and companion domains blocked manually, my children can still reach these platforms.

My younger daughter has since also been exposed, this time at home, through her older sister.

The responsible-parent ceiling is not high enough.

Debate interrupted.