I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. This bill is all about protecting people from harm. It's about setting basic standards and giving social media users more choice on what they see—what they are fed by algorithms. It will give them the choice to opt out of algorithms. It will require big tech and social media to provide a safe online environment, in particular for our kids. Our country needs this. Our kids need this. This month, AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett spoke about online child exploitation and victimisation. What is happening to our kids online is disgusting and we should all be concerned about it—nudify apps and young boys and girls being extorted for images of their bodies. We need to do something about the impact online on our kids, and we need to do it now. We also heard from the commissioner this week about the impact of online abuse and threats, not just for us as politicians but also for members of the public who are in public-facing jobs. We know that some of our Public Service workers, such as our hospital workers, our ambos and our police—a lot of people online—get a lot of abuse and hate just for doing their job.

Since I was elected, over the last three months I've taken up the opportunity to have an app installed to remove abusive, threatening and ableist comments from my social media feed. I had found that overwhelmingly my feed was being dominated by hate. I could scroll and scroll and I would struggle to find a comment that (1) was about anything to do with a policy we had made or (2) wasn't hateful or threatening or abusive or ableist. So I took on this plugin to see if it would make a difference. Extraordinarily, it filtered out, in three months, 55,000 comments from my page. If you go to my page, you'll see that there are still negative comments there. It doesn't filter out negative comments; it filters out abusive comments, threats, ableist comments and sexist comments. Incredibly, 55,000 of those have been filtered out. For MPs it's been filtering out, on average, about 50 per cent of comments, and the rest still stay whether they're negative or positive. That's a lot of comments on my page.

Having experienced this online hate—and I've experienced online hate since I put myself up for election—and the impact that it has had at times on my family, on my community and on me, I know that our community have to do about the way in which we conduct ourselves online. It's the public square. I think that most people forget that these comments are read and digested not just by us as politicians or by other people in the public eye. They are digested by kids; they are digested by people who are vulnerable; they are digested by people who are mentally ill.

We heard from Krissy Barrett this week that online abusive, threatening and negative content, even if it's about, for example, dieting and eating disorders, does have real-world impacts. Every single day, I'm called 'pegleg'. It doesn't bother me, but, for another person with a disability, it will bother them—'Is that how people see me?'