Jason Clare Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education
2:53 pm
I thank my friend the superstar member for Sturt for her question. Every mum and dad I know is worried about their kids being bullied at school. It's not just in school and not just in the playground. They're worried about these sorts of things. They're worried about bullying happening online. That's one of the reasons why the digital duty-of-care legislation that passed through the House yesterday and is now in the Senate is so important.
I was told the story the other day of a girl in year 10 who was bullied so ferociously that she ended up in hospital. These are just some of the messages that were sent to her online that the whole world saw. 'Nobody likes you.' 'Everybody hates your guts.' 'You should kill yourself.' Now, to the credit of the school, to the credit of her principal, they lobbied Snapchat and Instagram for months to get these taken down but to no avail. One of the things that this bill that we've passed through the House—and it's now in the Senate—does is make it easier to get this sort of stuff down quicker.
But it's not just kids bullying other kids. Adam Raine used ChatGPT to help him with his homework. He started by asking it questions about geometry, and then he let it into his head. He told it how he was feeling, and it suggested to him that he might want to consider suicide. It even offered to write the note for him. Adam took his own life. One of the things that this bill does is stop chatbots like this from fostering this kind of emotional dependence with children, making the vulnerability and the loneliness that they're living with worse.
There are mums and dads out there now that are worried about their kids that are slipping away from them, and they don't know what to do, but they're looking to us. They're looking to us, and they're asking for our help. They want the bullying online to be taken down. They want the smut, like those nudify apps, gone. They want the algorithms out—out of their kids' heads and out of their lives. That's why I say that this is not about censorship. It's not about freedom of speech. It's about them. So I say to my colleagues and friends on the other side of the chamber: please think again about it. It's not too late to change your mind here and vote for this in the Senate.
No comments