Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is for the Minister for Communications. I commend the government for committing to a digital duty of care. Fifteen years ago, we had no idea about the harms that social media would do, from radicalisation to exacerbating eating disorders. With AI, there are early signs of new types of harm, like attachment hacking and cognitive decline. Will you commit to a digital duty of care that includes an overarching duty so it's futureproof for emerging harms rather than limiting accountability to the harms we can identify now?

Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sport) | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much to the member for Curtin for her question and for continuing to work with me and like-minded parliamentary colleagues on such an important space. I truly believe we are at the coalface of one of the most compelling policy questions of our time, and this is what that looks like—thoughtful questions, thoughtful answers.

The digital duty of care is meant to do two things. One is to make big tech prevent harm to their users and to prevent psychosocial harm to their users. I believe that defining it as psychosocial harm captures what you're talking about by way of emerging harms as we get more research that comes into the field. The second element of the digital duty of care is safety by design. That is switching the onus from them being able to, at the moment, do basically whatever they like in an unregulated space, the harm occurring and then avenues to people who have been harmed through things like e-safety to big tech needing to do safety by design.

I'll call out here something that Wayne Holdsworth said in our meeting and then the press conference with the Prime Minister earlier today about the social media laws, which are the first tranche ahead of what's coming with digital duty of care. He said that, when seatbelts became mandatory—it's something I say all the time—people did not immediately comply with them. It took a while for that cultural change to seep through to now, where you're at a point where, if you don't have your seatbelt on in the car, your kid will tell you: 'The cops are going to stop you. You haven't got your seatbelt on.' Those seatbelts, when they first came into place in Australia, weren't retractable. They were a much earlier form of the kind of seatbelts that we see now. In fact, now we have different car manufacturing companies compete to be the safest car on the roads—Volvo's five-point safety harness for your children.

I truly believe that what we're doing here is moving from that early, non-retractable seatbelt model to a point where online tech competes to be the safest company in the space. That means we have to hold them to account. That means we have to continue to work together in a bipartisan measure. In short, I think we do address that, but I look forward to continuing to work with you on digital duty of care in the second half of this year.