Continuing on from earlier, these laws are about protecting people from harm. They're about setting basic standards and giving social media users more choice over what they see. It will require big tech to provide a safe online environment, in particular for our kids. Our country needs this; our kids need this.

This month, the AFP has told us about and spoken of online child exploitation and victimisation, like on nudify apps. They've also spoken about online abuse and accounts; the manosphere; images and videos that glorify violence, porn and misogyny; and content that encourages eating disorders. Suicide is having a devastating impact, and all of this content is having a devastating impact on our kids. It has real-world consequences.

I spoke earlier about the number of comments that I receive on my social media accounts. If you had a side look at my socials for a minute, you'd see that, over the last 18 months, I've had tens of thousands of comments threatening my personal safety, calling me 'peg leg', calling me 'NDIS scum' and telling me that they hope my other son dies. Last week, one person wrote:

know where your family lives, run or burn

which was reported to the AFP. In the week before, Adrian said:

you are a delusional—

bleep—

retard that needs a hot poker shove up your—

bleep. John said:

jump off a building already—

bleep bleep. Jamie said:

I prefer assassinations.

Leroy said:

Someone shoot this dopey—

bleep. And, on the day after Helen's attack, Josh said:

are you gonna get the AFP to knock on my door for 'intimidating you'

We know that words and other content online and in the media fuel violence, threats and abuse in real life, not just for MPs but for teachers, health workers and retail workers. The Minister for Social Services, Tanya Plibersek, said yesterday that the explosion in social media tracks the explosion of sexual violence and strangulation. It's frightening. Kids, vulnerable people and people with mental health issues read those comments. They see and they feel the hate. They follow and are fed destructive content. There are millions of social media accounts that promote and normalise violence, misogyny, extremism and dangerous behaviours—porn.

We must demand better from big tech and the online environment. That is at the core of this legislation. If you run an online service in this country, you have a duty to keep the people using it safe. If you build it and put it online, you are responsible for the risks to users. And it's not just about social media; the games, the apps and the AI chatbots are all covered by this bill, as are nudify apps, which we heard today over 200,000 people have downloaded in Australia. That's scary.

We know what algorithms feed our young people: content that promotes eating disorders; content that glorifies dangerous behaviour, violence and suicide; and content promoting misogyny and the abuse of women. This content is seeping out of the screen and into our schools, our homes and our relationships. These are accounts that are, overwhelmingly, set up to menace and harass. Teachers are telling us about it. Young female teachers are now copping abuse in the classroom. They are telling us about attitudes that walk through the school gate straight off a phone or an iPad. It is content that radicalises, pushing young people towards extremism and violence.

This bill creates a single, overarching obligation—a digital duty of care. It requires the providers of online services to take reasonable, practicable steps to keep the people who use them safe. A duty of care is not a new idea; it is one of the oldest ideas in our legal system. We already ask an employer to take reasonable steps to keep their workers safe. We ask the builder to make safe homes and the manufacturer to make safe products. All this bill does is apply the same well-settled principle to online services that are now as much a part of our daily life as any workplace or public square The standard is not perfection. The standard is what is reasonably practicable—reasonable steps matched to the risk. That is a deliberate choice, because for too long the approach to online safety in this country has been to just politely ask the platforms, 'Do better,' with a set of basic online safety expectations and industry codes. They were a start. But, as we all know, that approach has been a big fat fail.

This bill replaces that with one clear, enforceable duty, set by this parliament, that every provider must meet. For young people, this bill goes further still. Providers must take particular care to protect Australians under 18 from the harmful material they promote. Where a platform breaches that duty of care it will face penalties of up to $109 million, enforced by the independent eSafety Commissioner. The bill also gives the eSafety Commissioner strong tools to act on the harms that are hurting Australians right now. It sets minimum standards for how complaints and disputes are handled so that, when an Australian reports something, they get a proper process and a real response, not a bot and a dead end.

This builds on the work the Albanese Labor government has already done to make Australians safer online with the social media minimum age and our crackdown on nudify apps and undetectable tracking tools that are used to stalk and control women. Then there is the part of the bill that hands Aussies back some direct control. We call it My Feed, My Way. Under the bill, social media services will have to notify their users—new users and existing users alike—and offer them a real choice over what drives their main feed, an opportunity to shut out the garbage, to switch it off. You can absolutely keep the algorithm and swallow that garbage if you want to, but if you don't want to you can choose not to: your feed, your choice. This bill gives you the power to make it social again, to make it about your friends, your family, your favourite charities and the businesses you want to follow.

Now, you would think that a law to protect Aussies from this would be a no-brainer, but we know that those opposite and One Nation will tell you this bill is censorship. They'll call it Big Brother. They will say that the government is coming for your freedom—which is just rubbish. Adults can still access what they want. The real freedom is in the ability to switch off the algorithm. We would not accept the harms caused online in other environments and other contexts. We demand that a car is safe before it is sold. We demand that a medication is tried and tested before it is put to the market. We demand that a toy is safe before a child can play with it. We should demand nothing less of the platforms Australians use every single day.

At the centre of this bill is one simple principle: that the best interests of Aussies should come first. On this side of the House we are choosing the wellbeing of the people who use these platforms over the profits of the companies that run them. Anyone who votes against this bill is choosing something else. They are choosing profit. They are choosing outrage. They are choosing harm. I know which side I'm on, and I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, which the government has decided to ram through the House of Representatives today, even though the bill has been referred to the Environment and Communications Committee and the other place for examination in detail, with a reporting date of 20 November. I would have hoped that by now this government might have learned that approaching critical questions relating to digital regulation and online safety requires careful and methodological consideration, reflection, and interrogation of experts for the impacts and human responses to the reforms that are proposed here. After all, this parliament trusted this government back in December 2024, when the government shunned the wisdom of the proposal which had been put forward by the then leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton, back in June of 2024 to ban certain social media platforms for under 16-year-olds. When, after months of discussion and expert testimony before the joint committee on social media and the Australian society, during which, may I say Labor members did not conclude that a social media ban was required, and, after months of public outcry, the government finally and reluctantly introduced legislation to age gate social media platforms which we knew were doing the most harm, they made us stay late, and it was all very dramatic as they pushed their legislation hastily through the House. That time we trusted the government that it had devised strong and competent legislation to mitigate danger to young people via social media platforms, but, rather than work on the fine detail and create something watertight, those opposite got busy on a world victory tour. 'Look at us—we're global heroes for legislating protection for under-16s from the scourge of online harm.' If the government had given half as much time to the detail and the implementation of those laws as it spent in the departure lounge, maybe we wouldn't be here today where I can say, quite confidently, I do not know a single teenager who cannot get onto whatever social media platform he or she wants, and yet the minister has bundled in here today with haste and demanded that this bill be passed by tonight. Again, the government demands that we trust them. This time we do not.

Everyone knows where I stand on this topic. I got here on my feet for the very first time in this place and talked of today's adolescents who are 24/7 connected to devices, addled by algorithms and autoplay, showing signs of stress and, indeed, in some cases, distress. I cited their self-control difficulties, impulsivity, family conflicts, sleep disturbances, inactivity, concentration impairment and poor language development and the well-documented epidemic of anxiety and depression in teenage girls, which we now know correlates with the high use of social media.

In preparing my first speech, I sat down with some of Australia's then leading minds on the impact of screens on brain development, Sydney based child psychologist Dr Brad Marshall, leader of the Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance, and Pasi Sahlberg, who was then at the Gonski Institute for Education, working on the impact of too much screens in education. I read the works of Jean Twenge, specifically iGen, which details the impacts of social media and screens on the brain and psychosocial development of young people. That 2017 work, together with Generations, released in 2023, are essential reading for anyone with an interest in this topic, and I'm very grateful for the time Professor Twenge has given to me personally to discuss her work.

Soon after my first speech, knowing I had served on the NBN board for a number of years, the tech industry rang and asked me to lead a new parliamentary friends of tech group that they wanted to send up. I said sure, on one condition—that we talk about algorithmic transparency. 'Let me get back to you,' came the hesitant reply, and I never heard from them again. In my first 18 months in this place, I hosted the inaugural Australian Gaming and Screen Alliance symposium in this building, in which child psychology, brain development, education experts and psychiatrists, as well as leading voices in digital health, screen addiction and gaming behaviour, discussed what they were seeing coming out of COVID, and I've had the good fortune to stay in contact with people like AGASA's Dr Brad Marshall.

Last year, he and Professor Wayne Warburton published in Current Psychology a survey of 2,000 10- to 14-year-old students. They found that secondary students averaged over nine hours a day on screens—nine hours a day. Primary school students averaged more than six hours. Both statistics are up two hours or more since COVID, when we fattened our children on their digital diet. They estimated that more than 350,000 Australian children under 15 are at risk of smartphone addiction. We have a problem, but we have nowhere near the sophistication we need to deal with it, neither in the social media ban laws that were passed in haste in this place in December 2024 nor in the legislation the Labor government is trying to ram through the chamber today.

Let me tell you the story of a 17-year-old boy who does not actually exist. He was a fictional teenager with a fresh new Instagram account created by Reset Tech at my request. My fictional teenager searched for and liked 40 Jordan Peterson posts, looking for guidance on how to be a modern man. Within two hours, the Instagram reels algorithm was serving him videos of Andrew Tate. My fictional young man never went looking for Andrew Tate, but Andrew Tate was delivered up to him. While he may be fictional, there are thousands of young Australians for whom this experience is all too real. Today, what we feed Australians online is chosen by a machine they cannot see, built by a company that profits from their attention, while their parents, their loved ones and their mates have no idea what they are being shown. The question that this House should be answering today is: will this bill change this situation for the better? I regret to say that, as drafted, it will not.

It's important to remember that tech itself is not the villain. There is tech for good. There's really good tech—telehealth consultations, for example. In Rosebud, there's the community influencer raising awareness of issues in her community or for a local charity. There were the brilliant young entrepreneurs explaining to the Treasurer how his May budget was going to destroy their business with clarity and conviction that most politicians could only dream about. There is tech for bad—the endless scroll and hours stolen from sleep, sport or friendship. And there is tech for the bloody terrible—the feed that drives a 14-year-old girl to self-harm, this extortion ring that targets a lonely boy and the recommendation engine that walks a young man one video at a time towards extremism. Our job here should be to protect the first, discipline the second and stamp out the third.

The common thread separating tech for good from tech for bad is algorithms. In the context of social media, an algorithm is simply a set of computer instructions which enable a platform to decide what you're going to see next. Every like, every share and every second spent lingering on a video or a photo is recorded and the system uses that record to determine what keeps you scrolling the longest and then serves up more of it. It has no regard for what is true or what is helpful or harmful or even what you've asked to see. The algorithm chooses what will keep your eyeballs on the platform the longest so your attention can be sold to advertisers. Algorithms are not free speech. They are force-fed speech—someone else's idea of not what is good for you but what is good for them and their marketing revenue.

In 2024 I served on the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society with my most excellent colleague in this place the member for Fisher. More than 200 witnesses provided verbal or written submissions to that committee and, as coalition members wrote in our separate detailed comments on the 200-page report, we heard repeatedly that parents do not have a full or accurate view of their children's online lives. Ali Halkic described his son Allem as 'so beautiful and so confident', and he told us that:

… within four to six weeks Facebook basically destroyed us as a family.

Ali believes that had he known more about the danger his son faced online he would have done things differently. Parents are the best judges of how to raise their children, but no parent can parent what they cannot see.

The algorithms that hold our children captive are also damaging for our society as a whole. In the last parliament, I also served on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Radicalisation of young Australians was a key issue of discussion before the committee then and, as we learned from the interview with a former Leader of the Opposition on News 24 last night, it has been an ever-growing issue since his time as the Minister for Home Affairs almost a decade ago. We now know radicalisation happens not in backrooms but in bedrooms, served up by algorithms to vulnerable teenagers spending nine hours a day on their phones.

We know this partially thanks to the heroism of Frances Haugen, the Facebook engineer turned whistleblower whose story is now in Australian cinemas in Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning. I got to know Frances during our last term of parliament, and one day she kindly offered to come to my electorate. On Frances's visit to Flinders, we sat down with a number of senior classes at Balcombe Grammar and we talked about their digital diet as well as cybersecurity and social media. One fact from my discussions with Frances that was indeed borne out both in the Facebook files and in the motion picture now made of her whistleblowing from her time at Meta is that Facebook's own internal research found that 64 per cent of all users who joined an extremist group on its platform were driven there by the algorithm. These people were not searching for hate; they were driven to it algorithmically. Two in three found themselves somewhere they had not set out to be nor where we want them to be.

The coalition has led this parliament's work in identifying dangers inherent in algorithms. The coalition comments in the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society included 13 recommendations. The first was that the Australian government require social media companies to provide easily accessible features for users to control or reset their recommender systems, including to reduce or remove persuasive design features such as infinite scrolling and to have more proactive ability to customise their feeds. Features would favour the ability for a customer to opt in or out of recommended content. Our 10th recommendation recommended that the Australian government should develop a reporting framework that requires social media companies to provide regular transparency reports, including on what data social media companies collect on users and for what purpose it is collected and the type of data social media platforms use to generate personalised content on recommender systems.

This built on earlier work by the coalition highlighting the danger of algorithmic diversion. In August 2023, the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, chaired by my friend James Paterson, found that foreign interference had become Australia's principal national security threat and that foreign adversaries can manipulate content algorithms. Its first recommendation was to require a minimum set of transparency requirements enforceable by fines for all large social media platforms. Authoritarian regimes rely on secrecy, and we must rely on openness. Doing nothing to address algorithmic transparency and choice is not an option. We have known this for a while, and yet this is not what this bill targets.

'My Feed, My Way' is a convenient catchcry the Prime Minister has used to describe his reforms, but it is utterly misleading. Very little in this legislation targets algorithmic transparency and choice. It is buried in an exposure draft relating to user empowerment tools which has been released, giving people the option of an algorithmically curated feed or a chronological feed like we used to have in the late 2000s and early 2010s, before likes and shares and advertisements and scams became the fuel in the engine of social media. Such reforms have been introduced elsewhere and could easily be included in this bill. Like its predecessor exposure draft, this bill remains too imprecise, too vague and too open to manipulation, which tries to hide the provisions of the much-maligned mis- and disinformation bill which was introduced by this government in November 2024.

Dangerously, however, this bill also abolishes unlawful material codes, unlawful material standards and age-restricted material codes, which today require online services to reduce the availability of the most seriously harmful refused classification material through mandatory prevention, detection, reporting, removal and access-restriction measures. The existing age-restricted material codes require online services to prevent children under 18 from accessing or being exposed to specified pornography, high-impact violence, self-harm and other age-inappropriate material through age assurance, access controls, safety settings, parental tools and content restrictions.

Let me be clear. Criticising this bill is not an argument for doing nothing. Doing something is no longer optional, but the coalition cannot support this bill in its current form.

I want to thank the member for Flinders for that contribution, because I think she made a number of compelling points based on her experience in the industry. Can I suggest to her that the minister herself has said on multiple occasions she is very keen to have specific amendments from the opposition to do what I hope we all want to do, which is provide some protection from the way that the online environment is harming particularly our children at the moment.

Right now, we have an information environment which is force-feeding billions of people a steady diet of outrage. It monetises hate. It drives division. It severs social connections, and it spreads the kind of disinformation that makes us all less safe. Nearly 39 per cent of Australians aged 16 to 24 experience a mental illness every year, according to ABS data—figures that have risen sharply when you compare them to the pre-smartphone era. It takes just 23 minutes for an account mimicking a 16- to 18-year-old boy to be fed misogynistic content on social media. The tenor of public discourse is now so vitriolic that nine in 10 female politicians in this country are experiencing persistent abuse or violent threats on a regular basis. These are just some of the examples that people have been canvassing in recent days, but the point is clear. Social media platforms are deriving enormous profits from unsafe products—products that harm our children, our democracy and our health while eroding any sense of common ground and pushing our community to extremes.

Our Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 will change that. It will ensure that tech giants are held to basic safety standards, just as toy manufacturers are, just as car makers are and just as food companies are. No-one should be able to sell faulty products in Australia that harm consumers or promote criminality. It will force platforms, gaming sites and AI chatbots to protect under 18s in particular from violent pornography, from hostile ideas about women and gender equality, from content that encourages eating disorders and from content that glorifies criminal activity or causes serious distress, including abuse and bullying. Of course, our greatest focus is on those under 18s because we know that they are the ones at greatest risk, but all Australians should be protected from content which depicts, encourages, promotes or incites child sexual abuse, which promotes sexual or gender based violence, which circulates fake nude material created without consent or which promotes or incites extreme violence or cruelty or involves explicit threats of violence, including death or rape threats. As we've been discussing these issues in recent days and weeks, I think most Australians would be shocked to know some of the content that we are proposing to deal with. They wouldn't believe that such things exist on the internet.

The other crucial thing that this bill does is give back users control over what they see in their feeds. Some of us are old enough to remember what social media was when it was first introduced. It was a great place to catch up with what family members were doing, particularly if they were in different parts of Australia or around the world. It was a great way to catch up with friends, particularly friends who'd moved away, or check out whether your high school boyfriend was now single. But, in recent years, it has really morphed into an environment where algorithms are shoving violence, misogyny and body dysmorphic content down users' throats. Research consistently shows that content that's divisive can radicalise users and prey on their most intimate insecurities. The bill seeks to give Australians back their agency online by allowing them to either opt in or opt out of recommender systems.

Many of those opposite are trying to pretend that this is somehow the government controlling what people see. It is the exact opposite. This is allowing people to choose the people they want to follow, the businesses they want to follow and the organisations that they care about—their local footy team, the coffee shop down the road, the community group that they're part of or their local church. They can choose who they receive content from. They don't let absentee oligarchs in Silicon Valley make that choice for them. That's what's happening now, with no transparency around it at all. Anyone in this chamber trying to frame this choice as censorship needs to ask themselves the question: what am I so determined for people to see online without giving them the choice that they can opt out of seeing it? Algorithms are built by tech bros who have no concern for Australia or for Australians. They themselves—those tech bros—are not champions of free speech. They use free speech arguments when it suits them, and then they use billions of dollars to shut down criticism whenever it criticises them. They're not champions of free speech. They're champions of their own speech. They worship at the altar of profit and they have proven time and time again that there is no low they won't sink to in order to keep eyeballs glued to screens.

Social media, of course, can be a tool for good. The member for Flinders was providing great examples of where it can be used for good. It can be a source of connection. It can be a way to enhance community. It can be a way to celebrate self-expression. If you're a small business, it can be a way to get connected to new markets and new buyers. But, as things stand at the moment, we have not got the balance right.

Our world-leading social media ban for under-16s has gone a long way already in shielding young Australians from the harms that some of these platforms inflict, while giving them back their childhoods. We're hearing great stories about kids playing in the playground more and talking to each other more, but technology changes rapidly. A digital duty of care will ensure that every Australian is entitled to safety online; that products, websites and platforms which violate those standards face consequences; and that users choose what they see on social media, not billionaires based in Silicon Valley.

The legislation has my full support because we know that online harms are rapidly spilling into the real world and because, in the words of Molly Bannister, who lost her beautiful 14-year-old son Olly to suicide after he was constantly and ruthlessly fed body-dysmorphic content on social media, Molly said:

For too long we've asked everyday people and parents to somehow outsmart the most sophisticated technology companies in the world.

This bill changes that. It gives more power back to parents. It gives more power back to social media users. As the minister in charge of the next plan to end violence against women and their children and as a mother, I back that. I implore those opposite to join with us to put the needs of children first, to put the safety of Australians first and to back our digital duty of care.

When the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 was first released, I received more than 30 emails from constituents who were concerned, outraged and, in some cases, perplexed about what the government was proposing. One constituent called it the 'big brother bill'. I'm sure that is not the government's intention, but that is how some people in my community perceived it, and we need to take their concerns seriously.

When I look at this bill, I think about the parents in Fowler who worry about what their children are seeing online. I think about the people who have contacted my office because they are worried about government having too much control over what they can say and read. I think about our small-business owners, who are already working long hours and cannot afford another layer of paperwork simply because they have a website. We have a responsibility to consider all of those concerns.

I support making big technology companies take greater responsibility for the harm occurring on their platforms, but supporting the intention of a bill does not mean accepting every provision in it. Tech companies make enormous profits from our attention and our children's attention. They cannot leave families to deal with the consequences on their own.

We still have to ask: Who is covered? What will they have to do? How will these powers be used? What safeguards will protect people when something goes wrong? That is how I approach this debate as an Independent and as the member for Fowler.

The internet gives us extraordinary opportunities. For many families in Fowler, it is how we stay connected with relatives overseas. It is how small businesses find customers. It is where people get their news and share their views. But it can also expose people to terrible abuse, exploitation and violence. We cannot ignore the role of the platforms themselves. These companies decide how their systems work. Their algorithms influence what appears on our screens and what keeps appearing again and again. They cannot take profits and leave families to deal with all the consequences.

I want to mention one recent piece of research. In August, the University of Melbourne released a report, Misogyny,online radicalisation, and youth extremism in Australia. It surveyed more than 1,100 young people aged 13 to 17 and around 2,300 adults. It found that roughly one in three teenage boys express misogynistic attitudes. One in four agreed that feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted with violence if necessary. And 27 per cent of teenage boys agreed with white supremacist attitudes, which is a real concern. That is one study, but those findings should concern all of us.

We need to understand what young people are being exposed to, who is influencing them and what responsibility platforms have. There should be no disagreement about protecting children from sexual exploitation, content promoting eating disorders, threats of violence or serious bullying, nor should there be disagreement about addressing apps designed to create fake nude images without a person's consent. The question is whether this bill achieves those objectives with clear, proportionate and accountable laws.

Broadly, it creates a duty on those responsible for online services to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, a safe online environment. It requires written risk assessments and measures to address identified risks. It provides for tools to give users greater control over their online experience, including algorithmic recommendations. It also strengthens the cyberbullying and cyberabuse schemes and gives the eSafety Commissioner additional enforcement and investigative powers. I should also point out that the provision in the exposure draft that rightly caused much concern—a largely unfettered power to the minister to define seriously harmful content—has now been removed. What is and what is not harmful content is now set up plainly in the bill and not subject to arbitrary ministerial decision. That is a welcome development.

The bill certainly proposes some very significant changes to Australia's online safety regime. Personally, I think that you should get kids off the phone. Don't give them a smartphone. We should examine the changes carefully. A broadly expressed duty backed by substantial penalties can still encourage platforms to take down lawful content rather than risk getting it wrong. That matters in a community like Fowler. Our communities discuss politics, faith, history and events in their countries of origin, often in languages other than English. We should not leave those conversations vulnerable to automated systems that cannot understand the context or to platforms deciding that removing lawful discussions is the safest option. Protecting people from serious harm should not mean silencing lawful debate.

My next concern is small business. Small business is the beating heart of Fowler. Our local businesses are already dealing with rising costs, tight margins and growing compliance demands. Often the owner is serving customers during the day and doing the paperwork at night. A family business in Fowler is not Meta. It is not TikTok. It is not X. Yet the broad reach of this bill could capture ordinary business websites, not just the large platforms the government talks about. Think about the bakery in Cabramatta, the hair and nail salon in Canley Heights or the tradie in Bonnyrigg with a basic website and a contact form. For those businesses, a website is simply a digital shopfront. It tells customers where they are, what they offer and how to contact them. If those services are captured, the businesses behind them could have to prepare written online safety risk assessments, review them at least annually, retain records for six years and provide them to eSafety within 30 days if requested. This is a new obligation—to understand the requirements, prepare the documentation and keep it up to date. There is no automatic exemption simply because a business is small.

The Minister for Small Business has told this House that most small businesses will have minimal obligations because their websites generally do not allow users to interact with each other, message strangers or upload content. I welcome that assurance, but minimal obligations are not the same as exemption, and what sounds simple in a ministerial office can look very different to someone running a small business, especially in South Western Sydney and, no doubt, in regional Australia as well. They still have to work out whether the law applies. They still have to understand what a compliant assessment looks like. Will they need professional advice? Will they feel that they have to pay someone to prepare it? Most of the time they probably will. What happens if they add a customer review feature? These are reasonable questions.

Small businesses cannot pay their accountant in assurances. If the government accepts that a basic small-business website presents little online safety risk, it should put that protection clearly in the law, not as what the minister will determine as low risk and leaving them in limbo. Small size should not excuse a generally high-risk service, but simply having a website should not expose a family business to unnecessary compliance costs. For businesses that remain covered, there must be a simple and proportionate way to comply.

There should also be an independent assessment of the costs before these obligations apply to small businesses, with adequate time for them to understand and prepare, and the guidance must reach people who need it. That means, in Fowler, plain English, translated information and practical examples. We cannot put information on a government website and assume every business owner will find it, understand it and know what to do.

Accountability must also apply to the regulator. The bill would allow the eSafety Commissioner an approved researchers to operate accounts under assumed identities, sometimes called sockpuppet accounts, to investigate whether platforms are complying. I understand why those tools can be useful. Test accounts can help researchers understand what users are being shown and expose failures that might otherwise remain hidden, but, when public officials operate under assumed identities, there must be clear limits and independent scrutiny. An annual public report is a start. I believe the Commonwealth Ombudsman should also oversee the commissioner's use of these accounts with appropriate access to records and regular reporting to parliament. That is not about questioning the intentions of individual officers. It is about ensuring that significant powers are accompanied by meaningful accountability.

The government wants this bill through the House before the Senate committee has finished its inquiry. That committee is due to report on 20 November. That makes it even more important to address these concerns rather than asking Australians to trust that everything will work out. I want to be constructive. The safeguards I'm proposing are intended to improve this bill not defeat its purpose. A clear exemption for low-risk small-business services, proper scrutiny of compliance costs, protection for lawful expression, independent review and oversight. These are reasonable things to ask for.

Parents want their children to be safe. Australians want to speak freely. Small-business owners want to know what is expected of them without another unnecessary burden. We should be able to work towards all three, but, if these concerns are not adequately addressed, I cannot support the bill in its current form, not because I oppose protecting children online but because protecting children and holding big tech accountable should not require us to accept avoidable burdens on family businesses or inadequate safeguards for lawful speech. Protect children, hold big tech to account, respect our freedoms, and make sure a law aimed at global technology companies does not leave the local hairdresser carrying the paperwork.

I thank the member for Fowler for her contribution. The Albanese government is continuing its international leadership on online safety. We led the world with the under-16s social media ban, which has been taken up in countries around the world, including in the UK, Spain, Malaysia and many other countries, and we're leading the world again with establishing a digital duty of care.

This legislation sets basic safety standards for those engaging in the digital tools we use every day. It's fundamentally about two things: safety and choice. The idea that businesses have a responsibility for the products that they create is one of the oldest obligations in law. Negligence is founded in the concept of businesses having a duty of care for their consumers. It's something that we expect in things that we use every day, from food and drinks to the cars we drive, to the buildings we live and work in. This bill extends these obligations to online services, like social media, online games and AI chatbots.

This is not about limiting freedom of speech. There's already, I fear, misinformation out there about this bill. We've received emails from constituents concerned about restrictions on freedom of expression. We understand that freedom of speech is absolutely vital to our democracy, and I reassure those people that have written to us that this bill will not restrict freedom of speech. It will not prevent you from criticising the government or our policies, or from engaging in public debate about a range of issues. It will not stop you from disagreeing even strongly in the public sphere. This is about keeping people, particularly young people, safe online. It's about putting the obligation on social media companies to take reasonable care to prevent foreseeable harm. It's also about giving people more choice in what they see online.

There were many speeches yesterday that touched upon the online environment, how the anger and aggression that has, sadly, become endemic in Australian society finds its worst expressions online and how the online environment even fuels it. This anger and its symptoms—the worst being violence against retail and hospitality workers, hospital workers, paramedics, teachers and politicians, at every level of society, it seems—is not going to be solved by this bill alone, but I believe this bill is part of the solution.

Our under-16s social media ban, which passed with bipartisan support, has already shown that effective regulation can help improve safety online. It's already resulted in over five million accounts being deactivated. We recognise that not every account that is held by a young person has been deactivated, and that they often find ways around it; they're very resourceful in that way. I think it's particularly difficult for the generation that had social media and have been asked to delete their accounts. But, as a parent, I know it will be easier to say no to my kids signing up for social media. My daughter is becoming a teenager now and we haven't let her sign up for social media because there is that norm in society now that teenagers, that young people, can't sign up for social media in the first place—and their friends won't be online, so we won't have that group pressure. As a result of the under-16s social media ban, we're hearing about some good outcomes. Teens have reported greater engagement in sport, better sleep and a reduction in bullying online just since our reforms took effect. We're making meaningful progress, but there's still more work to do, and that's what this bill is about. This digital duty of care is particularly focused on strengthening the safety of young people.

Under this legislation, all online services, including games and AI chatbots, must protect people under 18 from harmful content like pornography and material or conduct that encourages, promotes or instructs disordered eating; that encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality; that glorifies crime or encourages dangerous stunts or seriously harmful practices; and that involves abuse, harassment or bullying, or any other material or conduct or combination of material and conduct that may cause serious harm to children. Under-18s will also be protected from design features that will have negative behavioural impacts, like addictive features that cause kids to stay up late and to lose sleep.

These steps address concerns that I hear from parents and people across my community. Algorithms that have targeted vulnerable children and young people come up amongst teachers and parents chatting at the school gate or at the local footy, and they come up with young people themselves. Young people know about the harm an unfiltered and unregulated social media presence can have on them and their friends. Often they're even more aware of it than adults are. I've spoken to students at East Doncaster Secondary College and Box Hill High and with our youth advisory committee, who understand online harms all too well.

As I said, one of the harms we're addressing is disordered eating. These laws will require platforms to prevent minors and users from being targeted by material that promotes eating disorders. In Australia, over 1.1 million people are living with an eating disorder. Twenty-seven per cent of these people are aged 10 to 19—and that's a figure that's doubled since 2012. Eating disorders are amongst the deadliest forms of mental illness, and for those that seek help it takes an average of one to six years to recover. A 2015 study of teen girls reported that social media users were significantly more likely than non-social media users to have internalised a drive for thinness. Now, 10 years later, the risk of young people being fed targeted and harmful messaging that can exacerbate eating disorders is significant. Robb Evans, who lost his daughter, Liv, to anorexia, has spoken about the ways in which social media can magnify mental illness. Liv, after searching for low-calorie recipes, was fed reels providing her advice on how to survive on just 200 calories a day. Her feed actively directed her towards more extreme and harmful content. Thanks to the bravery of people like Robb who have shared their stories, we now have an opportunity to protect vulnerable young people in the future from these exacerbating factors.

We've also heard in the House from the Minister for Communications and the Minister for Education how algorithms' bias towards misogynistic content means that accounts registered to teenage boys will be directed towards antiwomen, dehumanising content within just 23 minutes of being created. Within two to three hours, a teen boy's feed will be filled with videos promoting violence and sexist attitudes and war cries like 'your body, my choice. This is material they are force-fed purely because of their age and gender, and it tells them that social and personal frustrations are caused by gender equality. It is not woke to want our young men to have healthy, respectful attitudes towards women and to want to have healthy, respectful, equal relationships. It is a foundation of a decent society. This is especially the case in an environment of rising sexual violence and negative attitudes towards women.

This bill will also require that online services, including games, must protect under-18s from being exposed to pornography. Young people shouldn't be getting their sex education from pornography that normalises things like choking or violence or degrading acts. Online services will also need to protect young people from content that glorifies crime or dangerous stunts. Research done by the eSafety Commission showed 46 per cent of children have seen dangerous online challenges. In recent years, trends like the skull breaker challenge and the squishy toy microwave trend have resulted in significant harm for many Australian children and young people who are exposed to them. This includes spinal cord injuries, seizures, severe burns and head trauma.

When we consider the capacity of social media platforms to cause serious distress, the story of Emma Mason and her daughter Tilly comes to mind. Tilly Rosewarne was 15 when she died by suicide, and her mother, Emma, says:

This was death by bullying but it was enabled by social media.

Tilly's family are all too aware of the real-world harm that can be generated from online abuse, as Emma has so powerfully said. She has taken her Let Them Be Kids campaign to the UN and shared her story across the world. Now the world knows that tech companies are all about the algorithm and not the human cost of what's going on. As long as social media companies are the ones setting the rules, the safety of our children will not be the priority. As Emma has said, these reforms will save lives, and they will keep more kids safe.

This bill also places greater obligations on big tech companies to ensure their products are safe and gives adult Australians greater choice about what they see online. Social media companies like Meta and TikTok, online games like Roblox and more recent technologies like AI chatbots all have had ample responsibility to fulfil their social responsibilities, and far too often they have failed to do so, even when compelled. This bill will require them to do annual risk assessments of the harms the features on their services could cause Australians and put systems in place to prevent those harms.

Very importantly, this bill will give Australians the option to opt out of the social media algorithm. The option must be accessible, prominently displayed and not make your feed harder to navigate. If people choose this option, it means they'll only see content from friends, family, businesses and content creators that they choose to follow. Again, this is not about restricting freedom of speech. It does the opposite. It is about giving people more choice. For too long, big tech companies have avoided their social obligation. This bill puts the onus back on them. It will give Australians more choice. It will make them safer and it will make our young people safer. I commend this bill to the House.

For several years now, Australians have been increasingly concerned about the impact of the online world on the welfare of children and on the cohesiveness of our society. A movement for change, begun and led by brave parents who saw their children's lives taken by cruel and highly addictive social media, created a remarkable period of bipartisanship that put Australia in the forefront of global movements to bring about online safety. It enabled the government of Malcolm Turnbull to create the world's first online safety watchdog, the Children's eSafety Commissioner, whose remit was later extended to adults. Then, in 2024, the parliament came together again and legislated a minimum age for social media. We did it for Rob Evans and Liv, Emma Mason and Tilly, Mia Bannister and Ollie, Wayne Holdsworth and Mac, and for every young person who has lost their life or been damaged by the experience of social media and the online world—and we did it for their parents—so all children and adolescents would be protected from unnecessary harm.

It has had positive impacts on the welfare and happiness of our children and adolescents. Five million underage social media accounts have been deactivated, removed or restricted, and surveys have found that many young Australians are now spending more time playing sport, getting more sleep, being less exposed to inappropriate and violent content and suffering less from bullying. Despite the fact there are still too many under 16s using social media, it was a highly promising start and it attracted global attention, respect and support, which is why it is being replicated right around the world. It demonstrates that Australia can lead the world on truly important issues. Its failure to achieve even greater success can be put down to one overriding cause: noncompliance by the online platforms, some of whom have evaded their responsibilities under the law. We strengthened the compliance requirements recently through the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026, and, empowered by this, the eSafety Commissioner is currently investigating noncompliance by five platforms: Instagram, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat.

Too many children, though, are still at risk and are still being harmed. There is a growing body of research pointing to the reality that, as a result of the deliberate design of its algorithmic features, social media is changing our society in harmful ways, turbocharging anger to the detriment of our social cohesion and our democracy. It is promoting misogyny, building an aggressive and sometimes frightening manosphere and driving a wedge between men and women, leading to an increase in gender based violence. Algorithms discourage nuance. They deliver increasing levels of angry content into the devices. At its most extreme, this is contributing to the normalisation of aggressive behaviour. The negative consequences are being felt by everyone, not just by politicians but also by nurses, doctors, ambos, teachers, shop workers, hospitality workers—in fact, people from all industries and all walks of life. It is affecting all of us in ways that are becoming increasingly negative and unpleasant. The problem has gone on for far too long.

The nation's security and police leaders have warned us that the level of potential danger is increasing. ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned:

Social media is … promoting discord and inflammatory rhetoric, exacerbating polarisation, and creating a permissive environment for violence.

AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett has said that the National Security Investigations team is charging almost one individual every week for targeting Commonwealth parliamentarians and public officials. The AFP, she said, is recording growing volumes of online abuse, threatening rhetoric and intimidation. This level of harm must be addressed and must be reduced.

The onus is not on children or parents to act. It is on the companies to act to ensure their services are safe. It is doing harm to our kids and to our society, and we must call time on it. We have given the tech companies years to address these serious problems caused by their products, but they have failed to do so repeatedly. By not meeting their social responsibility properly, the companies have been undermining their social licence. The time is up. Their social licence must now be expressed through legislation, and these technical companies, run largely outside of Australia, can make a difference.

I recently met with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. The new Apple phone has features on it designed to protect children and designed to empower parents to act more decisively in the interests of their families. So it is possible for companies to act responsibly, but the truth is that we have a responsibility as well to act, and this is the moment for this parliament to act, to make the social media and the online world safer, to pass the government's digital duty of care bill, and, by doing so, require tech companies to take responsibility for the safety of the products and services they provide that have made them hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars of profit.

This bill puts a positive obligation on big tech to provide a safe online environment where Australians are protected from seriously harmful and illegal content, adults are given a meaningful choice about what they see on their feeds and under-18s are protected from content and features harmful to young people. It will set safety standards for the digital services we use every day, just like we do for motor cars and food and children's toys. If we can do it for all of those products, why is it hard for us to do it for something that has a much greater and regular impact on families?

It will require companies to undertake risk assessments of their services, put systems in place to address their risky features from doing harm and provide people over 16 with empowerment tools that give them choice about what they see in their feed. Crucially, online services, like social media, online games and AI chatbots, must protect under-18s from harmful content that promotes eating disorders and hostile ideas towards women and gender equality, pornography, material that glorifies crime or dangerous stunts, and content that causes serious distress, including abuse and bullying.

The bill will also protect under-18s from addictive features that cause kids to stay up late and lose sleep. It will ban nudify apps, which cause so much distress and harm to young people. Our children simply should not have to live in this poisonous and unhealthy environment. They deserve better. Their childhood should not be spent glued to a device. They should be playing outside with their friends, off their phones and on the footy fields and cricket pitches, the tennis and netball courts, in the swimming pool, trying any sport that grabs their interests, reading books, and engaging with human interaction with real people. The stories we hear about people identifying a chatbot, a nonperson, as their best friend should be a huge wake-up call for every member of this parliament to be prepared to act. Young people need to be able to figure out who they are, free from the pressure of the entire world to act in a certain way.

The bill will also protect all Australians, including adults, from material that promotes child sexual exploitation or child sex abuse, grooming, sexual violence, extreme violence or cruelty, the menacing or harassing of individuals and the encouragement of terrorist acts. Importantly, it will halve the length of time that digital service providers have to respond to cyberbullying complaints from 48 to 24 hours, and it will empower eSafety to go undercover to make sure that companies are complying with the law. Failure to comply with this digital duty of care will result in a fine of up to $109.2 million, which is in line with other Australian penalties designed to protect Australian consumers.

Let me be clear: under the digital duty of care, online services will be required to have systems in place to protect all Australians, including Commonwealth officials, from death threats, threats of rape, threats of violence, terrorism and material or conduct that can cause serious harm by menacing or harassing an individual. Some have suggested this is about censorship. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not about preventing mean comments or political debate. It is about preventing serious harm. It is not about controlling what adults do online. It's about giving people back power and choice. Rather than someone in the United States deciding what they see, they get to decide themselves. That is what this legislation is about. It is about increasing choice, because it will require platforms to give us more choice over the content and the features that we use, including the feeds that we choose.

I urge the parliament to support this bill. This bill, if we carry it, will be replicated around the world, just like the bill banning under-16s from social media has been. This is an opportunity for our country to lead, and lead we should. At its core, the legislation brings together 17 existing industry made codes into a single overarching legislative framework in a way that makes them easy to understand and enforce. The complex and contradictory nature of these codes has made them difficult to enforce and easy to evade. It makes them a lawyer's picnic. Put the power back in the hands of our constituents and away from the multinational companies and the tech giants. That is what this is about. The evasion has gone on too long. This bill will put an end to this subterfuge and will help to keep our people safe.

The bill in essence is a much-needed but moderate and commonsense response to a problem that is becoming more serious with every passing day, a response to a rising chorus of concern across society about what social media is doing to our children, our relationships and our social cohesion and community behaviour. It's backed by academic experts and by our intelligence and police leaders. It's endorsed by important organisations that support the rights and welfare of children, young people and young adults—headspace, Project Rockit, the Butterfly Foundation, SmackTalk and Teach Us Consent, whose impressive young leader Chanel Contos I met with yesterday to discuss this issue. I want to thank all of them for their advocacy. I want to thank the parents who have taken personal grief and channelled that into not wanting other parents to go through what they have gone through with the loss of their son or daughter.

Ultimately, this bill is, of course, in the interest of the digital media platforms and social media companies themselves, because it is the best way for them to actually retain their social licence, which is fast losing public support, and avoid a potential backlash. Australian parents and the Australian people want the measures in this bill passed. I say to everyone in the House and the Senate please examine your conscience, please examine what is in this bill, and please do not be distracted by what is not in this bill as well. This is sensible reform, and I commend it to the House.

Imagine you could travel back in time 50 years to the 1970s. Imagine telling someone about the internet, about the mobile phone and about social media. 'Within 50 years,' you could tell this person, 'nearly everyone on Earth will carry a device in their pocket that gives them instant access to the sum of human knowledge—every book, every paper, every fact available in seconds. That same device will allow you to communicate with friends and family around the world in an instant. You'll be able to send messages, hear their voice and see their face. The tyranny of distance will be no more. You'll even be able to communicate with almost anyone on Earth. You'll be able to share stories, photos and videos. You'll be able to message people you've never met before with similar interests and ideas.' What would you have thought at that time, hearing about the promises of the future? The possibilities would have felt so bright and exciting. Access to the world's knowledge would surely drive productivity, new inventions and rising standards of living. The ability to connect with anyone at any time would surely drive greater connection and thriving families and communities, and the ability to share ideas with strangers would surely drive greater democratic participation and exciting new collaborations.

But fast-forward 50 years to the present and consider that productivity and living standards have plateaued or are going backwards. Families and communities feel even more strained and disrupted, and, around the world, democracies are backsliding towards authoritarianism. How has this happened? How has the technology that promised so much, which could have unlocked incredible possibilities, failed so badly? What went wrong? Our online spaces are now vectors for incredibly harmful material—child sexual abuse material, suicidal content, aggressive bullying, radicalisation and racism. Social media fosters anger and division. It causes anxiety and mental illness. It drives a constant feeling of negativity and helplessness. Social media is fraying our social fabric. We welcomed this technology into our lives, enamoured by its promises, without thinking about the harms it could cause. And now, decades on, we find our lives intrinsically intertwined with the digital world, and we find ourselves with the almost infinitely impossible job of unpicking the harms caused by social media and digital platforms, piece by piece.

The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 is one of those really important pieces. It places a digital duty of care on online services. They must take appropriate action to provide a safe online environment. For the first time, responsibility will sit with the companies that design these services and not only with the parents and children whose attention is being monetised. My electorate supports this. In a survey of my community of Curtin, more than 90 per cent of the 1,200 respondents supported the idea that social media companies should have to take more responsibility for the harms they cause. Importantly, the digital duty of care will extend beyond social media to other online services like search engines, AI chatbots and app stores.

The bill is strong when it comes to protecting children. Under the digital duty of care, online services would be obliged to protect children from content such as pornography, abuse, misogyny and the promotion of eating disorders. For adults, online services are required to protect people from serious harm, like content that promotes child sexual abuse, extreme violence, suicide and terrorism. What does this actually mean in practice? It doesn't mean you will no longer see harmful content online, but it means that platforms have to take appropriate action to limit it. That means doing risk assessments to identify the risks in advance, rather than waiting for harms to occur, and it means putting in place systems to deal with those risks. That could include better screening of extremely violent content, faster responses to content reported by users or dialling down algorithmic echo chambers that show extremist content.

Perhaps the most important step in this bill is that it goes beyond content. The bill requires services to look at the design features that cause harm to children and serious harm to adults. This means companies will have to consider the impact of algorithms and of addictive design features, content moderation systems, content monetisation processes, ad approval systems and beyond. This is an acknowledgement that it's not just individual pieces of content that cause harm; it's also the systems designed by social media companies. To give you one example, it's alleged that Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, previously had a 17-strike policy before it suspended accounts engaged in the trafficking of humans for sex. You could give 16 indicators that you were sex trafficking, but only on the 17th would you be banned. Under the digital duty of care, systems like this are also under the spotlight.

The bill makes two further important changes. Firstly, it includes important transparency measures, which will allow researchers and the eSafety Commissioner to understand what safety measures these companies are actually putting in place. Secondly, it enables the minister to require user empowerment tools to give Australians greater control over their online services. The government has announced that it will use this power to require all social media companies to give you the choice to opt in or out of your algorithm.

The bill is very welcome. We need it, and I commend the government. It signals an important cultural shift as we start to expect more from social media companies. But it can be better, and I am proposing some improvements. The first is to introduce a private right of action. This would give Australians a way to take direct action when they've been harmed to take the pressure off regulators and to take the politics out of enforcement. It would then be Australians, not just the Australian government, holding international tech companies to account. This is complex drafting, and I haven't attempted it in the House, but I strongly encourage the government to move it and the Senate to consider it. The second is to increase the penalties. The current maximum penalty for breaching the duty of care and for failing to carry out risk assessments or provide user empowerment tools is $100 million. That might sound like a lot, but this would be about one-twentieth of one per cent of Meta's revenue last year—too small to change behaviour. Other jurisdictions have seen this. The EU, the UK, Canada and New Zealand have fines that range from three to 10 per cent of global revenue. I propose changing the maximum to 5 per cent of global revenue. If we want to change behaviour, there need to be consequences that mean something.

Another important amendment that I'm proposing deals with a harm that this bill doesn't address. Psychologists are telling us that AI chatbots and companions create a risk to children's long-term psychological development and human attachment through what's called attachment hacking. This is where AI systems like chatbots and companions simulate emotional intimacy, fostering a child's dependence on it instead of human relationships. As the PM mentioned in his speech a few minutes ago, we're seeing children confiding in AI chatbots and companions rather than in a friend, a parent or a teacher. An AI companion tells you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear to make sense of the world and sense of yourself. This can create a critical disruption to psychological development and a child's sense of reality. This bill would be improved with my amendment to include this type of harm. My fourth amendment is simple. User empowerment tools must be prominent and accessible, and this should be written into the act. It's meaningless to give adults a choice about their algorithms or future more sophisticated user empowerment tools if that choice is hidden deep in the settings menu. We've seen the EU struggle with this malicious compliance, an algorithm opt-out that's technically available but hard to find. Australians must have a real choice about what they see that's prominent and accessible.

I want to turn to free speech or, more accurately, our implied right of freedom of political communication. I've heard the concern from my community and from this chamber that this reform is about censorship—the government deciding what you see online now. I commend the government for listening to concerns and removing the minister's power to extend the categories of harm. This was a power that could theoretically have been used to threaten freedom of communication. I believe that this change should have quelled most concerns related to censorship, but I've still heard some pushback, which I want to address. If anyone is controlling what you see, it's the social media companies. Their algorithms decide what lands in your feed, and they are designed to make a profit by keeping every one of us scrolling for as long as possible. They are monetising our attention. We are the product, not the customer.

This bill shifts some of this control from the platform not to the government but back to the user. The bill doesn't make a single post unlawful. What changes is how services are designed. Reducing this important piece of legislation to a scare campaign about censorship is exactly what the worst of these platforms want. They want users to defend their ability to design platforms to keep those users hooked and angry so the platforms can sell your attention to advertisers.

Passing this bill is the start of the work, not the end of it. I want to make three points about what comes next. First, this bill will come down to compliance and enforcement. A duty of care is only as strong as the regulator that enforces it. The eSafety Commissioner will be asking some of the best resourced companies in the world to explain their algorithms and their safety systems. Ensuring that the commissioner is well funded and empowered is critical for the digital duty of care to succeed.

Second, we should design more user empowerment tools, and we should design them with the people who use them. I held a workshop on the digital duty of care with students from the University of Western Australia earlier this month, and the word that kept coming up was 'control'. Young people who grew up with social media told me that, rather than a binary choice about recommended content, they want to be able to dial it up or down—for example, by increasing the ratio of discovery to personalised content on their feed. They want to know what a platform has decided about them. The opt-in and opt-out choice is a good first tool, but it's blunt, and many will choose not to opt out. We should be thinking about other, more nuanced user empowerment tools that can help people combat echo chambers and doomscrolling to give Australians more control over their own experience of social media.

Third, we need to think harder about the more insidious role of social media in our public life. Australia has seen a rise in anger over recent years, with recent examples of anger spilling over into real-life violence. There's a broad recognition that social media has a role to play in the amplification of anger, negativity and outrage. Social media rewards short, emotional posts and punishes balance. Algorithms drive echo chambers, where people become more and more set in extremist views. Addictive features keep people online for longer, degrading mental wellbeing, disrupting families and keeping people disconnected from other people in the real world. Anonymity and the separation of a phone screen allow people to say things they would never say in real life. Social media is not the only reason for the rise in temperature, but it's a big reason and one that we've not dealt with before. Australia has gone through difficult economic times, international shocks and periods of polarisation, but we've never dealt with social media before.

These are issues that go beyond this bill. This bill deals with serious harm—not anger, outrage and anxiety for adults. It's about the relationship between the online service and the user, not about the broader impacts of social media on families, friends, communities and society. The next step in our journey must be to unpick the broader, negative impacts of social media on our society: the constant amplification of anger and negativity and the fraying of our social fabric. We must understand the impact so we can make our own choices about who we want to be, not just assume that this is inevitable.

To conclude, digital duty of care puts responsibility where it belongs: on the companies that design these online services. It looks at how services are built and not only at what's posted. It gives people some control over their own experience. Until now we have not made a considered choice about the role that digital platforms play in our lives. We can make one now. I encourage the government to seriously consider my amendments. I commend the bill to the House.

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.

Consider the influence that social media companies have over you. Consider the way they shape the news you read, the jokes you listen to and the people with whom you interact. When your feed was chronological, simple and all about the people you actually knew feels like a distant memory. Most of us—at least, those my age—joined social media to connect with friends and family. Today, the algorithm can be fun, interesting and even informative, but it can also be divisive, isolating and radicalising. It exercises enormous power over us, and we barely understand how it works.

Governments have allowed tech companies to cultivate this power with minimal oversight, and for too long a handful of tech billionaires have written their own rules. They've had years to fix the problems themselves, and they have chosen not to. These multinational companies have discovered that the most effective way to increase their profits is to hook us—and the best way to hook us is to inflame us, to drive us further apart from each other into echo chambers and digital worlds that are often dark, dangerous and divisive. In just 13 minutes, an account mimicking a 16- to 18-year-old boy will be fed misogynistic content. Too many children in my electorate are experiencing these harms, and parents write to me frequently to express their concerns. They feel powerless to protect their kids from these formless, invisible algorithms that manipulate their kids' minds and distort their development.

Social media is the Wild West, and the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 tries to bring some law and order into the digital world. It's time for government to crack down on the tech-bro cowboys and govern to protect the people who put them in this place. At its core, this bill puts a legal duty on online services to take appropriate action to keep Australians safe. That covers social media, websites, messaging and online games. For the first time, companies will be required to protect us from serious harmful materials and conduct resulting from the products they sell. These serious harms include child sexual abuse material, grooming and image based abuse. In addition, companies must protect children from specific harmful material, including content promoting eating disorders, self-harm, misogyny and dangerous stunts.

Tech companies will need to give users new tools that increase an individual's ability to control what they see, rather than be subject to the invisible whims of the algorithm. At least once a year, they will have to assess the risks their own products create and act on them. The cost of taking action is no excuse. There'll be fines for breaching the duty of up to $109 million. These could and should be higher, and that's why I'll be proposing a sensible amendment to calculate penalties as a percentage of revenue. This would make our legislation consistent with similar legislation in other jurisdictions which places higher penalties on companies, recognising the enormous quantum of profits that these companies enjoy.

The bill also gives the eSafety Commissioner new powers to take down nudify apps. It halves the time platforms have to act on cyberbullying and abuse complaints before the eSafety Commissioner can step in, from 48 hours to 24 hours. It starts to prise open the black box of platforms so that independent researchers can finally look into how those algorithms actually work.

Opponents of this bill claim that it's about censorship, that government wants to control what you see and read. The obvious response to that objection is: if there's someone controlling what you see, it's the social media companies that develop the algorithms, with no scrutiny or guardrails—and they do so entirely in pursuit of profit. This bill is about giving you more control to determine what you watch, what you listen to, what you read and, therefore, how you think and feel.

Let's just take a step back and remember what it is that's being restricted here—child sex abuse material, terrorism, nonconsensual fake nudes, rape threats. Which of these do you want to allow unrestricted? For children, preventing their exposure to pornography, to material that encourages disordered eating or to attitudes hostile towards women seems, to me, eminently sensible and reasonable. I welcome the government's decision to drop the power for a minister to add new categories of harm without first coming back to the parliament. Limiting this ministerial discretion, I believe, is an important step and should put to rest the claims that this bill is about censorship.

The bill could be stronger. I'm going to support the amendments put by my colleagues from the crossbench. It should ensure that opt-in to algorithms is the default, and that's what the campaign led by Chanel Contos of Fix Our Feeds is calling for. It would mean that you have to intentionally choose to use particular algorithms rather than being nudged into them by the tech companies. The bill could include amendments to protect children from AI companion chatbots, including attachment hacking where tech companies manipulate people into emotional connections with AI. I applaud, in particular, the member for Curtin for her leadership on this issue, showing what constructive, courageous leadership from the crossbench can look like.

More broadly, this bill doesn't address every harm caused by social media and other online services. We still have so much more to understand about how these services and the companies operating them drive radicalisation and polarisation. The bill's own explanatory memorandum points to research showing social media can accelerate young people's paths into violent extremism. We see the same forces pulling our politics further apart, making it harder to talk with one another, disagree respectfully, trust each other and find common ground. If we want safer and more connected communities, it's time to put the platforms in their place and the people in control. I commend the bill with the amendments brought by the crossbench to the House.

The coalition has launched a petition to kill the bill. Apparently, the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 is government censorship. That is an extraordinary description of legislation that gives Australians more control over what they see online while requiring technology companies to take responsibility for the products they design. I've been on Facebook since around 2008 and on Myspace before that. I'm starting to give away my age! Then again, back then it was a terrific way to keep in touch with friends and family, particularly while I was travelling overseas. When I returned to Australia, it helped me stay connected with the people I'd met along the way. I could see their photographs, hear their news and maintain friendships across thousands of kilometres. It was simple: you followed someone because you wanted to hear from them, and, for the most part, you did.

These days, Facebook is a different experience. Posts from friends and family are still there, but they're sprinkled throughout my feed like salt and pepper in between a sponsored post, videos from strangers, arguments I never asked to join and advertisements for things I have no intention of buying. I joined Facebook to keep up with people I actually know; now, I spend more time scrolling past people I don't. Apparently the algorithm knows what I want better than I do.

The technology writer Cory Doctorow has explained how platforms arrive at this point. At first, a service offers something genuinely useful. It connects friends, helps small businesses find customers and allows people to share information. We join because it works. Then, when enough people depend on it, the company starts prioritising advertisers and paying customers. The experience changes. What we choose to see competes with whatever keeps us looking at the screen. Eventually, the platform starts squeezing those businesses too. A local business spends years building an audience only to discover it may have to pay to reach the people who already chose to follow it. The experience gets worse, but leaving becomes harder because our friends, customers and communities are all still there. That is not just a complaint about the advertisements; it is about the enormous power platforms acquire over connections Australians have built themselves.

It brings us to My Feed, My Way. Under the proposed rules, Australians over 16 will be able to choose whether their primary social media feed contains posts from accounts they follow or personalised recommendations selected by an algorithm. If you like the recommendations, you could opt in. If you prefer posts from friends, family and chosen creators, you could choose that instead. The choice should be clear, easy to make and persistent. A platform should not quietly reverse it each time you open the application or make the alternative impossible to use. It should not take a science degree, six settings screens and the patience of a saint to see what your friends are posting.

The detailed feed requirements are proposed through a legislative instrument enabled by the bill, not spelled out word for word in the primary legislation. That distinction's important and parliament can scrutinise how the rules operate, but the underlying principle is straightforward: the person holding the phone should have a meaningful say in what appears on it. The coalition calls this censorship, but I struggle to see how giving someone the choice to reject recommendations silences the person whose content is not recommended. Nobody has the right to appear in a stranger's feed simply because a company's algorithm predicts that an argument will generate engagement. And, if choosing your own feed is censorship, what should we call a system in which a technology company chooses it for you?

There is another question we need to ask. For years, social media companies have presented themselves as platforms where people post content, but those services are not passive noticeboards. They select, rank and recommend posts. They decide which video plays next, which controversy is amplified and which content reaches people who never asked to follow its creator. Those are decisions about distribution. They can have commercial and human consequences. Traditional publishers carry legal responsibilities associated with what they publish. The High Court's decision in Voller demonstrated that facilitating third-party comments can, in particular circumstances, amount to publication for defamation law. That decision did not declare every technology platform a publisher of everything it hosts, and this bill does not do so either—but the policy question remains. When a business activity recommends and amplifies content for profit, what responsibility should accompany that power? There is a difference between allowing someone to speak and deliberately putting their words in front of a million strangers.

I do not suggest that every recommendation amounts to an editorial endorsement—a newspaper editor and a recommendation system are not identical—but we cannot ignore the decisions made by the people who built and tune those systems. They determine the incentives, the measures of success and the way content travels. If a company can optimise its system to maximise advertising revenue, it can also be required to assess how that system exposes people to foreseeable harm. That is a more useful discussion than pretending the platform has no role once someone presses 'Publish'. The digital duty of care begins to address the risks created by the system doing the amplification, and the principle should be familiar to anyone who has worked in an industry where safety is taken seriously. In workplaces across Australia, employers have duties to identify hazards and control risks. They cannot simply wait for a worker to be injured, hand them a complaint form and declare the system successful. We apply similar expectations to cars, food and children's toys. If a product has a foreseeable defect, the company designing it has a responsibility to act. Online services should not get a different rule simply because their products apply on screens.

This bill requires providers to assess the risks arising from their services, including risky design features, and take effective measures to reduce them. It is about prevention, not just removing a harmful post after somebody has already been hurt. It also changes the way online safety is regulated. Today there are 17 industry developed codes and standards spread across different services and obligations. The bill replaces that complicated framework with an overarching duty of care after a transition period. Rather than waiting for the industry to draft a new code each time technology changes, providers must assess new risks and respond to them. Companies remain responsible for designing their services, but safety is not simply left to rules written by the companies being regulated. The duty applies to specified serious harms affecting adults, including child sexual exploitation, explicit threats of violence, intimate image abuse and material encouraging suicide or serious self-harm. Children receive additional protections against pornography, material encouraging eating disorders, dangerous stunts, bullying and hostility towards women, as well as design features associated with harmful behaviour. This is not about outlawing political disagreement; it is about defined categories of harm and appropriate steps to reduce the risk that online services expose Australians to.

The government has already introduced the social media minimum age of 16. According to the updated government figures, more than five million underage accounts have been deactivated, removed or restricted. That does not mean the job is finished. There are still underage accounts, and the eSafety Commissioner is investigating possible noncompliance by major platforms. (Quorum formed) The answer to noncompliance is to enforce the law, not to abandon the expectation that that platform should follow it. The figures also describe survey respondents reporting more sport and better sleep, alongside reduced exposure to some harmful experiences. These are early findings, not a declaration of victory. The responsibility remains on platforms to meet the law and on regulators to test what is happening in practice. The risks to children extend beyond social media accounts. They use online games, messaging services and artificial intelligence chatbots, including products that imitate a friend or adviser. Parents cannot expect every interaction or understand every feature of every new product. Children should not be expected to recognise unsafe design before the provider has any responsibility to intervene.

The bill also addresses a particularly disturbing use of artificial intelligence: apps that generate fake nude images without consent. A perfectly ordinary photograph can be turned into an intimate image the person never agreed to create. For the person targeted, especially a child, the damage can be devastating. The commissioner will have powers to require action against apps and websites predominantly designed and used for generating that material. When serious cyberbullying or adult cyberabuse is reported, the bill reduces the waiting period before the commissioner may intervene in relevant cases from 48 hours to 24 hours. Australians should not have to submit a complaint into a digital black hole and wonder whether anybody has read it.

There is another issue that those opposite have become particularly excited about: sock puppet accounts. It sounds sinister, but in reality these regulated test accounts are rather like mystery shoppers for the internet. If a shop says it checks identification before selling an age restricted product, an inspector can test whether that actually happens.So why should regulators have to accept a technology company's word that its safety systems work? Can an adult profile contact a child through an online game? Can a younger teenager open an account without age checks? How does an AI service respond to attempts to produce abusive images? Those are practical questions. A test account can help answer them.

These provisions allow appropriately regulated testing and provide a pathway for approved researchers to obtain relevant safety data. They are not a licence for government to plant political opinion in people's newsfeeds. They are a means of checking compliance. We do not let companies mark their own homework, and there is no reason to start with big tech.

The coalition has also criticised powers that were removed before this bill was introduced. The proposed ministerial power to add new categories of 'harmful material' was removed. The final bill contains protections for professional news material. It does not establish a general regime for deciding whether political claims are true or false. Those are facts about the legislation before parliament, whatever a petition might suggest. Nor does the duty mean a neighbourhood florist's basic website will be regulated as if it were one of the world's largest social media platforms. The framework is risk based, with minimal obligations intended for low-risk services and guidance to be provided by the eSafety Commissioner. Technology should serve the people who use it, not the other way around. I commend the bill to the House.

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 and to oppose it quite strongly. One of the most fundamental responsibilities of the parliament is to ensure that the laws we pass are clear, properly defined and capable of being applied without political or ideological prejudice. This responsibility becomes particularly important when legislation has the potential to restrict freedom of expression and speech. While we all support protecting children from violence, exploitation and genuinely harmful material online, we must be very careful not to confuse protecting people from harm with protecting them from ideas the government happens to disagree with. Unfortunately, I believe that this is a very real danger with this legislation.

This bill gives unprecedented powers to the government and the eSafety Commissioner, authorising them to make decisions that, to be honest with you, in many cases, should be decisions made by parents, not government. The bill explains a plethora of extremely concerning recommendations. I agree with Senator Henderson's comparison of it with a dog's breakfast. Its intention to protect children is perplexing considering Labor has already imposed restrictions on under-16-year-olds on social media platforms and begs the question: is that legislation a complete and utter failure of Labor once again?

The bill is full of vague phrases and makes restrictions around undefined terms such as 'gender equality', which I'll expand more on shortly. It threatens online social media platforms with penalties of up to $109 million for failing to protect users from online harm, something the bill can't even properly define and something that will be decided by the government of the day. No doubt this will only serve to have a chilling effect on public debate and free speech.

I have real concerns about many proposed sections in this bill, but one of the ones that I find very concerning is proposed section 25E(1)(c), which covers 'material or conduct that encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality'. It seems very reasonable, but the bill doesn't define what 'hostility towards women' or 'gender equality' actually mean. This leaves the scope of the provision unclear and open to broad interpretation.

To better understand my concern, one can turn to the explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill, which, when expanding on section 25E(1)(c), refers to a 'growing proportion of adolescents' expressing 'misogynistic attitudes'. The word 'misogyny', which has an established dictionary meaning of hatred of women, once again, at face value, seems like an appropriate term to describe hostility towards women. But when referring to misogyny, the explanatory memorandum cites a federal government funded study into misogyny conducted by the University of Melbourne that adopts a definition of misogyny developed by feminist academic and activist Kate Manne. It is a definition that broadens the meaning of misogyny dramatically beyond the commonly understood meaning of hatred of women.

Manne's definition of misogyny is less about hatred of women and more about mechanisms that enforce what she describes as 'patriarchal expectations'. Manne describes her new definition of misogyny as aligning with other semantic activism, which is effectively the practice of changing the meaning of words for the purpose of achieving a social engineering goal—in other words, weaponising words in the Left's never-ending culture wars. Manne's analysis of misogyny encompasses concepts such as traditional gender roles and expectations that women provide men with care, sympathy and attention. That women caring for men—and indeed men caring for women—can be considered as a form of misogyny is clearly outside what Australians ordinarily understand as hatred of women.

Of course, any disagreement with any of the many and varied forms of feminism is considered misogynistic also and therefore hostile to women. If this broader concept informs the interpretation of hostile attitudes towards women, serious questions arise about section 25E(1)(c)'s reach as it relates to online content teaching children about a pro-life view of the world, including that human life begins at conception. Will this section also prohibit online teaching that a man and a woman are determined by biological sex? These are all captured by this definition of misogyny.

This bill needs to address these serious matters of violence against women and men, which is something we all support. But this certainly adds many questions. The bill's failure to define gender equality raises questions about how the term will be interpreted, particularly in the light of the government's approach, which places an emphasis on disadvantages experienced by women while being blind to the serious disadvantages faced by men. I suspect that this government doesn't actually know what gender equality really means. For example, the government's main policy document on gender equality is clearly titled Gender Equality (Working for Women). Its first objective is addressing gender based violence. Whilst we should all be concerned about violence towards women, the strategy does not address the fact that the vast majority of victims of violence are male.

As a former police officer, I have a very good understanding of violence and domestic violence. And as a father and grandfather of five girls I feel we need to address violence against females. But I also know that to achieve equality we need to understand that men can be and all too often are the victims of violence. Official Australian Institute of Criminology statistics show that males have consistently accounted for a substantial majority of homicides in Australia. From 1989 to 2025, on average, approximately 70 per cent of homicides had male victims. Australia's 2024-25 domestic violence homicide data showed that male victims are a substantial group also. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's domestic homicide analysis shows that, of the reported 98 domestic homicide victims, over half—49—were male. Where Labor's gender equality policy does mention male victims, it states, 'Men are also victims of men's violence,' which is obviously true but ignores the significant number of female offenders. The same Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2024 domestic homicide data for intimate partner homicide showed that approximately 30 per cent of offenders were female, and police data shows similar rates for offending for domestic violence assaults. That's a third.

These figures support a response to male victims and female offending alongside efforts to address male perpetration and violence against women. With glaring inconsistencies in the government's interpretation of equality, it's fair to ask: when the government is using the term 'gender equality' in legislation, what does it actually mean? While I've spoken a lot about the bill's reference to gender equality and misogyny, the bill's ultimate flaw is that it grants extraordinary powers to the government and eSafety Commissioner, forces companies to regulate an extensively complicated and undefined mess and takes away responsibility and accountability of both parents and individuals. The government should never be awarded these sweeping powers to censor what someone has access to, because it appears that what they consider safe or harmful is completely subjective.

I understand the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of her speech for incorporation into Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. In this House on Monday, Helen Haines's husband, Phil, asked for us to ensure that the horrific attack she endured last week would mean something. The attack on our dear colleague last week brought into sharp focus the toxicity of online environments and the abuse and threats that not only politicians but Australians across the country are facing every day. It shone a spotlight on the intentional stoking of online outrage, grievance and anger by AI algorithms that are designed to drive profits for the tech bro billionaires. Quite simply, outrage sells. This growing online rage is dividing our nation and our communities. As this culture of abusive rhetoric becomes increasingly normalised online, it's now spilling out into the real world. Vulnerable people, people with mental ill health, are being radicalised with a rapidity never before seen and at younger and younger ages. This is not healthy for individuals, and it is not healthy for our nation. As Phil Haines said, we have a choice right now. We can choose to inflame this toxic rhetoric or tame it.

So the introduction and debate of this bill is extremely timely. It presents a critical opportunity to protect Australians from the growing harms of an increasingly toxic and harmful digital world. It is our opportunity to finally hold big tech accountable and put the wellbeing of Australians ahead of the profits of some of the most powerful multinational tech companies in the world. Quite disingenuously, the coalition and One Nation will try to argue that this bill is about restricting freedom of speech and expression. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is, in fact, about putting the power and choice back in the hands of Australians. And, at its heart, this bill is about prevention of harm to Australians. It would place a duty of care on digital platforms to identify and reduce foreseeable online harms. It would require platforms to take reasonable steps to safeguard their users with stronger protections for children and young people. It would also give Australians greater control over what appears in their social media feeds. Importantly, it would strengthen the powers of the eSafety Commissioner and introduce penalties for companies that fail to meet their obligations.

These are important reforms, and I welcome them, but we must ensure this legislation is as strong as possible and does in practice what it is intended to do. For too long we have allowed the big tech companies to operate unfettered and without boundaries we would expect of all other industries. We would never accept children's toys or bikes, for example, being sold without proper safety standards. Yet we've allowed social media platforms into our homes, our schools and our children's bedrooms without demanding the same duty of care. Research shows that 63 per cent of Australian children aged 10 to 17 years were exposed to harmful online content in the previous year and 74 per cent have been exposed at some point in their lives. Exposure to cyberbullying, online abuse, self-harm content and other harmful material is recognised by the eSafety Commissioner and mental health experts as a risk factor contributing to youth mental ill health and suicide risk.

Too often it is shock, outrage and anger that keeps us engaged, so that is what the tech bro algorithms serve up constantly. I see it firsthand. This toxic online culture is getting worse, and it's becoming normalised. People talk in a way they would never do face-to-face. A quick look at my own Facebook page is case in point. Comments say: 'Bullshit clown', 'Look at you. All stupid and shit', 'Stupid bitch'. These are just a handful of the comments I, and so many others here in this House, receive on a regular basis. As a member of parliament, I accept that public scrutiny and robust debate are an important and crucial part of this job. Freedom of political expression is fundamental to our democracy, and we must defend the right to disagree. But intimidation, harassment and abuse should never be the price of participating in public life. It weakens our democracy. Research commissioned by Women for Election found that nine out of 10 female politicians and candidates had received abusive threats online, including those of a sexual nature. Of course, this has a chilling impact on our democracy. Freedom of speech does not mean tech companies should have a free pass to amplify abuse and division for profit.

This bill is not about suppressing legitimate debate or unpopular opinions. It's about making big tech responsible for the systems they design and the harms they can prevent. Nowhere is this responsibility more important than when it comes to our children. Parents across my electorate of Mackellar are deeply concerned about the impact of social media on their kids, and, yes, they're still getting around the limits. A mother of a young girl wrote to me recently. She said she was horrified by the onslaught of violent and misogynistic content across social media, and how these key messages feed back into our community and our schools. Her concern is one I hear repeatedly. Parents are worried about what their children are seeing online. Many children can circumvent that 16-year-old limit and find themselves immersed in an online world that is uncensored and harmful.

We know that young people who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems, including symptoms of depression and anxiety. We know that harmful content, unhealthy comparisons, cyberbullying and sleep disruption can and do affect young people's wellbeing. We know that algorithms can repeatedly expose vulnerable users to material that reinforces their insecurities. Prevention must be at the heart of our response.

Very recent research from the eSafety Commissioner shows that almost 50 per cent of Australian kids have been exposed to offensive, sexist or hurtful content about women and girls, fight videos, dangerous challenges, content encouraging unhealthy eating or exercise, and hate based content targeting identity groups. In 2024, researchers from the University College London examined how TikTok's algorithms delivered misogynistic content to accounts modelled on teenage boys. They found that, after just five days, misogynistic content increased from 13 per cent to 56 per cent of recommended videos. The boys were not necessarily searching for hatred towards women. Some accounts began with interest in fitness, self-improvement or loneliness, but the algorithms increasingly directed them towards content built around anger and resentment towards women. This is deeply disturbing because it demonstrates that young people do not have to actively seek out harmful content to be exposed to it. I have two sons, and, like many parents, I don't want them logging on to social media to watch sports highlights or fitness videos only to be automatically exposed to content that demeans women or promotes harmful ideas about masculinity. This is particularly concerning because adolescence is the time when young people are forming their identities and are highly susceptible to influence. They are learning what healthy relationships look like and developing their understanding of respect, consent and equality.

The consequences of harmful content do not stay on our screens. A recent study conducted by the University of Melbourne found that young men are more likely to hold hostile attitudes to women. Amongst other alarming findings, it found that 24.7 per cent of teenage boys believe that feminism is damaging to society and should be resisted with violence if necessary. Toxic and extreme attitudes are becoming increasingly normalised online and are now spilling into our real-world interactions, including in schools and in classrooms. This is not just an online safety issue anymore. This bill is also about preventing abuse of and violence against women.

We're also seeing the devastating consequences of so-called nudify apps. These AI-powered tools can turn an ordinary photograph of a young person into a sexually explicit image without their knowledge or consent. Girls and young women are overwhelmingly the targets. These images are being used to humiliate, bully, harass and even blackmail children, with devastating consequences for their mental health. In 2025, Australia's eSafety Commissioner took action against nudify services attracting around 100,000 visits a month from Australians. These services had been used to create sexually explicit deepfakes of Australian schoolchildren. This technology is facilitating sexual abuse, and we have a duty to ensure that these companies prevent these types of harm.

The government's proposed My Feed, My Way reforms are a welcome step, allowing people to choose between algorithmically recommended content and the content from the people and pages they choose to follow. Algorithmically recommended content should be opt-in, not opt-out. This is especially important for young people. We cannot expect a child to understand how a sophisticated recommendation system is shaping their emotions, interests and beliefs, and we should not put the entire burden on parents to fight algorithms developed by some of the world's most powerful technology companies.

We must also confront the addictive nature of social media. These platforms are not designed to simply entertain us. Many are deliberately designed to keep us coming back. Infinite scrolling means there is never a natural point to stop. Autoplay delivers the next video before we have decided whether we want to watch it, and notifications draw us back into the app. Likes and comments encourage us to keep checking. There are striking similarities between these techniques and the psychological mechanisms used in poker machines. We regulate poker machines because we understand the dangers of their design and intention. Why should we ignore those same risks with digital platforms? We should not wait until harm has occurred before we act.

Then there's the prolific and violent pornography that our sons and young men are frequently being delivered by AI algorithms and exposed to day in, day out. This has led young people to believe that strangulation is a normal part of sexual relations. This had devastating consequences in my electorate of Mackellar not long ago, with the tragic loss of a beautiful young life recently. Also increasingly commonplace is anoxic brain injury.

The organisation It's time we talked has spent almost two decades working to prevent the harms of pornography on children and young people. It warns of the growing normalisation of sexual strangulation. Amplified messages on social media that portray dangerous sexual practices are contributing to this normalisation. It's time we talked are seeing the consequences of the large-scale promotion of gender inequality, sexual aggression and violence. They are calling for stronger action to prevent the normalisation of harmful sexual practices. They want a regulator with the authority and the tools to hold digital platforms accountable. I support that call. We cannot allow engagement algorithms to help normalise dangerous behaviour while companies evade responsibility for foreseeable risks, and we cannot continue to treat the online world as though it's disconnected from the real one.

But strong obligations must also come with strong accountability. Australians need access to free and independent external dispute resolution when digital platforms fail them. While the bill provides for stronger internal complaints and dispute resolution processes, an internal complaints process alone is not enough. For many Australians, dealing with a large digital platform can feel like shouting into the void. Accounts are hacked, businesses are locked out of platforms they rely on and harmful content is reported but not removed. Complaints are met with automated responses, endless online forms or no meaningful response at all. And when the platform fails to resolve the problem, where does the consumer turn? Too often there's nowhere to go. We should expand the jurisdiction of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to cover the digital world. The TIO is an established and trusted scheme. Expanding this model would give Australians a practical avenue for redress, and I will be moving amendments to that effect.

Today's bill is about the kind of world we want to create both online and outside—one where teenagers are manipulated by addictive designs built by teams of engineers or behavioural experts, one where people cannot be targeted simply because outrage, division and engagement are profitable and one where we can engage respectfully and robustly in debate without doing harm. We have a responsibility right now to Helen, to Phil and to all Australians. This is our duty of care, and we must uphold it.

I move the amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "House" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

", whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading:

(1) notes that:

(a) people, small businesses and community organisations need an accessible and affordable avenue for redress when they are in dispute with large digital platforms, including where their accounts are suspended or terminated, or they are otherwise adversely affected by a platform's decisions or conduct;

(b) an independent ombudsman is needed to provide accessible, independent and effective dispute resolution for users of online services; and

(c) there is strong support for expanding the remit of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to cover digital platforms, including from the public, consumer advocates, legal and community organisations, academics and parliamentarians; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) require appropriate online service providers, as determined by a legislative instrument, to join and abide by an External Dispute Resolution scheme operated by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman; and

(b) expand the remit of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to establish an Online Services Ombudsman, providing independent, accessible and effective dispute resolution for users of digital services".

Is the amendment seconded?

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Every parent wants to believe that when they send their child out into the world, that child will be safe. Every parent knows the fear of not being able to protect them from everything the world might throw at them. That used to mean waiting with bated breath on the porch, as the sun came down, for them to ride in on their bike. But the world our children are growing up in has changed. Their lives extend far beyond the school gate, the local park or the sidelines of a weekend sport.

The online world is now woven into how children learn, socialise and come to understand themselves, who they are and the world around them. But that connection comes with risks. Through social media, online games and other digital platforms, children can be exposed to harmful content, online bullying and dangerous influences that can affect their safety and wellbeing. It has quietly slipped into their pockets and into their bedrooms. We cannot leave parents on the digital front line to fight by themselves.

The companies that design and profit from these platforms must take responsibility for the harm their services can cause. If big tech can spend billions of dollars to get you hooked on an algorithm that keeps you coming back for more, it is not too much to ask for those same companies to keep you safe from harm. The question is not whether children should be able to participate in the digital world. It is whether the companies shaping that world should be required to take greater responsibility for the harm their services can cause. If you build it, you have to be responsible for it. The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 builds on our social media minimum age reforms by setting clearer expectations for online services, requiring them to take a more proactive approach to safety and giving Australians greater choice over their online experiences.

I think about this issue not only as a member of parliament, but also as a parent. My daughter is three years old. She is at an age when the world is full of things to discover every day—questions to ask and new experiences to explore. Like any parent, I want her to grow up with the freedom to learn, to make friends, to develop her interests and to find her own place in this world and in this country. I also want her to grow up in a society that takes her safety seriously. Technology will continue to change, and the online world she encounters as a teenager will almost certainly look different from the one that we know today. I hope that is because of a Labor government introducing a digital duty of care.

We have the opportunity to set a clear standard for the world that she'll grow up in. Companies that profit from digital services must take responsibility for the harm they cause. This is not a new concept at all. In the 18th and 19th centuries, unscrupulous bakers used to put chalk and sawdust in bread to thicken it out—to make more of it. That doesn't happen anymore, and it doesn't happen because we have standards, because there are rules and because those who made the bread needed to be accountable for it. We see those standards in every facet of our lives, from cars to manufacturing and retail.

This is the extension of that into the digital world. These platforms are not neutral spaces that live in a vacuum. Companies make decisions about what appears in a feed, what gets recommended next, how long people are encouraged to stay online and how easily they can report abuse. Those decisions shape people's experiences. Harmful material can affect how young people see themselves and others. Features that encourage prolonged engagement can interfere with sleep, and online bullying can follow a child beyond that school gate; it can follow them home. Adults, too, can experience threats, harassment and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. These are not problems that can be solved simply by telling people to log off. That's not how the world works. We need to address the risks at their source, where digital platforms have the capacity to prevent harm.

This government has shown that it's prepared to act. In December last year, the Albanese Labor government introduced Australia's social media minimum age law, setting a minimum age of 16 for accounts on covered platforms. Since then, more than five million underage accounts have been removed, restricted or deactivated. A YouGov survey earlier this year found encouraging figures among 13- to 15-year-olds. Thirty per cent reported more time playing sport, 27 per cent reported better sleep, online bullying was down by nine per cent, and exposure to inappropriate and violent content fell by 18 per cent. You don't have to listen to what is happening; it's there in the numbers.

These results ask us to answer a bigger question: what kind of childhood do we want our children to have in Australia? One where they face constant threats from an ever-present digital world? Or one where they have more time to play, better sleep and less exposure to harm? The social media minimum-age law was an important first step. But protecting young Australians online means going further than just setting that age limit. We must also address how digital services operate, the content they promote and the features they use to keep people engaged. The eSafety Commissioner is already investigating whether major platforms are meeting their existing obligations. We must ensure that those obligations are enforced while building on that work to make online services safer by design, day by day. That is the next step: a digital duty of care that requires digital services to take greater responsibility for preventing harm.

The purpose of this bill is pretty straightforward. The bill will establish basic safety standards for online services, including social media platforms, online games and AI chatbots. Services will have a positive obligation to protect Australians from seriously harmful and illegal material and conduct and to protect people under 18 from material conduct and features that are harmful to young people. The bill shifts that focus towards prevention, stopping harm in its tracks before it becomes a reality.

Providers will need to assess risks associated with their service's features and put systems in place to prevent harm, including through annual risk assessments. In other words, companies should not have to wait until someone is harmed before asking whether a feature is safe. They should be considering those risks when they design their services and when they decide how those services should work. What is the impact on our young people? What is the impact on people streaming on their services? We expect manufacturers to consider product risks and to act when they identify those problems. Digital services should not be exempt from that basic principle that has been around for a very long time. The bill strengthens protections for young Australians against content that promotes eating disorders, glorifies crime or dangerous stunts, causes serious distress, or encourages hostility towards women and gender equality.

We want young Australians to learn, connect and participate online, but not at any cost, and not in an environment where harmful material circulates without safeguards, where seatbelts have never been required to be installed. The bill also addresses design features that can encourage children to stay online late into the night and to lose sleep. This is not about eliminating every risk; it is about requiring technology companies to take reasonable, proactive steps to reduce the harm that we know is happening.

The bill also empowers the eSafety Commissioner to take action against apps and websites that are predominantly designed or used to generate fake nude material. These so-called nudify services can be used to create intimate images of people without their consent. The consequences for those targeted can be deeply distressing. Services designed to facilitate this kind of abuse shouldn't be able to operate without meaningful consequences. The bill reduces the required response time for cyberbullying and abuse complaints from 48 hours to 24 hours and empowers the eSafety Commissioner to set minimum standards for platforms' internal complaints and dispute-resolution processes. It also allows the commissioner to use covert accounts to test compliance and enables university accredited researchers to access online safety data. This helps assess services' performance rather than relying solely on what the companies say.

The bill is also about giving people more choice. Through the My Feed, My Way initiative, social media services will be required to give Australians aged 16 and over a choice about the primary feed they seek. People will be able to choose a feed based on the pages and the people they follow, rather than relying only on algorithmically recommended material. Those who prefer personalised recommendations should also have choices about what they see. In my household, my partner, Mark, doesn't tell me what I can watch on television. Why should I let Mark Zuckerberg tell me what I can scroll on my phone if I don't want to? This is not about the government deciding what adults should think, what they should read or what they should watch. It is about giving people greater control over their online experience while requiring services to take responsibility for serious harm. In short, this ain't about freedom of speech; it's about freedom from harm.

Obligations mean nothing if there are no consequences for failing to meet them. Under this bill, failure to comply with the digital duty of care can attract penalties of up to $109.2 million. That is substantial—and appropriately so. Online safety obligations are serious legal responsibilities because they not only affect our kids, our young people and every Australian but impact on our society as a whole. At the same time, strong safety standards must have clear boundaries. The government has listened to concerns raised during consultation and made changes to the bill. Protecting people from serious harm is not the same as censoring legitimate debate. There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinion and threatening someone with violence, just as there is a difference between lawful discussion and the non-consensual creation of intimate images. We can uphold freedom of expression while requiring companies to take reasonable steps to address those serious risks. For the bill itself, as it progresses, we should consider genuine improvements constructively while keeping its purpose in view.

The question is whether we are prepared to establish reasonable standards and hold big tech accountable. I believe that we are right to do so. Australians have strengthened safety standards in workplaces; we've strengthened safety standards in cars and in everyday products. The social media minimum age law was an important step in online safety, and the digital duty of care is the next. It puts Australia at the forefront, as a world leader in this space, and we watch as the rest of the globe looks to us for that leadership. It will require online platforms to assess risks, prevent harm, protect young people, respond quicker to complaints and give users greater choice. Most importantly, it makes clear that responsibility for online safety cannot rest with parents alone. We must hold the companies creating these platforms to account.

I will start with a quote from political philosopher John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government in 1690, he said:

… the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom …

The bill before us, the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, seeks to introduce a digital duty of care which will require online service providers to deliver a safe online environment that takes effective measures and manages the design features of their services with the goal to effectively provide protection from serious harm and illegal material and conduct such as terrorist or child sexual exploitation material. I would say there is already statute with respect to illegal material—terrorist and child sexual exploitation material. It also seeks to provide protection for Australian children from harmful material and conduct and harmful design features. Again, I would say there's already legislation that's supposed to protect children and they're not actually supposed to even be online until they're older than 16.

I do appreciate that the government is trying to address some of the awful behaviour that does happen online. It's antisocial in many cases. Even on posts that are about people letting a room in their house, you'll see a litany of comments, with people making all sorts of absurd comments. Often they actually don't even read the original post. But the question is: do we legislate for that in here? I would say no, and I would say we can't.

I would like to keep this debate and my contribution quite dry. I'm going to look at what various learned legal professionals have said and not go down the emotive path that many in here have done with this. I understand that they come from a different place on this. However, I've reviewed the submission of the Law Council of Australia regarding this exposure draft and they say that:

The Law Council acknowledges concerns about online harms that may impact mental health and wellbeing. Certain forms of online content, online abuse, image-based abuse, algorithmic amplification and self-harm-related content can contribute to adverse mental health outcomes, particularly for children and other vulnerable persons.

But they then state that:

… any reforms in this area must consider and have regard to potentially competing rights, such as freedom of expression.

While proposed subsection 233(1) of the act has been retained, which makes explicit that the act does not apply to the extent, if any, that it would infringe on any constitutional doctrine of implied freedom of political communication, there is no proposal for freedom of expression or similar to be included as a consideration in the administration of the act. Freedoms of expression are not included in the objects of the act, which the Law Council see as an important addition. This is the cornerstone of our democracy and this must be at the forefront of all of our thoughts.

While ministerial discretion to extend the definition of material or conduct that is seriously harmful or harmful to children has been omitted from the bill as introduced and that material or conduct may be extended only by return to the parliament, the definitions of harmful material or conduct are sufficiently vague and broad to engender concern. The Law Council of Australia says of the exposure draft that:

While at face value, the material and conduct referred to at section 25C could reasonably be regarded as seriously harmful, we are concerned that there are instances where the drafting could result in unintended consequences.

To me, the words 'unintended consequences' should strike fear in all of us. It is not the position of this place to create unintended consequences.

I note the bill as introduced now addresses the Law Council of Australia's concerns that the definition of 'seriously harmful material and conduct' could capture services that publish material for legitimate journalistic, legal, educational or other public interest purposes at least in part through proposed section 25F on excluded material. The Law Council proposes that the definition of 'seriously harmful material and conduct' link materials to an existing criminal offence, which would provide greater certainty in determining whether it's appropriate. It said:

Section 25D lists a range of content that is deemed to be material and conduct harmful to children. Similar to the above reflections on section 25C, while few would argue that the core content listed has the potential to be harmful to children, there is a need to ensure that definitions are sufficiently targeted and clear.

The Law Council broadly supports the requirement for providers to undertake periodic risk assessments but suggests that the legislation be clarified to direct assessments towards identifying risks that could undermine a safe online environment or otherwise expose children to harm. Again, I'll just remind the House that we have already passed legislation which means that children shouldn't actually even be on any social media.

A requirement to identify all reasonable foreseeable risks is also very broad. In support of a risk based and proportionate approach to compliance, the legislation should make clear that the nature and extent of a risk assessment should be appropriate, having regard to the nature, size, complexity, functionality, reach and risk profile of the relevant service. Smaller businesses that are only minor participants within the online services ecosystem and have limited ability to influence broader online harms should not be subject to the same compliance expectations as large platforms with substantial user bases, sophisticated functionality and significant control over user interactions.

Today, I met with small business representatives from across the country who are seeing businesses around them fail due to reduced earnings and increased regulatory burden. The last thing that they need for their basic outward-facing website with a contact form is to have to do another risk assessment or, worse still, pay someone to perform it and then maintain the records for many years. The Law Council of Australia proposes guidelines that provide safe-harbour protections for low risk small businesses, and this is an idea that I would like to see adopted.

Finally, the Law Council has stated, in relation to the creation of accounts for research and data access, sock puppet accounts, that, while the bill does contain some safeguards, proposed section 205C permits but does not require the data access rules to address the kinds of data that may be accessed or the privacy, security or confidentiality of that data. As the scheme could involve access to personal or sensitive information, minimum safeguards should be established in the primary legislation. The bill does not establish limits on the number or frequency of data requests, and, although these matters could be addressed in the data access rules, repeated or technically complex requests may impose an undue administrative burden on smaller service providers.

I'd just like to go to this whole sock puppets idea. Really? What on earth are we thinking? This is just Big Brother on steroids. It's just mental that we would give a government department the power to then create all these fake accounts to then try and impersonate themselves as fake people online to try and capture where they think that there's harm being done.

I'd like to mention comments from Leanne Ho. She's pro bono partner at Wotton Kearney. She stated in the Law Society Journal online in, in an article titled 'What if the Harm is More to Democracy or Social Cohesion? Is that Protected?':

Australia doesn't have a Human Rights Act nor a Digital Services Act, like the one in the European Union, where the risks identified in the draft Bill are already recognised under their human rights framework.

And she says:

"So, this creates risks on the community side because the Bill is very much centred on safety rather than human rights so you could have a situation where, depending on the government of the day and the kinds of views that are represented … democratic rights and freedoms could actually be at risk …

I go to the Business Council of Australia. They recommend changes to ensure the framework is clear, proportionate and focuses on those providers which can control online safety risks, set clear statutory boundaries, make compliance and risk assessments proportionate, define harm better, set core obligations in legislation and proportionate enforcement and regulatory safeguards.

My view in where we are with this? I think it's self-evident that children and vulnerable people should be protected from online harm and radicalism. There are, sometimes, illegal acts that are online that are put out for other people to view, but we already have criminal charges on the statute, both on the Commonwealth and in individual states, to address this. In fact, in some states, there's a separate offence for filming and then uploading such crimes. The government has already legislated social media minimum age restrictions. That should already be providing protection for children under 16 years of age. However, we've already seen that, while the government says it's very successful, many others say it's not successful.

I would also like to say, if the government are so concerned about harm, why have they avoided implementing the Murphy report recommendation which we have? We know about the harms with respect to online gambling. If the government is so concerned about people's algorithms and protecting them from their algorithms, why don't we just do an education piece about how on, say, Twitter, you can pick to follow either the For You page, where the online platform determines your algorithms, or a 'Following' page or you could even just have your favourites page and then you just get that? I understand that's the same on Twitter. I'm not sure about all of the other online platforms, but really maybe it's more of an education piece.

The definition of harm, I believe, in this bill is far too subjective. It's broad, and what I consider harmful may not be considered harmful by somebody on the other side of the chamber. This bill also places considerable burden on small businesses, which have already suffered enough this year. They've suffered economically. They've had a massive downturn, many of them. We've had so many businesses close, and they now have new taxes on them that were never mentioned at the election and that were sprung on all of us at the budget. This is burdening them with more compliance that I believe is unforgivable.

So let's take the emotion out of this debate. Let's look at the legislation before us. This bill gives too much power to the eSafety Commissioner. I do not believe there are enough legislative guardrails. For me, this is less about harm and more about the control of adults and their behaviours and actions that are technically not illegal. On that principle, I cannot support this bill.

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.