David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I firstly want to associate myself with the contribution from my colleague Senator Hanson-Young. I think she hit the nail on the head in her take-down of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, an incredibly inappropriate and rushed piece of legislation. Let's call it out for what it is. This is a deeply flawed and dangerous proposal by people who appear to have never been on the internet or met a teenager. It's a bill to appease Rupert Murdoch and the news stable, and its implementation, if we ever get that far, will be a hot mess. This is the kind of legislation that's brought to the parliament by a prime minister and a bunch of people in Labor and the opposition who get their staff to print their emails out for them. That's the legislation we've got before us.

The evidence against it is literally overwhelming. We have child mental health experts who say that this could dangerously isolate many kids who use social media to find essential support at particular times when they need it. We have IT and government specialists who say that it cannot work. We have privacy advocates who are saying that this will reach into the privacy of everybody who engages in social media, not just kids but adults. We have human rights organisations who are pretty much all united in opposition to this law. We have government agencies, like the OAIC, who say, 'Don't do this.' It's an extraordinarily broad alliance of people. I can't really recall such a kind of united breadth of opposition to legislation that Labor and the coalition, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, both whose names start with Mr, are joining together to ram through with a sham inquiry in the last few hours of parliamentary sitting this year.

Why are those people—the mental health experts, IT and government specialists, privacy advocates and human rights organisations—all joining together to oppose this legislation? Because this policy will hurt vulnerable young people the most, especially in regional communities and especially in LGBTQI communities, by cutting them off from the support that they need and the support that they can sometimes only get on social media. To be clear: it has not worked anywhere in the world where these kinds of thought bubbles have grown and then popped. So why are we ramming it through with so little scrutiny here? Why does the Albanese Labor government suddenly want to work on absolutely everything with Mr Peter Dutton?