Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the minister's explanation.

We are now three months and two High Court cases into the social media ban, and it all seems to be going swimmingly. The kids are out there kicking the footy, youth in regional and rural areas have been cut off from their online support networks and there has been a spike of young people ringing Kids Helpline as a direct consequence of this ban. In fact, headspace have said that one in 10 young people have cited the ban as a factor in their seeking mental health support.

In January, we saw the tastefully delayed figure of 4.7 million accounts paraded in triumph throughout the broadsheets and tabloids of this country that had campaigned so forcefully for this law. Since that number has come out, many questions have been raised about the accuracy of the government's data. According to the AFR, it included inactive accounts, duplicate accounts and accounts the users had already closed. Senator Dean Smith, like many of us, has been interested in the origin of this figure, but the government has not complied with his order for the production of documents, and eSafety has not released platform by platform data that we have requested.

I was reading an interesting paper by the former Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans. In a 2008 paper entitled 'The Senate, Accountability and Government Control' he wrote:

In the Parliament of 2001-04, there were 89 orders and more than half of them, 46, were not complied with. The reasons given by the government for not producing documents came to be increasingly remote from any recognisable claim of public interest immunity, and often consisted of simple assertions that documents were confidential and off-hand dismissals of the non-government parties' interests in the information.

It seems there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to governments that are determined to be secretive, even when it means defying the Senate and the powers granted to it under section 49 of our Constitution.

Everyone's got a story of how their little cousin got around the social media ban or how they didn't get kicked off at all. Even if the ban worked and kids under 16 all had their accounts taken away, they can still go on YouTube and watch brainrot shorts, and they can still go on Discord and get bullied and groomed.

Consider the opening sentence in an article in WAtoday from January:

Underage Snapchat users are verifying their accounts by scanning the faces of people who are decades older and of a different gender, exposing a major loophole in the Albanese government's signature policy.

This is one of the many issues that will be considered during the two-year longitudinal survey of the social media ban. This is the very same survey that eSafety has said will cost nearly $1½ million. Why didn't they work out these problems before putting the ban in place? I mean, you wouldn't have to pay me $1.46 million to know that this wasn't going to work. It was obvious at the time that this would happen. This wasn't a considered, refined policy, and it wasn't even a policy made on the run. It was just the government having vibes to ban social media. It was an idea designed to prey on the fears of parents, even though any considered analysis threw up series of questions the government has never had to answer and has never had an answer to.

So how did the government address this? It stopped the analysis from occurring. Like Alex Jones, this government is conducting information warfare to stymie this chamber's ability to scrutinise its activities. In his 2019 speech entitled 'Labor and democracy', the Prime Minister said:

Building a better future for our country starts with a full-blooded assault on the culture of fear, censorship and denial that the Morrison Government is trying to foist upon us.

The assault on the Morrison culture never happened; the culture was simply put under new management.