Right here. The Albanese Labor government has circulated the most onerous, terrifying bill presented to parliament this century. The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 exposure draft gives the government power to censor not just social media but the entire internet, using powers that exceed anything available anywhere in the world. The bill enacts a new statutory digital duty of care which would impose a proactive obligation on a broad range of online service providers to protect users from so-called harm. These include every social media platform; every communication platform, like Signal and WhatsApp; search engines including Google and Bing; app stores like Apple and Google Play; hosting services, meaning every website, every web-hosting company, in Australia, covering every website in Australia; code-hosting sites like GitHub; cloud services like Cloudflare; telcos including Telstra, Optus and Aussie Broadband; software like Oracle, Adobe, HubSpot, SAP and Monday—it's a bloody long list; AI systems like Grok, Claude and ChatGPT; any and every site that generates or edits pictures or videos; and other designated internet services—a catch-all for anything you guys forgot. And, wait for it, it includes equipment suppliers for internet hardware, including routers, servers, desktop computers, laptops and internet enabled phones. Worse, it can extend to BIOS or software updates on your computer which can be used to block websites, words or phrases at machine level. Even anonymous platforms like Tails will be caught up in this bill, which intends to give Australian citizens nowhere to hide from the eSafety commissar's quest for power.

What does a digital duty of care look like? The bill requires any person responsible for an online service to 'ensure, so far as is reasonably practical, a safe online environment'. This has three elements. All persons are protected from a variety of harms, including harassment. This has a legal meaning from general criminal law which would exclude a single critical post, although a pattern of critical posts from one person or one person participating in a campaign of critical posts from others would breach this section—one person. If the eSafety commissar or commissioner writes guidelines stating that certain political discussions or hostile online discourse creates an environment ripe for harassment, tech companies are legally forced to react and ban the user, group or topic—topic! This gives the eSafety commissar sweeping powers to defend approved government opinions, voter blocs or movements, while slapping down anyone critical of the government.

Secondly, children attract broader protections, including any material or behaviour capable of inflicting serious harm—capable of inflicting harm in the judgement of the eSafety commissar, the arbiter. There is no place for intent, let alone causing actual harm. 'Capable' is the new, low threshold. It's absurd.

Thirdly, it covers harms arising from platform design. These can flow from material or conduct. This includes infinity scrolling, which is the one thing in the bill One Nation would like to see removed from social media.

In fairness, I say the digital duty of care is not absolute. The 'reasonably practical' qualifier, which largely reflects principles from workplace safety legislation, requires weighing up all relevant matters, including the likelihood and degree of harm; what's known or ought reasonably to be known about the risk; the availability of mitigation measures and the cost of those measures; or the impact on user privacy, including whether that cost or impact would be grossly disproportionate to the risk. Exemptions—the duty does not require platforms to police or take action regarding lawful communications occurring in private solely between consenting adults. This ensures end-to-end encrypted messaging services or standard private adult emails are not forced to actively monitor private conversations for general harmful content.

The bill does include the word adult, meaning a digital ID will be necessary to prove you are an adult before allowing you to have a chat or email chain without monitoring from the government, so you have a digital ID to get away from monitoring. These things are private anyway. What does it matter what you say amongst friends? Apparently, it does to this Labor government. When the government is provided with this much power with no suitable checks and balances, abuse will occur.

Now, we get to another terrifying aspect of the Albanese government's digital duty of care. Section 205G to 205K of the bill allow the government to create fake accounts called sock puppets or liar puppets that appear to be a person yet are in fact a government run account. These clauses allow the eSafety commissar and approved researchers to assume false or fictitious online identities.

A point of order—the senator has referred to the eSafety Commissioner in the incorrect way a number of times. I thought you were mispronouncing it, but I think you're being quite deliberate, and I think that he should refrain from doing that.

The eSafety Commissioner is not a protected person in terms of the standing orders, so there's no point of order.

These clauses allow the eSafety commissar and approved researchers to assume false or fictitious online identities; use AI to make up images, videos or memes; post under the fake names; and watch what happens—in other words, all the things they ban you from doing. The exposure draft states that the eSafety commissar's testing powers operate without limitation. There's no mechanism requiring eSafety to seek an independent warrant before deploying fake accounts nor is there a statutory requirement to publicly report on how many liar identities they operate, what they said, who they impersonated or whose images they deepfake—nothing. This provision will allow the government to make any claim, promote any agenda and attack any person, party or idea without consequence. The only limit to fraudulent identities is the provisional liar accounts can't do something which is a criminal offence. How reassuring.

The bill explicitly states that this authority applies despite anything to the contrary in other federal, state or territory privacy and identity laws. This is despite section 3 of the Privacy Act 1988 explicitly stating federal law is not intended to exclude or limit the operation of state or territory laws that protect personal information, provided those laws can operate concurrently with it. Section 109 of the federal Constitution provides, where the state law is stricter than the Commonwealth law, the state law generally applies, except now where the government is impersonating people to sway public opinion.

Section 25C of the act provides the minister with the power to add anything she wants to the list of harms and then require the eSafety commissar to have that removed from the internet. There's no guidance at all on the use of this power. It's a blank cheque. The minister's decisions under this section are under a legislative instrument. Woe betide Australia if a government ever gets a majority in both houses again. This is terrifying. The UK shows how this provision can be used to eliminate political dissent. In two years, 19,883 UK residents, almost 20,000, have been arrested for saying things on the internet the government did not like. Examples of this so-called hate speech include 11 Britons tracked down and arrested for abusing England players in the World Cup for missing penalties only for abusing black skinned players, abusing white skinned players was considered just fine. This is an example of the single post and company rule I mentioned earlier. A woman was arrested for posting rap lyrics that included the N-word, despite her not having any ill intent. She posted song lyrics for goodness sake. That N-word is ubiquitous in rap, yet, on social media, it's hate speech. Graham Lineham was arrested for saying trans men are still men, which is true. This is where legislation like this always ends up: in policing thought and opinion, rather than worrying about actual harm.

Our major defence ally, the United States, expressed concern. In a communique issued on 22 September, it said, as to the exposure draft:

A framework that empowers governments to enforce vague definitions of "harm" risks becoming a mechanism for viewpoint-based censorship …

The United States nails this reason for this bill: viewpoint based censorship. Their concerns are threefold. Firstly, this is a mechanism of overcensorship, which pre-emptively censors free speech. Secondly, it explicitly warns that such a framework risks reducing the reach of independent journalists and alternative voices. Thirdly, the White House registered its strong opposition to foreign measures that result in the extraterritorial censorship of protected speech.

You all laughed when One Nation said we were heading down the same path as Communist China. Now look: according to the Supreme People's Court public blacklists, 23 million Chinese are now non-persons, unable to access the internet or public transport or leave the country. Five million people have their employment, their income and their spending limited, under the control of the state.

Meanwhile, most of the companies caught up in this power grab are out there taking care of business, thinking Australia is a democracy, blissfully unaware of our descent from democracy to totalitarian communism in just four years. Four years—that's all it took.

Never in the history of humanity has a ruler had this level of power—never. One Nation strongly opposes this bill. In government, we will repeal it.