MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator GHOSH (Western Australia) (16:47): The significance of the problem that's been identified—the horrific and repugnant material that exists online and is often fed to people in our society, including young people—is a serious issue that we need to grapple with, and the Albanese government is taking substantive and decisive action to minimise online harms and try to keep Australians from all walks of life safe in a digital world.

That task involves balancing that goal of safety, the overarching priority to make sure people are safe, with careful consideration of the regulations and standards implemented to ensure they're effective, do not have unintended consequences and operate in a coherent and holistic way so they achieve the goals at which they are aimed. The government has taken a number of steps to deliver on those broad goals of online safety.

These actions include legislating a social media minimum age requirement, a world-leading reform that endeavours to protect those under 16 years of age from the documented harms caused by the unregulated use of social media platforms. That includes supporting the development of new and mandatory industry codes to protect young people online, including phase 2 codes.

And it includes enacting a digital duty of care, which will place the onus on digital platforms to proactively keep Australians safe and better prevent online harms. That digital duty of care is of particular importance in a context where the technology keeps developing and many of these things are difficult to contain once they are out of the jar. The technology in many of these instances has no moral compass itself, and so its capacity for good or bad depends on those who create it and then how it is deployed by those who use it.

We have seen across the online world—not only in Australia but around the world—how this has been weaponised and used as a method of abuse, which is abhorrent. The first step is making sure that tech works for us, and it's by creating a digital duty of care that places the onus on the platforms and the creators of these tools, as well as the users, that will assist in keeping Australians safe.

The motion today refers to a recommendation within the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021. That's a review that was brought forward in time by the Albanese government because it recognised the urgency of some of these issues. It's a 216-page review, comprehensive in nature and containing 67 recommendations, which, as has been indicated by multiple ministers, are being carefully considered and reviewed by the government in order to come up with solutions.

The recommendations in addition to recommendation 18 included recommendations around increased penalties for wrongdoers, stronger powers for the eSafety Commissioner and methods to ensure faster takedown of offensive material. The reforms that will follow this review will be measured and appropriate and reflect an attempt to deal with the complexity of these issues and the nuance required in responding to them.

Recently senators in this place have held and attended hearings and inquiries that relate to online safety and have asked questions of technology companies, providers, individuals and organisations, trying to grapple with some of the complexities around this issue. It's clear that not everyone agreed on the precise methods, but the goals are ones we all share.

There's a reason the government brought the review forward. There's a reason we've gone through all these steps. There's a reason the Minister for Communications is so intently engaged in the goal of online safety.

It's because we know how important it is. We know that social media and the online environment have opened up a world of opportunity for people across the world and that it has also created environments and platforms that become conduits for harm. Data from the eSafety Commissioner show that 46 per cent of 10- to 12-year-olds have been subjected to cyber bullying, and, among 13- to 15-year-olds, that figure rises to 57 per cent.

We know the real-world consequences of those numbers. We also know that algorithms used by social media platforms and other tech companies are directing vulnerable Australians towards harmful content. We've heard testimony in those committee hearings that I referred to about the harms children are being exposed to when online, be it sexually explicit material, violent abuse material, the material referred to by other speakers today or material that, one way or another, takes children who are already in a dark place or already at risk and puts them in even greater danger.

That's what we need to address. By the methods of those regulations I referred to earlier, in those codes, we're trying to ensure that they can enforce the law and help Australians who are at risk by quadrupling the eSafety Commissioner's base funding. We are trying by creating a digital duty of care.

These are all substantive things the government is doing to address the issue.