Online Safety and Other Legislation Amendment (My Face, My Rights) Bill 2025
Senator WATT (Queensland—Minister for the Environment and Water) (09:14): Australia's online safety work is world leading, and the Albanese Labor government is taking decisive action to minimise online harms and hold big tech accountable. Under the current Online Safety Act, the existing image based abuse scheme already allows the eSafety Commission to take action against the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, regardless of whether the material is AI generated.
Further, under the current unlawful material codes and standards, digital service providers are already required to take proactive steps to prevent the generation and distribution of all class 1 material, including child sexual abuse material and pro-terror material, and material that is generated by AI. Our government has also ensured that the eSafety Commissioner is well resourced to assist Australians who face these harms each and every day, to educate Australians about online risks and to hold online service providers to account.
The Albanese Labor government has been very clear this work must continue. We remain committed to introducing a digital duty of care, putting the responsibility on digital service providers to protect their users from harm before it occurs. We know that big tech companies have the technology, resources and responsibility to manage harms before they occur, rather than solely relying on individuals to report harmful material post exposure.
That is what the digital duty of care will do. It will require all online services operating in Australia to be proactive and take steps to design safe services, rather than this being the exception. This includes AI platforms and chatbots.
Australia is leading the world when it comes to online safety, including our social media minimum age laws, and we will continue our work to protect people online. We delayed access to social media until the age of 16, with five million accounts deactivated so far. We want kids to know who they are before platforms assume who they are.
We want to give kids three more years to build real-world connections and online resilience. Our world-leading measures in online safety complement our privacy reforms. Our government has already implemented a first tranche of privacy reforms, to ensure Australians' privacy is respected and protected, and is committed to further uplifting privacy laws to ensure they are fit for purpose in the digital age.
In 2024, the government amended the Privacy Act to include a new statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, which may include sharing of deepfakes as a misuse of a person's private information. This enables Australians to take legal action directly against individuals and entities not otherwise covered by the Privacy Act. Privacy is an important and complex policy area, and reform cannot be pursued in a piecemeal fashion, which this bill does.
The government has committed to uplifting privacy laws to achieve the right balance between strengthening privacy protections and enabling personal information to be used in ways that benefit individuals, society and the economy. The government shares many of the concerns that Senator Pocock has outlined and the intent of this bill. However, we intend to address these concerns as part of holistic reform rather than through piecemeal reform.
We are also concerned that, if passed, this bill would likely increase regulatory and enforcement overlap, including between the functions of the eSafety Commissioner, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and law enforcement agencies. This bill does not address the intersection of such overlap, and therefore the government will not support it.
For those reasons, while supporting the bill's intent, the government will be opposing the senator's bill. Our government will continue our world-leading action in online safety and ensure that we hold big tech accountable, but we'll do that in a holistic rather than a piecemeal manner.