MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr LEESER (Berowra) (15:45): The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens and, in particular, its most vulnerable citizens, our children. In the course of my service in this place, I've met with people on the front lines of child protection work in various guises and sought to advance their work—people from the International Justice Mission and ICMEC.
I've met former AFP officers who've had to spend day after day watching child sex abuse materials online. I think of colleagues like the member for Fisher and the member for Flinders, who've been at the forefront of debates about online child safety. I think as well about people like the member for Fairfax, who, with the member for Fisher, has supported Bruce and Denise Morcombe and the Daniel Morcombe Foundation.
I think about the experiences of the members for Wide Bay and La Trobe, who are sworn police officers, and hearing the stories of the member for Wide Bay, particularly, about going to child sex abuse cases and having to confront some of the worst people imaginable. I've repeatedly raised issues of child protection and child safety in this place. In the recent budgetary consideration in detail, I raised in the Federation Chamber, and not in a political way, a series of questions about whether, under the current implementation of the Hague Convention in this country, we are sending Australian children into harm's way to be abused—questions that the Attorney-General did not answer.
When I and the member for Fisher were in the role of shadow attorney-general—we were shadow attorneys-general in succession—we moved private members bills to increase the penalties for child sex abusers in the wake of scandals of paedophile rings in childcare centres and people getting off with too-light sentences for multiple child sex offences. We moved a bill to address that—to have mandatory minimums for first child sex offences—yet the government voted against bringing on that bill for debate.
That was not because the government brought on a subsequent bill to protect children but because they didn't like the fact that it was us raising the issue. As shadow attorney-general in August last year, along with the then shadow minister for education, I called on the government to, within the year, implement a national working-with-children check because they had said, no, it would be implemented in a longer period of time than that, and it just didn't seem right.
We're still waiting. The national working-with-children check has not been implemented. So we on this side of the House are not going to take a lecture from those on that side about child safety.
It was our side of the House that devised the national centre for countering child exploitation. It is our side of the House that's been the leader in relation to online safety. We built the global model for it.
Every major protection that Labor now relies on was legislated by the coalition. In 2015, we had a world first. We created the children's eSafety Commissioner, the first dedicated online safety regulator anywhere on earth.
The world didn't lead us. We led the world, and other democracies are still copying the coalition's model. In 2017, we dealt with image based abuse.
We built the world's first scheme to force platforms to take down intimate images shared without consent and hit perpetrators and non-compliant platforms with real financial penalties. In 2021, we introduced the Online Safety Act, the most comprehensive online safety regime in the nation's history. We codified the basic online safety expectations and created an adult cyberabuse takedown scheme and slashed the time platforms have to strip illegal and terrorist content from their feeds.
That's not rhetoric; that's a record. That's the record of the coalition in government. We support the social media ban.
The social media ban was our idea. It was born of coalition conviction that childhood is worth protecting. I've mentioned my friend the member for Fisher.
In several committees, he pursued these issues. I've mentioned the member for Flinders. It was Peter Dutton, when he was Leader of the Opposition, and it was David Coleman, as the shadow minister, who first suggested these ideas.
In November 2023, a coalition private member's bill forced age verification onto the agenda. Labor knocked it back, then bowed to pressure and funded a trial in the 2024 budget. In June 2024, we pledged we would deliver an under-16 ban within a hundred days.
Only then did the Albanese government try and play catch-up. The 2024 ban passed with our support, because we'd been calling for it all along, but—and this is the issue—having seen Labor's social media ban in place, we've seen it not be effective. What Labor is asking us to do now is to not subject the bill to the ordinary parliamentary processes.
For the first six years of my parliamentary career, I sat on the other side of the House. Again and again I heard Labor members stand on this side of the House and call on the then government to deal with legislation in the ordinary way and to subject it to ordinary parliamentary scrutiny. That is all that is proposed here.
The reason it is necessary in this case is that the Labor Party fumbled the ball so badly in relation to the first tranche of this legislation. We need to have another go. We need to hold big tech to account, but we need to make sure that the measures that are being proposed are actually the right ones.
The eSafety Commissioner's own March 2026 compliance update finds that 70 per cent of children are still on social media. A landmark BMJ study has found that 85 per cent of under-16s are still logging in. Its verdict is that there's been limited implementation, incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention.
It's in these circumstances that we cannot simply just wave a bill through; we need to use the processes of the parliament. We need to do our job as legislators and apply the ordinary scrutiny to these important bills—and scrutiny of legislation is what we are all paid to provide. I believe these bills are very important.
The social media ban is obviously important because it protects young, vulnerable children from the scourge of child sexual abusers and paedophiles and those people that would seek to prey on them. But, as the shadow education minister, I've another reason for supporting the social media ban. The challenges that the world faces today will require our children, the next generation, to use all the brain power they have available so they have strong concentration spans to ensure that they can address issues of global conflict, economic insecurity and AI.
We're not going to be able to address that properly if we have young children addicted to social media, which ruins their concentration spans. That's why we've been so strong over the years on things like banning mobile phones in the classrooms and reducing the use of technology in the classrooms. We know that this has a very negative effect on children and on their learning and their capacity.
It's why we support the social media ban. But we are not going to wave things through carte blanche, given the record of this government and this minister and the failures of the first attempt here. The eSafety Commissioner herself called the original ban a 'very blunt force approach' thrown together 'very quickly' with 'very thin scaffolding' and with no 'potent powers'.
In her words, taking on the world's biggest tech companies is not like 'sticking a pink parking ticket on a windshield'. We want to make sure that we've actually got the right powers to take rapacious big tech on and to make the penalties stick. That's the important thing here.
That's what we on this side of the House are trying to do by doing our job—our duty as parliamentarians—of subjecting the bill to the proper scrutiny, hearing from the stakeholders and hearing from people who are advising big tech about what they think of this bill in order that we can plug any loopholes that might be found and make the scheme safer. We don't want to be back here in six months, patching up the scheme again and again.
We want to get this right this time. It's already failed once because we have a minister who fumbled this and a government that did not take these issues with all seriousness. Instead, we have an opportunity to get this right, and that's why we are sending these matters to a Senate committee.
These amendments are a confession that Labor should have done the job right from the very beginning, not in the way that they did it, not in a way that was broadly criticised, not in a way where the minister, instead of focusing on the bill and on the detail, focused on selling the bill during her $100,000 New York trip. What we needed to do was to make sure that we focused on the very detail of the bill, and that's what this opportunity gives us.
So it's sad today that we are having the matter of public importance on an issue in which there is broad agreement. There is agreement that we need to protect the safety of our children. We need to protect our children.
No-one in this place doesn't believe that we need to protect our children. But we on this side believe that we won't get a third go at this. We've got to get this right.
We've got to demonstrate that there are proper safeguards in place. We've got to demonstrate that this law is absolutely right. And the way to do that and to put it beyond doubt is to have the parliamentary committee look at it properly.