QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms WELLS (Lilley—Minister for Sport and Minister for Communications) (14:15): I thank the member for Barton for her question and for her commitment to improving the wellbeing of young people through her youth advisory council. For too long, tech companies have been running real-time, unregulated, user testing of their products in Australia, and their platforms and tools have infiltrated our daily lives in ways we could never have possibly imagined—some good but some with terrible consequences.
There is a global reckoning coming for big tech. It started here in Australia with our world-leading social media laws protecting young Australians from the harms of social media. But Australian parents are understandably still worried about how they can protect their kids on other platforms, like online games and AI chatbots, because online harms have real world consequences, especially for young people—girls getting advice from a chatbot about how to live on just 600 calories a day, boys getting cyber bullied on online games, teenagers doing illegal and dangerous stunts because they've seen them online.
Tech companies must take responsibility for the harms that their tools and their features are causing. Tech companies can still move fast, but they cannot be allowed to break things any longer. In the same way that we have safety standards for cars or food or appliances, Australia is now going to set basic safety standards for online tools and services through our digital duty of care.
Emma Mason's daughter Tilly died by suicide as a consequence of the harm she experienced on social media when she was 15. She along with Mia Bannister, who lost Ollie, join us in the gallery today. Earlier, she stood with the Prime Minister and said: 'With a digital duty of care, we enter a new era.
Today we should all be proud to be Australians.' Wayne Holdsworth, who also joined us and who lost his son Mac to suicide, said, 'We want to look back on this as a time when we led the world to improve opportunities for our kids and keep them safe.' Despite the false and baseless claims being spread, the digital duty of care is not about controlling adults online.
It is about giving adults a choice online. You can choose if you want to opt into the algorithm as your default feed or if you want your default feed to be filled with your friends and creators and businesses that you choose to follow. As when you buy a new appliance, the government sets minimum safety standards, but ultimately you choose what you want to buy as long as it's legal and it's not causing serious harm to other Australians.
This is not about control. This is about choice for adults and for protecting young Australians.