Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026

Senator BROCKMAN (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (11:42): Let me start by saying that, whilst I appreciate the passion from Senator Lambie and I know it's coming from a good place, I find it very difficult to understand how you can criticise the Liberal Party for opposing certain aspects of the government's legislation in this place while at the same time saying how bad that legislation actually is, how ill thought out it is, how it's rushed through this place in a way that doesn't actually reflect good public policymaking.

I'm just not sure how those two things sit together, because the Liberal Party does have a strong track record in this area. What the Liberal Party believes above all is that you cannot parent from Canberra. The social media ban is widely seen to have been largely ineffective.

Anecdotally, talking to my children and based on what is happening with their schoolmates, you hear that it is just almost completely ineffective. The fact is that we need to empower parents. What they are getting from various levels of government and various parts of the Australian society are massive mixed messages.

Let me just give you one example. All families are different, and all parenting styles are different. My wife and I decided that our children would not have devices.

They range in age between 10 and 13. They go to public school, and, at their public schools, they are forced to have devices. It comes with its own acronym, BYOD—bring your own device to school—and it is part of the requirement of attending that school that children, including primary school children, have to bring their own device.

Yes, how those devices are used is managed somewhat, I will say, in the classroom situation, but can't governments see that that kind of approach is sending massive mixed messages to children and huge difficulties to parents, who are trying to do the right thing by their kids and keep them away from parts of the internet which are extraordinarily harmful. Nobody in this place denies that that is the case.

Nobody denies that is the case. We need to sit back and take a long cold, rational look at what we are doing and asking if the sweep of what we are doing right across society is actually having the correct impact. You can go back to the Rudd government and, 'Every child will have a laptop in school.' How quaint does that look now at a time when increasingly educational institutions—and I note even the Minister for Education actually came out and said this today: we need a digital detox in schools.

I think we will look back on this era, however long it's been since Kevin Rudd was prime minister, and say this was a failed experiment that we inflicted upon the young people of Australia. It is a failed experiment where we are forcing children to have devices and then, at the same time, saying, 'You're not supposed to use them in certain ways.' That is a huge difficulty for parents to negotiate when they have made a decision that social media and vast parts of the internet are not something that, particularly at younger ages—we're talking about primary school kids here—kids should be interacting with.

It seems to me highly doubtful whether there is any safe use, particularly for younger children, because you cannot contain or regulate in any meaningful way, certainly not from Canberra, as to what people are doing and what tech savvy kids are doing in their own backyards. I think we need to take a long, cold, hard look at what we are creating here for our children in society and whether we need to really rethink our approach on a whole lot of different levels.

This is not just coming from the parents, though I speak to many parents about this issue. This is not just coming from the parents wanting to say: 'Ban it. Don't have any devices.' The fact is that, in a particular secondary school in Western Australia, they actually took the decision to say, 'Let's try, with the agreement of the parents and with the agreement of the kids, to have a year without devices.' A year 8 class undertook a year with no devices in the classroom.

Specialised computer classes were obviously part of the curriculum, but it was a year of no devices in the classroom. Guess what happened at the end of that year. Both the parents and the student cohort said, 'We vote to continue that for the next year.' This is not saying kids shouldn't learn about computers and shouldn't learn about the online environment.

Of course they should, but it does need to be done in a way that actually benefits them and their education. I think those are the things that this place should be taking much, much more seriously, rather than legislating in a way that we fundamentally know isn't going to work.