ADJOURNMENT

Senator GREEN (Queensland—Assistant Minister for Tourism, Assistant Minister for Pacific Island Affairs and Assistant Minister for Northern Australia) (20:00): Last week our government released the exposure draft of our digital duty of care legislation. It is designed to do something pretty simple: put more responsibility on technology companies to identify the risks that their products create and take reasonable steps to address them.

For children, that includes protection from harmful material like content promoting eating disorders, pornography, misogyny and crime. The bill also includes a commitment from our government to deliver My Feed, My Way, giving Australians greater choice over whether they want an algorithm deciding what appears in their social media feed. These algorithms are designed to keep people watching.

This is a design feature of social media, and our government says that you should be able to switch them off. The algorithms learn what captures people's attention and they serve them more of it, no matter how damaging it might be to that person's mental health or the wellbeing of that person. We have heard numerous examples of this, of course.

For girls, it might feed them content around eating disorders, harming perception and body image. We've seen examples where, for a teenage boy who is lonely, angry or looking for answers, that can mean being pulled further and further into content built around resentment towards women. What is the coalition's response to this piece of legislation?

Of course, we saw very quickly that Senator Matt Canavan, who is one of the loudest opponents of this legislation, was determined to bring it down, attacking it as an attack on free speech. This is not an attack on free speech. This is about giving people a choice about what they see on social media.

For adults, these laws are about illegal content and giving people greater choice over their feeds. For children, they're about protecting them from serious psychosocial harms online. It really was galling to see the coalition rush to declare this legislation unacceptable without ever listening to the views of parents, without ever listening to the views of the advocates who stood outside and demanded that we deliver this change.

That tells us something about the choice being made here, because we know that the Liberal-National Party is deeply divided on this policy, but also on their future. When confronted with the very real problem of boys being exposed to harmful and misogynistic material online, Senator Canavan's answer was apparently not to hold the enormous, powerful platforms and the algorithms serving them to account.

His answer was to blame teachers. His answer was to blame teachers, because he wanted to make it clear that he didn't support taking action on big tech. We should be able to say two things at once in this place.

We should be able to say that boys deserve support, good role models, places where they can talk about loneliness, mental health and pressures that they face, and we should be able to say that girls and women should be safe—those two things are not in conflict—and they should, in particular, be able to be safe online. I suppose the question for the coalition is this: if you don't want to give people a choice about what they see online, if you don't want people to be able to turn the algorithm off, why do you want to force people to watch content that they don't want to see?

As I said, we've all seen examples of this. The example that comes to mind for me was being very close to giving birth, very pregnant and being bombarded by videos about stillborns. I have a lot of empathy for those families and those stories, but that was content that I just did not want to see.

Yet Senator Canavan and those opposite are saying that, under their policy and their approach to these algorithms, I would be forced to watch that content—forced to watch content about stillborn babies while you are heavily pregnant. That's exactly what they are saying, and I'm sure that other people have examples of that. You should be able to switch off your feed.

It should be your choice. That's exactly what our government is delivering. Those opposite are so bitterly divided on this that they can't stand up for parents and families.

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