QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:53): Can I thank my friend, the much-loved member for Macnamara, for his question. Our children aren't born racist. No-one is born antisemitic.
No-one is born with hate in their hearts. It's something that's learnt; it's something that's taught. And I think we all know where that can end—the sort of wickedness that it can lead to.
There's lots that we need to do to tackle antisemitism. Part of it is what we do in education, and that's why we appointed David Gonski to chair the Antisemitism Education Taskforce. David is a towering Australian, somebody respected and admired, I think, by everybody in this chamber.
He understands the education system inside and out. He understands the power of education and what it can do. The work that David has led has focused on all parts of the education system—what we do in teacher training, in teacher resources, as well as the changes we need to make to the curriculum.
All that is important work, but that work can be undone when kids finish school and they get back on their phones and back on the internet. Antisemitism, as we all know, has exploded online. To give you an example about how it's affecting our kids, research shows that a teenage boy today only needs to spend about an hour on TikTok looking at lifestyle content for men before being served conspiracy theories about Jewish people.
It's algorithms that do this, spewing all that poison at our kids, serving up hate on a plate. We need to do something about it. It's not just the government saying this; today, the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, made the same point.
The special envoy told the Daily Telegraph: "Within hours of the Bondi attack, we saw social media platforms feeding users denials that it was real, conspiracy theories that it was a 'false flag' operation and justifications for the murder of innocent people," … "My hope is that a digital duty of care will make it harder for algorithms and recommender systems to dish up this sort of content to Australians, particularly children.
"People should have a choice of what they see, but to the extent what they see is determined by algorithms, feeds should contain fewer overseas bots pushing malicious hate and fewer anonymous trolls using antisemitism to drive engagement." It's a powerful argument, and it's a reminder of what algorithms do and what they're doing to our kids and the dangers that they pose, and a reminder to all of us here to work together and to come together and do something about it.