QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:51): I thank my friend the fantastically talented member for Forde for his question. Bullying isn't what it was like when we were kids. It's not just a bit of push and shove in the playground.

It's a lot more insidious than that today. Because of the internet, bullying can follow you all the way home. You see it online day and night.

You can feel like you can never escape from it. And, in the worst of cases, it can lead young people to take their own life. The awful truth here is that it's getting worse, not better.

That's why we've got every state and territory to agree to major antibullying reforms, which kick off from the start of school next year. From the start of school next year, every school—public, Catholic and independent—will have an obligation to take initial action on bullying complaints within two school days. That involves action to stop the harm: talking to the children involved, contacting both sets of parents—the parents of the child that's being bullied and the child that's doing the bullying—and, in some very serious and extreme situations, contacting the police as well.

Those are the sorts of things that we need to do inside the school gate. But, of course, we've got to act outside school as well. I've talked at question time over the last few weeks about the impact that algorithms are having on our kids, the way they're affecting our kids: teaching boys to hate girls, teaching kids of one religion to hate kids from another.

This is just another example: this is the story of Robb Evans. Robb is a dad. Robb's daughter, Liv, took her own life a couple of years ago, when she was 15, after battling anorexia.

He tells the story about how this all started at school with bullying and with body shaming and how Liv started restricting her eating. But Robb says that it was social media that supercharged all of this, and algorithms meant that Liv kept seeing the same thing online all the time, day and night. He told the ABC last week 'the trouble with these algorithms is that they prey on people's vulnerabilities'.

If you're not feeling particularly mentally strong, it just makes it worse and worse. And, unfortunately, that's what happened to Liv. That's why Robb's backing the digital duty of care—because he knows personally the way that those algorithms affected his daughter.

I think we all know the way these algorithms work. They're poisoning our kids. They're making boys hate girls.

They're making people of one religion hate people of another. They're making kids hate themselves. They're literally poisoning our kids.

And we've all got a duty here to work together, to come together and to do something about it.