STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator WHITEAKER (Western Australia) (13:48): The internet is a very different place from the one that I grew up with. When I was a teenager, the biggest social crisis that I faced online was deciding who made it to my Top 8 best friends on MySpace. The most heated debate that I saw online was whether you were 'team Edward' or 'team Jacob'.

In the interests of bipartisanship, I won't be telling the chamber which team I was on! Seriously, though, there were risks. We were told not to talk to strangers online, and, if something made us uncomfortable, we could log off.

We could leave the computer in the study and walk away. Today, logging off the internet is not that simple. Feeds are designed to learn exactly what holds a young person's attention and keep serving it up.

They follow kids into their bedrooms late into the night. That is why our government introduced world-leading social media minimum age laws. We know the internet does not become safe the day a person turns 16, and the responsibility for staying safe online shouldn't be put on our kids.

When you buy a car in this country, you don't have to crash test it yourself, because it has to meet a safety standard before it ever reaches the showroom floor. For too long, big tech has been the exception to that rule, and our digital duty of care is designed to change that. We are seeing a deeply worrying rise in attitudes towards women, especially in young people.

We're seeing a rise in sexual abuse between young people. More than one in 10 girls have had a sexual image of themselves shared without their consent before they turned 18. These are all things that we should be concerned about.

Under our plan, platforms would have a legal duty to do better—to identify harms and to take reasonable steps to present them.