QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Ms WELLS (Lilley—Minister for Sport and Minister for Communications) (14:39): I thank the member for Dunkley for her question. She has been an immense advocate for our online safety reform agenda and an unwavering supporter of her constituent Wayne Holdsworth and his organisation, SmackTalk. Of course, this parliament remembers that Wayne lost his son, Mac, to extortion online.
Parents like Wayne should be the driving force behind all of our work on online safety to keep Australians safe online. Australia has one of the most comprehensive online safety frameworks in the world. It protects Australian children from cyberbullying.
It protects adults from cyberabuse. It requires online services to report how they are keeping Australians safe. It empowers the eSafety Commissioner to take down seriously harmful material, including image based abuse.
As the coalition has been focused on this week, there are 17 industry drafted codes and standards that were designed by big tech, not the parliament, to protect Australians from illegal and restricted content. This complex framework has helped many Australians, but an independent statutory review has found that it is not able to cope with the growing scale of problems in the online world.
Just last week the AFP commissioner, Krissy Barrett, warned that the police cannot be the only safety net when it comes to the radicalisation of young people online. By the time the AFP is knocking on a door, the harm is already done. That is why tomorrow the Albanese government will introduce a digital duty of care to the parliament.
Australia's digital duty of care will set basic safety standards for the online services we all use every day, just like we have in every other industry. It will shift the burden from the shoulders of victims like Wayne and Mac to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur. It moves the safety net upstream to the people who design the product before it ever reaches the child.
The core of the duty is to provide a safe online environment and to put systems in place so all Australians are protected from seriously harmful and illegal content. Harm like tech facilitated, gender based violence, like pro-terror material, like child sexual abuse material, like death threats and rape threats—harm that I think we can all agree parliament needs to protect Australians from.
So imagine my surprise this week when the coalition began criticising the government for trying to do just that and for taking the core requirements of the 17 industry codes and standards and bringing them together under law for parliament to debate. Last week they were criticising our online safety laws for not having enough parliamentary scrutiny. This week they're criticising our online safety laws for having too much parliamentary scrutiny.
Put your politics to the side, listen to the AFP commissioner, and help us pass— (Time expired)