Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Rarely do you get to stand on something that's very close to one's heart, but I am on this. I'd like to first of all acknowledge the member for Higgins, Dr Ananda-Rajah, and thank her for the work she has undertaken and also so many other colleagues of hers and others dealing with this mind-twisting, as a parent, issue that can unfortunately come across your life. I think the first step I saw in my having to deal with this is body image, especially girls—I won't give away the name—saying, 'I've just got to lose this part of weight; I've just got to lose that,' and you just let it brush over you. You don't worry about it. You just think it's a statement.

Then you get to the point of realisation. I know exactly where I was: at the Albert Hotel at lunchtime in Brisbane. I was watching this young girl push the food around her plate, and because you're a father and you're obtuse, you just say: 'Would you please eat it? Don't just push it around; put it in your mouth'—obviously the wrong thing to say. Then comes the realisation, as it slips and it slips, and then starts the pleading, because as parents you're not psychologists: 'Can you please eat? Do you realise what's happening?' Then there's the traumatisation of hospitalisation, then the tube-feeding, then being by someone's bed and saying to them, 'You're going to die.' This is repeated by so many parents. Then there's the bright side, the incredible psychologist doctors, who can do what you as a parent can't, and that's get inside a person's head and get to the point of trying to turn the situation around.

Later on, there's an understanding of the other things that floated in the background: the bullying, the intimidation, how cruel one person can be to another by trying to drive them into a certain process and the insidious nature of social media, which is never regulated. As you know, I wanted to go to the United States—but, unfortunately, I got COVID—for the express reason of trying to deal with this, to say to people: 'You're responsible. It's on your platform. You make money out of it. You're responsible for it. You're the person who should be paying the price.'

This is so important. The earlier you realise the problem, the better chance you have of dealing with it. The earlier you can see that and get a person to professional help, the better it is. Because you don't want to go through the issue where people can't get in a pool, because they can't regulate their body temperature or where you see people who are full of fun and full of life just destroyed by this. We have to do everything we can.

There is help—the Butterfly Foundation is one organisation that provides mental health help. We need to make sure that we train the psychologists and the psychiatrists, who have the capacity to work in the hospital system, and make parents aware, especially to instruct young girls that you can look how you want! You can be what you want. Beauty does not come online. Beauty comes from your soul, from your voice, from how you think and from your actions to make the world a better place. It is not determined by what you see online. And you are stronger than the people around you who sometimes try to play with your psyche, like a cat plays with a ball of string.

I would like to commend this and the member for Goldstein for bringing this forward. It's incredibly important. It resides on all sides of the chamber, and I hope there's a chance, if someone out there is maybe looking at their daughter or possibly their son, that this tweaks something with them, and they say, 'I'm going to do something about this right now.'

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