Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to share the concerns of parents in Wentworth about the harmful impact of social media on young people. Over the past two years, I've had countless conversations with people across the community who are worried about what social media is doing to our kids. Nearly 400 responded to my recent survey about how to keep kids safe online. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they were extremely concerned about the impact of social media on young people's mental health, showing the extent of parental anxiety in my community. People's concerns related to a broad range of different issues, with most parents in Wentworth worried about multiple negative impacts that social media can have on kids' health. More than 80 per cent were concerned about online bullying, social media addiction and access that kids have to pornography, and a further three-quarters said they were worried about eating disorder content and the promotion of negative role models.

I welcome today's announcement from the eSafety Commissioner that she will give internet companies six months to develop an industry code that dictates what minors are exposed to on their platforms. But we have to go further. In my community survey, there was substantial support for a range of actions from government and social media companies, including inducing tools to report harmful content, banning gambling and alcohol ads—I was just speaking to a young man in year 11 last night who was talking about how many gambling and alcohol ads he is served on his social media, despite being well under the age when he should be receiving those ads—increasing the transparency on social media algorithms and creating an overarching duty of care for social media companies to protect the wellbeing of young people online. Parents also raised the importance of better education for children so they know how to use social media safely.

The solutions favoured by people in Wentworth closely reflect the recommendations from work conducted by the Butterfly Foundation and Zoe Daniel MP, and I commend them for their work. I also commend the work of community campaigners like the team at Wait Mate, a Wentworth based organisation that has recently started to help families come together in their schools and in their local communities to slow the spread of smartphone use by young kids. My community was also open and certainly interested in the idea of banning social media access to those below the age of 16.

The impacts of social media are just one of the mental health challenges facing people in Wentworth. And I want to talk for a moment about the difficulties experienced by people in our community with complex mental health conditions. The tragic events at Bondi Junction in April highlight the urgent need to better support people with complex mental health conditions. Since the attack, I have been contacted by family and friends of people suffering complex conditions, telling me about the challenges they face every day in caring for their loved ones. Those suffering from complex conditions are often referred to as the 'missing middle'. But they aren't really missing at all. They're our family members, our friends and our co-workers, and they're faced with a lack of active and ongoing support, with a lack of integration between services, with staff shortages across crucial clinics and with police who lack the training to adequately respond to mental health crises when they are frequently called to the scene.

People are not just falling through the cracks in our mental health system; they're falling through chasms. Tomorrow morning I'll be holding a roundtable in parliament aimed at elevating the voices of people with complex mental health conditions and understanding just how much more there is to do to better support them. There are no easy answers. There are no quick fixes. We need long-term solutions, not bandaids.

I acknowledge the important work that the federal and state governments have been doing to date, and have committed to doing, to better provide a more integrated support, including the Mental Health Reform Advisory Committee and the recently appointed peak bodies for carers and consumers. These are very positive steps forward. We need to continue this work and expand it. The unifying call from 17 mental health organisations coming to parliament tomorrow is for long-term funding and reform that is agreed to during the upcoming Health Ministers' Meeting and that is enshrined in the National Health Reform Agreement. I urge the government to listen to the experts who are coming to share those stories.

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