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

In a time when we are moving towards nanobots with recursive self-improvement, a time when AI has the capacity to bring a whole new dimension to how we analyse what happens, I believe—or at least I've always hoped—that there would be the wit and the capacity for multibillion-dollar companies and multibillionaires to incorporate that technology into how people speak to one another. This is not so much person to person; this is person to phantom. There is an evil, insidious nature to what happens online.

I know this is a contentious issue for many, but I have incredibly strong views about why we should have the protections in this bill, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, for the vulnerable, who are getting into this online environment as they come home from school. I'll be honest, if you have girls who are around about 14 years old, they haven't developed a sense of proper agency in what's happening around them. A person—not a person; an evil thing, a phantom—has the capacity to come into that young person's life and completely turn it upside down, playing with their personality, playing with their ego like a cat plays with a ball of string and destroying that person. They really can.

Many parents have lived through this incredibly evil and destructive experience. A person who's happy and fun-loving is taken to the edge of death. Whether it's an issue such as anorexia, we stand back and say, 'What can we do?' Would you allow them to play with firearms or to play with dynamite just because it was free? I really mean it. It's as dangerous as that. It is not dangerous for everybody, but it is for the vulnerable, the person who starts competing with this unknown entity and tries to justify their position and tries to get a form of self-worth against—we don't know what. Is it another person, either named or unnamed?

We've already seen the tragedy of a young lady from near Strathfield—I think she was from Santa Sabina—who committed suicide the other day. We've seen other young girls who've taken their own lives. We have a responsibility to do something about this. It might not be perfect, but we've got to do something. You can't just sit back and say, 'Oh, this is too hard.'

I have been on this case for years. People say, 'We need more time.' I've been pursuing this for years.

I remember going to the United States of America and seeing Senator Ted Cruz on one side and a Democrats senator from the state of Washington on the other. They're a lot more forward leaning than we are. I don't think you'd find that they're some sort of socialist cabal; they are a lot more forward leaning. I watched them with a sense of real encouragement and with a real sense of purpose as they absolutely eviscerated people from Facebook and from Instagram. They were basically saying, 'Either you fix this or we will take your licence off you.' We haven't even gone partway down the path that that invective has. We have got to clearly understand that these companies could have done something. It's not as if they haven't heard about this. They choose not to. That is the problem: they choose not to. They choose not to because they make an incredible amount of money from advertising while having this group of people as part of their cohort.

This is not the misinformation and disinformation bill. That one has been parked. It's gone into oblivion, and I have not heard an obituary raised by those in the Labor Party and the Greens, saying they're sad about the misinformation and disinformation bill being buried. It went without a whimper. It died a miserable death, and it was carted out. But there's a fundamental difference here. That bill was about your right, in passive observation, to assess information that is before you and make your mind up as to whether you believe it or not, as to whether you absorb it and as to whether it informs you or not. Even if it's on criminality, it can't inform you to murder someone. It can't inform you that there's some sort of differentiation in DNA amongst humankind.

That information does not talk back to you. You observe it, and then you make up your mind about it. When you read a paper, the newspaper does not talk back to you. When you watch television, the television does not talk back to you. You make your judgement about what you are seeing. But social media is entirely different. It talks back. It talks back, and it says the most vile, horrendous things to beautiful, young people, who, at that point in their life, are looking for self-affirmation, who are looking to see themselves amongst their peers and who get sucked into this vortex that destroys lives. And it really does.

This bill is supported by some media houses not because the media houses believe it's a winner but because mums and dads think it's a winner. It's mums and dads who want this dealt with, and we have a responsibility to do something about it. Is this bill the perfect solution? No. Nothing that goes through this chamber is a perfect solution. It's the best attempt. It's us trying to do what we can, but it's not perfect. The great thing about the parliament is that, if something's not perfect, we can fix it. It is not beyond our wit to say, 'Oh, well, if in the future changes need to be mad, we'll make them.' Hopefully, we'll make them in the same bipartisan way as we are doing this, because I don't believe for one second that people on either side, in the majority, believe that this is a tenable situation.

What we are attempting to do with this bill is find a way to start the process to alleviate the problem that we have before us. We have made vastly more contentious moves in the past. Obviously one that comes to mind was after Port Arthur, with the control of firearms. I acknowledge that the member for Solomon and I have had quite a bit to do with firearms. I don't think any of us would go back now and say, 'You've got to have semiautomatic weapons in your cupboard and take them out for a run in the park.' No-one believes in doing that. Yet at the time there was tremendous uproar, a massive uproar. I live on the land. I own rifles. But if someone said to me, 'I want a Kalashnikov,' I would say: 'Why? You don't!' 'I need an F88 Steyr.' 'No, you don't, not unless you want to join the Army. Then you could be issued one from the armoury and trot around with it and the full kit.' I believe in the future people will say, 'Why didn't you do that earlier?' It is something that is before us now. Before we go into the next year, where it will be the fog of the election, this is something we can deal with now.

I pleaded with the then Prime Minister Scott Morrison that we had to do something about this. It was one of the things I brought up continuously, saying, 'When are we going to do something about Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Bezos and their cohorts that are capitalising on the misery of so many families?' It's an amazing thing. People say, 'You just tell your kids to get off it.' If that was the case, there'd be no-one who smokes. You'd just say to them, 'Don't smoke.' But 10 per cent of people do, and I'd say that 99 per cent of that 10 per cent know it's no good for you, but they do it.

When you see a child on their tablet, they swipe right and swipe left and bang, bang, bang and their fingers move so quickly and they're all across it. You can see that interaction and it is the most amazing, scary thing from a very young age. Then they start Minecraft. When they wake up early in the morning, go to the side of your bed and take the charger off you, sneak off, get on your phone and do all those tricks—just wake you up slightly with a phone in front of you. You look at it: 'Facial recognition. Thank you.' Off they go, back on to it. They can actually download programs. That's starting at a very young age.

What's in the back of your mind? 'It's Minecraft; it's passive.' They're engaged with the thing, but it's the start of the process. In the end you say: 'I know it's coming, Instagram. I know it's coming, TikTok. I know it's coming where they'll engage in that swill.' There are some nice things, but there's that swill of those evil people looking for vulnerable people. They get a kick out of hurting people. They get an endorphin kick; it makes them feel good. They don't care. In fact, some of this total and utter filth hold it as a prize if they kill you. It's a win. It is the crime you can get away with. You're out there as 'Rooster123' or 'Prince Charming' engaging with Jane Smith, 13 years old and at the local high school. 'Jane, you're fat. Jane, you should lose some more weight. Jane, you're a loser. Jane, you should kill yourself. You're nothing but rubbish.' Is that mythical? Is that overstating it? No, it's not. That's how it works.

And then there's the terrifying outcome that so many families have felt when they finally find out what's going on and they're having to engage the psychologist or the psychiatrist to try and deprogram this insidious programming that has happened. To get to that point in your life where you say to another person, 'What are you doing to yourself?' You get to the point where they have no control over their life anymore. It has been rewired by this engagement with a multibillionaire's money-making machine that makes them one of the richest people in the world. Whilst they acquire that massive wealth, and sit there in their T-shirt and parade like some sort of quasi-god on the stage in front of the adoring fans, they don't have the capacity to quietly stand back and contextualise all the mechanisms and all the attributes of how they made that money. They don't say to themselves in a quieter moment: 'Under my principles, under the rules I live by in my life, under the things that guide my compass, is what I am doing right? Is this good? Is this right? Is this just? Have I created harm? Am I responsible for hurting someone?' The answer to that last question is, yes, you are. But they don't do anything about it. So we have to do what is second best. We have to make our best attempt. We have to try to do what is right. This bill is our best attempt to do what is right.

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