Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This is exactly what many have been calling for. I therefore encourage the government to focus on the duty-of-care legislation rather than rushing this blunt bill, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024. After all, there is a positive precedent for a duty-of-care approach, with the EU's digital safety act obliging companies to design and operate their platforms to ensure people aren't harmed. Likewise, the United Kingdom legislation prevents access to content that promotes eating disorders or suicide.

Here, I want to acknowledge the work of the member for Goldstein, who this week introduced her Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2024. In stark contrast to what we have in front of us, this alternative bill has been developed over a period of 18 months in consultation with experts, carers and young people. Importantly, the member for Goldstein's bill addresses the underlying issues relating to online harm. I therefore thank her for her work and urge the government to withdraw their bill and bring hers on for debate.

To proceed with the legislation as it currently stands sets us up for failure, as evidenced by the failure of bans in other jurisdictions, including France and Canada. Concerningly, a ban has the potential to create a false sense of security for parents and complacency for platforms, leaving children who circumvent it with no protection against harmful content. Even if a ban could be enforced, there is a real risk it would drive young people to less-regulated services where adults or regulators have less oversight.

The government has also indicated online gaming services would fall beyond the scope of this legislation, despite games displaying many of the features cited as the core problems with social media, such as addictive features and potentially harmful content on social feeds. I can't let that exclusion go unchallenged as I have personal experience with friends who have had their kids refuse to go to school because of their gaming addiction.

Beyond concerns around the potential impact of an age ban on access to useful information, some of my community have also raised concerns on the bill's implications for privacy. The age-assurance trial is set to examine methods from estimation and inference to full-blown identity verification. With the former, we risk false positives as systems approximate a potential user's age. With the latter, users may be required to upload personal ID documents that many will rightly feel uncomfortable sharing. Ultimately, the more rigorous the test, the greater the risk that the right to privacy will be infringed. This is something my community of North Sydney cares deeply about.

More than a decade ago the then Attorney-General, who also happens to be the current Attorney-General, instructed the Law Reform Commission to conduct an inquiry into serious invasions of privacy in the digital era. Since then, academics and independent bodies like the Law Council have continued to call for action, arguing there is an urgent need for reform to strengthen protections for citizens and align Australian law with law in Europe and parts of North America.

This government then conducted another Privacy Act review, with the report offering 116 recommendations tabled in February last year. In it's response, the government agreed fully to 38 proposals, agreed in principle to 68 and noted 10. According to the Attorney-General's website, 'The government is committed to introducing legislation to protect the personal information of Australians in 2024.' Yet we have not even seen a draft of the new legislation. Instead, we have this bill which does nothing to offer any greater protection to anyone including our children. Rather, this bill will likely require personal identification or biometric data from all Australians to be gathered by the platforms. So, like many in my community, I'm confused by the government's priorities.

Other concerns related to this bill include the sharing of data with third-party verification services, the creation of databases linking real identities to online accounts, requirements for platforms to track Australian user location and the creation of infrastructure content monitoring—not to mention the potential for commercial surveillance of Australians. With all of that said, I also think it's unacceptable that the government is using its concern for the potential harms of online content to ban social media for the under-16s but won't ban online gambling advertising, despite the overwhelming evidence of the good an advertising ban would do.

Rather than pursue the bill in front of us, I urge the government to focus on empowering young people to curate their feed and ensuring parents feel comfortable having conversations with their children about the use of these tools in their day-to-day lives. I also encourage them to force the platforms to give users the ability to reset their algorithms and ensure they are held to account for providing broader education on what is possible, because we can already restrict the time a young person spends on their devices, we can already restrict the type of content someone sees and we can already implement strategies that provide a trusted source with an oversight on how a young person is engaging online. As a 12-year-old told me confidently just last week, 'It's all in the settings, silly.'

Ultimately, while I agree we need to ensure our kids are safe, this bill simply doesn't do that. Rather, this bill offers a blunt instrument that fails to meaningfully address the real problems of social media or hold platforms accountable for making their services safe for young people. For this reason, I move the second reading amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House declines to give the bill a second reading, and notes:

(1) the concerns raised by the mental health sector that a social media ban for children under 16 could:

(a) limit young people's access to important online mental health services and positive social connections;

(b) disincentivise platforms from offering child safety features for younger users that will inevitably circumvent the ban; and

(c) push younger users onto less regulated platforms; and

(2) that a one-day window for submissions to a Parliamentary committee inquiry is insufficient given the potential magnitude of these risks, and a robust inquiry process should instead take place".

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