Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government is going to legislate the banning of children from social media in order to protect them from harm. Is anyone in this place really buying this? If this government was really concerned about children's welfare it would have already banned puberty blockers for kids. If the government was really that motivated to protect kids it would remove radical gender theory from all schools, all classrooms, everywhere, for all age groups. This government expects us to believe that an Instagram account is more dangerous than telling children they've been born in the wrong body and they require a lifetime of medication to suppress and stifle their natural development. This government will attempt to sterilise kids without sanction but won't let them near a Facebook account, though—no, no. Give me a break!

This Prime Minister says he is all about protecting children. Really, Prime Minister? Riddle me this: how is it that your own Literary Awards just shortlisted a children's book titled Welcome to Sex that describes in graphic detail the most wicked of sex acts? The author of this book said that she would 'be happy with a mature eight-year-old having a flick through the book'. So eight-year-olds can learn about sex acts that I don't feel comfortable repeating here in this chamber with parliamentary privilege? So this book is acceptable—okay, great—but God forbid your child scrolls through Instagram or TikTok. Are you serious, Prime Minister?

How does the government propose to stop children accessing social media except with some kind of digital ID being required to interact online? That seems to be where we're going. And here is the real issue: is the government actually interested in protecting children or potentially more motivated to roll out the digital ID system? Protecting kids from the harms of social media, in my opinion, could be nothing more than a Trojan horse. We have increasingly authoritarian governments throughout the West that are intent on removing freedom of speech and monitoring everything that is said online. I'm sure they're going to protest and say that it's not their agenda, that their only concern is safety et cetera—and the gullible might believe it, just as people believed that masks and vaccines were for their safety, the crackdown on mis and disinformation was for their safety and the removal of their guns was for their safety. Garbage! It's about government power; that's what it's about.

Promising to protect the citizenry from all manner of harms, the government convinces us to give them more and more power until, eventually, none of us are safe from the most dangerous entity in the entirety of human history—the state. I don't doubt that children need protecting, but the people best placed to protect children are their parents. We don't need a nanny state dictating how old your child must be before he or she can watch a funny video on Instagram or communicate with their grandparents on Messenger. We don't need Prime Minister Albanese or his eSafety Commissioner policing our interactions online. Once we give the government power, the only thing that it wants is more power—and it never ends.

Both Labor and the coalition have promised to ban children from social media. They'll tell us about protecting kids, like I said before, but it's really about corporate and government surveillance into every corner of our digital lives. Social media is of course not a safe space for kids; I agree. But the answer is not to strip away everyone's freedoms under the pretence of protection. Once we lose freedoms, they're gone for good. Like I said, the best people to protect children are those children's parents, not the government. And the greatest form of governance in the world is the nuclear family. Delegating family responsibilities to the state never ends harm; it only serves to perpetuate harm. We must resist government overreach.