Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Prime Minister Albanese says his government will impose a ban on younger teenagers and children using social media, but it's not going to happen for a while. It may be even as long as two years. I wonder why that is. It's because this government's draconian digital ID system is needed for it to work. Without digital ID, this proposal can't work.

Make no mistake—Labor's proposal has little to do with the very important task of protecting our kids online and everything to do with government control over our online activity. I warned for a very long time about the rise of the surveillance state, where governments and corporations monitor everything we do online, and now it's all coming true right before our eyes. Soon you won't even be able to use the internet without a digital ID, and it gets worse. Big tech companies tell us that, to make it work, they're going to need a 'collection of new personal data such as facial imagery or government-issued ID'. It's not going to stop at kids on social media; it's going to be used for everything in your digital life: facial scans, fingerprints and who knows what other data will soon be needed just to simply exist online. You can kiss your privacy goodbye, and you can kiss goodbye your freedom of speech.

We all want our kids to be safe online, but safety is always the first excuse. The safety of our children can't be used as a Trojan Horse for the real objectives: control over the narrative and profits for the corporate media sector. Now these Labor governments—who, by the way, are the same Labor governments who do nothing about the sexually explicit books in our kids' libraries or about the life-altering puberty-blocking drugs being fed to them across the nation—tell us that they're the ones who are worried about the safety of our children online. Give me a break.