Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, it's been tabled? Thank you. It must be so good! One could have been dropped off at my office, but they didn't even do that.

There is a real issue here. As Senator Hanson-Young said: this is going to happen before Christmas, seriously? You've had 2½ years. We've known social media has been a big problem for a long time, and you really want to move this through this quickly? I really need to have expert advice on this over the weekend and a little bit further, because, quite frankly, how do you expect people to respond in five days? This bill no doubt could be made better if we had more time to get it right.

What I don't want to do here is make you two look like this is all about helping those under 16 so we can do something about the abuse that's going on online and young kids stop taking their own lives, when the bill isn't done properly. How is this supposed to be effective in helping those kids under 16? How? You can't be serious. Honestly, I would rather take a few more months and get this right and make sure this bill is correct and actually works.

Let's be honest here: you're throwing it back on the mums and dads. What about these social media people? What about these platforms? What part are they playing in this? What are they doing? Are you a bit too scared to take them on because they'll go at you in an election? There is a lack of courage in this place once again—for the sake of our kids.

By the way, if you think one move is going to fix this, you are delusional. It's called social intelligence, and, until you start teaching it to the next generation so they learn and have the courage to say no and know what the right thing to do in life is, it's really not going to change. You want to hit one thing, but you don't want to put in other bits and pieces. How about we look at the social intelligence and running it through the curriculum for kids that are five or six years of age? How about you do that? How about you look at these boot camps? You don't even want to speak about that because—goodness me!—you might get a little bit of slap-back before an election. Once again, you don't have the courage to say, 'Your kids can go and do a boot camp for 10 days, and we'll get them off these damned screens.' That's how it works. If you think one move is going to work, you are absolutely delusional.

Go and see what the Scandinavian countries are doing. We are building more detention centres and putting our kids in them. They are failing miserably—the kids are becoming better criminals. It is failing! You have to start with the next generation, and you are not doing that. So what other moves are you going to make alongside this? What courage do both you major parties have to actually make a difference to the new generation of kids coming through, to make them more resilient, to make them able to have the courage to say, 'No, we're not going to be a part of this,' to say no to drugs and alcohol and screen time? This just won't work. Leaving it in the parents' hands, without taking those social media companies by the throat, is never going to work. And five days? God almighty! What a joke this is in here today! What an absolute joke!

How about we just get one thing right in here, and we do it at 110 per cent so it actually works? Why can't you do that? Oh, no; you want to have this big headline, 'We've done this for your under-16 kids.' I tell you what, Australians: it's probably not going to work, because, when they run things like this through, you can guarantee it's got gaps bigger than your front teeth. It won't work. You've got to put other things in place alongside this. So what exactly are you doing to put those things in place? And what are they? This won't work alone. It just won't.