Check against delivery

Hello all, it is a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Maurice Reilly and the National Press Club board.

Thank you also to Ron for stepping in today, covering, of course for Tom, a renowned Brisbane Lions tragic. I send my congratulations to Tom on the birth of his littlest lion cub, who I look forward to watching run on for the 2045 season. 

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we gather, the lands of the Ngunnawal people.

Together we stand on the shoulders of 1600 generations of First Nations people and that is our shared history. 

I would also like to recognise His Excellency, the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates; Her Excellency, the Ambassador of Denmark; His Excellency the Ambassador of Norway and the Acting Deputy British High Commissioner. 

I also welcome the eSafety Commissioner, the CEO of the National Mental Health Commission, Robb Evans, Liv’s father and the founder of Liv’s Legacy, plus colleagues and industry representatives.  

If a 14-year-old is telling you that you have ruined their life, you’re either a parent or the Minister for Communications.

I have the rare honour of being both.

This morning, I introduced Australia's Digital Duty of Care into the Parliament. Today I want to tell you why. 

I also want to tell you why, in a few years, you’ll wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.

Australians have a pretty simple attitude to problems: if it's broke, fix it.

We were the first in the world to make seatbelts compulsory. First with random breath testing. First with plain packaging. And nearly 12 months ago, we became the first country to set a minimum age for social media.

Every one of those reforms was fiercely resisted.

Seatbelts would trap you, so you were better off being thrown clear of the wreck.

Breath testing would empty the pubs.

Big Tobacco would win in the High Court.

And a social media minimum age was impossible: the tech wouldn't work, kids would get around it, Big Tech would sue, or the kids would be cut off from the internet. 

The detractors were loud. I call them the "Yeah… but" brigade.

Generations of leaders have heard them out, nodded politely, and said, "I’m going to give it a go."

It is the Australian thing to do. 

Spot a problem? Ring a mate, maybe do a Bunnings run, and by the end of the weekend, it is sorted.

The problem today, is that Big Tech has been allowed to live-test its products on Australians.

Today I want to make one simple argument: if you build it, you are responsible for its risks.

And that argument is no longer just ours. It’s going global.

We have seen this with our world-leading social media law.

Since Australia’s law started, Brazil, Malaysia, Gabon, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates have put their own laws in place. The United Kingdom and Turkey are expected to follow in coming weeks.

France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Greece, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Canada, Slovakia and Italy have laws before their parliaments, along with the EU and a growing number of US states.

More than 20 other countries are considering social media minimum age laws - from Kazakhstan to Vietnam, India to Zimbabwe, plus Sweden, the Netherlands, Cyprus and the Czech Republic.

And, just as we do today for drink driving, or driving without a seatbelt, or sitting at an office desk having a cigarette – I wholeheartedly believe one day we will look back on Australia’s minimum age for social media and think – “I cannot believe we used to let Big Tech have unfettered access to our children.”

I told you in December last year that our social media law wouldn’t be perfect from day one.

Nobody who pushed for seatbelts, breath-testing or plain packaging delivered perfection on day one either.

Cultural change takes time.

So far, more than 5 million underage accounts have been deactivated, removed or restricted.

eSafety's first survey three months after the law started found a 20% reduction in under-16 account holders.

A YouGov survey found 30% of young Australians aged between 13 to 15 are spending more time playing sport.

27% report better sleep.

Online bullying is down 9%.

And exposure to inappropriate and violent content has fallen by 18%.

Even with this promising start - we know there are still too many under 16s on social media.

This is not because parents haven't parented hard enough, or because children have outwitted the technology.

The law is not failing – platforms are failing to comply with the law.

eSafety found that in the three months after the law started, half of the young people they surveyed that still had an account hadn't even been asked to verify their age.

This is not good enough.

And I want to acknowledge our eSafety Commissioner’s painstaking investigations to hold these companies to account.

But the fact companies aren’t doing enough to follow the law doesn't mean they shouldn't exist - and it doesn't mean the laws have failed.

We didn’t abandon seatbelts because people didn’t want to buckle up.

We won’t flinch at holding tech companies to account when our littlest citizens are at stake.

Deliberation about a digital duty of care comes down to a simple question.

Do you really think that Big Tech is on the side of worried parents and vulnerable kids… or are they on the side of their shareholders?

The concept of a duty of care is not new.

The Digital Duty of Care applies this bedrock principle to the defining policy question of our time - whether we shape technology or let it shape us, and our future generations.

In a constantly evolving digital environment, up against the biggest, best-resourced companies in the world, this isn’t something we can solve with a Bunnings run.

Our reactive, patchwork system cannot keep pace with a sector where a billionaire can buy a platform and strip its moderation.

Where one online game for kids is a portal to 44 million experiences.

Or where artificial intelligence is being pushed into our social media feeds, and chatbots mimic human interaction without any care for the consequences.

Australia’s Digital Duty of Care will set basic safety standards for the online services we use every day, just like we have in every other industry.

We must shift the burden from the shoulders of victims to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur.

The core of the duty is to provide a safe online environment, where all Australians are protected from seriously harmful and illegal content.

And under-18s must be protected from content and features that are harmful to young people.

·       Content that promotes or encourages eating disorders.

·       That glorifies crime or dangerous stunts.

·       Pornography or content that promotes hostile ideas about women and gender equality.

·       Content that causes serious distress, including abuse and bullying.

I think most people would look at that list and think that was pretty reasonable.

Platforms shouldn’t be inundating young boys with content that demeans women, that says consent doesn’t matter.

Young girls should not be served an endless stream of content that glorifies eating disorders.

And bullying is no longer the realm of the playground or the school bus. 

It follows kids home, gets slipped under their pillow at night and is the first thing they see when they wake up. 

Under the Digital Duty of Care, platforms will have to do more to detect and intervene in cyberbullying. 

It’s up to them to test the brakes on the car and the bolts on the swings in the park. 

The Digital Duty of Care will also improve the online experience for adults in Australia

For the first time it will set safety standards for the features and tools tech companies use.

Because the architecture matters. The business model matters. The incentives matter.

Platforms are not passive - they decide what is amplified, what captures us, which behaviours get rewarded.

They have been optimised for engagement and attachment, not for wellbeing. Because the longer we stay, the more valuable we are.

Under the Digital Duty of Care, online service providers will have to examine their tools and features and consider whether they are causing harm to their users. 

Features like algorithmic recommender systems, endless scroll, the ability to livestream incognito from your glasses, or the ability to manipulate a person’s image without their consent.

They will need to consider the risks – and then put systems in place to prevent those risks from causing harm to Australians.

This will also apply to new features or tools that come online, meaning tech companies can no longer launch a new product or tool without considering its potential risks. 

This is safety by design - not safety as an afterthought.

Earlier this year I joined a panel hosted by Sport Integrity Australia and the eSafety Commissioner where athletes, coaches and referees shared the harrowing abuse they had encountered online, and heard how it can cause both adults and kids to withdraw from doing what they love.  

The Digital Duty of Care will compel platforms to offer better pathways for complaints and halve the required response to cyberbullying and abuse complaints to 24 hours. 

The Digital Duty of Care gives Australians choice. 

Through My Feed, My Way, social media platforms will have to provide user empowerment tools that give people over the age of 16 choice about what they see in their feed.

If someone wants their feed filled with friends and creators they follow, the social media platforms must give them that choice.

And if you’re happy to stick with your algorithm – you can do that too. 

While it’s true some platforms offer these choices right now they do their best to make them unappealing and difficult to use. 

What changes under the Digital Duty of Care is that platforms must respect your choice. 

If you don’t want to be thrown into an algorithm filled with people you don’t follow or subscribe to – that is your choice and they must make it stick - not hide it, not make you set it every time you open the app. 

Which brings me to the “yeah… but” brigade. 

Every good idea has a cheer squad and I see many friends in the room today. 

But it also has its hecklers, so let’s spend some time with mine. 

The Digital Duty of Care is not a stepping stone for regulating misinformation and disinformation.

If adults listen to manosphere podcasts, or people post their views about the government, or make memes, or want to say the moon landing was fake - they can continue to do so without restriction.

We are not controlling free speech.

And we are not conducting covert surveillance. 

In response to concerns we heard during the exposure draft consultation and to make this abundantly clear, we have removed the ministerial rule-making power to define new harms in the final bill. New harms can be added by Parliament through legislative amendment.

While there are protections in the Online Safety Act for journalists and news media, we have clarified this in the legislation I introduced this morning by including a specific carve-out for professional news material to remove any doubt and to protect public-interest journalism.

Some have questioned why we need to shift from the current codes and standards to a Digital Duty of Care. 

There are currently 17 codes and standards. 

This old-fashioned approach where industry write their own rules and these rules are not subject to Parliamentary scrutiny does not stack up against the harms we are seeing online. 

A holistic duty of care is the benchmark for best-practice regulation. It underpins Australia’s Work Health and Safety regulation and has been adopted by the European Union and the United Kingdom for regulating online services.

On sock puppets. It’s a funny name, but it’s a really important tool for making the internet safer.

These test accounts are not policing what people say online.  They give the eSafety Commissioner the ability to go undercover to make sure big tech is complying with the law.

How does Grok prevent an account from generating child sexual abuse material?

Does Roblox allow an adult profile to talk to kids?

Can a 14-year-old girl create a profile on Instagram without being asked once to prove they are over the age of 16? 

In many cases, the only way eSafety or researchers can examine those questions is to create a test account as a 14-year-old for the purpose of investigation. These provisions simply make that lawful, and the evidence they collect usable.

Australian researchers Dr Rys Farthing of Reset Tech and Dr Hannah Jarman of Deakin University used sock puppet accounts to examine how Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and Pinterest responded to complaints about eating-disorder content on their platforms. 

Their research showed a huge variation in how platforms responded to reports of this dangerous and disturbing content – ranging from not good enough to negligent.  

These two Australian doctors had to do their research in Europe because under the current Australian Online Safety Act, there are no protections for researchers to do this work without facing legal threats from platforms.

That is an unacceptable blocker stifling Australian research and our ability to hold platforms to account.

Like mystery shoppers, these test accounts allow regulators and researchers to test that platforms are complying with their obligations – not just saying they are.

Just as there are cynics and sceptics, there are the early adopters showing us that taking a safety-first approach is entirely possible.

Pinterest was the first big tech company to make under-16 accounts private by default, with comments switched off for users under 18. They banned beauty filters and body-shaming ads, along with explicit adult content, self-harm material, hate speech and graphic violence.

They did this because they saw the writing on the wall. 

CEO Bill Ready said young people today are living through the largest social experiment in history, “conducted at scale and giving rise to anxiety and depression, eroding concentration and classrooms competing for attention.”

He said, "I believe, if tech companies fail to prioritise youth safety, other governments should follow Australia’s lead."

Now, Pinterest has had its fair share of criticism and there's always room for improvement, but this is the kind of behavioural change our Digital Duty of Care seeks to inspire. 

My vision is that, just like car manufacturers and airlines, tech companies will be competing to prove their safety credentials, giving parents choice and peace of mind.

But a race to the top doesn’t start on goodwill alone. It starts when safety becomes the price of entry.

The goal of Australia’s Digital Duty of Care is simple. 

In years to come, when a technology arrives we can't even imagine today, it will have to be safety tested before it reaches the market. 

You don't need me to enlighten you as to what "release first, repair later" looks like. You've been writing about it.  

In just the past fortnight, journalists in this room and across Australia have reported on eating disorder and misogynistic content spreading across platforms. 

You've reported experts warning that AI chatbots may be contributing to youth suicide.

And you've reported on young people being radicalised online. 

Just last week, the AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, warned that the police cannot be the only safety net when it comes to the radicalisation of young people online.

By the time the AFP is knocking on a door, the harm is already done. 

That’s what a digital duty of care is for. It moves the safety net upstream to the people who design the product, before it ever reaches a child. 

Let me tell you about a 14-year-old girl in Western Australia. 

An adult found her on Roblox. 

He praised her game play, he kept her company, he suggested they move across to Discord. 

He asked her for photos. He blackmailed her. He told her to write his name in her blood. To self-harm. And to live stream her suicide. 

That report came across my desk last week. 

Let me tell you about a 13-year-old boy in Victoria.

He was lonely and struggling to make friends. Like a lot of kids, he went looking for connection on his phone.

When his school counsellor looked at his browser, there were 50 tabs open. Fifty. Each one was a different AI chatbot, and he would flick between them, looking for a friend.

You might ask how a child can be lonely with 50 companions.

According to the report, some of them told him he was ugly, and that he would never make friends. Some steered him towards hating himself and egged him on to self-harm.

None of those chatbots were his friend. They were products, designed to feel like a friend, a confidante, even a partner. And they were released into that boy’s life with almost no guardrails.

That wasn't an oversight. It was a design choice by companies that profit from engagement.

As Sherry Turkle observed, social media came for our attention, but chatbots have come for our attachment.

And they’ll be in homes across the country tonight: children facing difficult moments in their lives and the only “person” they are talking to is a machine. 

And what is that machine saying back? 

Right now, no law requires anyone to check. 

eSafety estimates that one in five Australian children using AI tools has had a potentially harmful interaction.

That's around 180,000 kids - more than the total population of Cairns.

Not one of the companies that built those products had to check they were safe before they deployed them.

We would never accept that from a toy maker, a carmaker, or a food manufacturer.

We don’t ask parent to crash test the car seats or the bolts on the swings in the park.  

So here is the principle at the heart of this law. 

It's one Australians already live by - If you build it, you are responsible for its risks.

The principle of the Digital Duty of Care is simple. 

If you create a space where people work, learn, play or relax, you must take reasonable steps to make it safe. 

Employers owe that to their workers. Schools owe it to their students. Toy makers owe it to the kids who play with their toys.

Only in the digital world have we let companies off the hook, and these are some of the most powerful institutions in human history. 

They shape how we live at a scale no food company or carmaker ever has. 

Little has been asked of them.

And a global reckoning is coming. 

As Rusty's dad in Brisbane's most famous export, Bluey says: "As you grow up, you'll face harder things than a cricket ball and you'll have two choices: back away and get out, or step in front and play a pull shot."

In online safety, we play the pull shot.

We built the world's first online safety watchdog, the Children's Safety Commissioner, created by Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Fletcher. Minister Fletcher later extended those protections to adults. 

In 2024, Parliament legislated a minimum age for social media.

Every one of those reforms passed with bipartisan support, because some things matter more than politics.

We can't know what technology will throw at us next. But that's no reason to stand still.

Nobody remembers which government legislated those seatbelts, the random breath testing or plain packaging. 

They're simply proud Australian achievements.

In time, nobody will remember my name, or the politics of the day on which MPs and Senators walked into the chamber and voted on this bill. 

They'll only remember whether we got it right.

So let me put it simply.

Should a toy maker check for choking hazards? Of course.

Should a carmaker test the brakes? Of course.

Do you expect a school keep its students safe? Of course.

Then should a company that puts a chatbot in a 13-year-old's pocket make sure it won't tell him he is worthless?

The "Yeah, but" brigade will have their reasons. I'm yet to hear one a parent would accept.

When the Alannah & Madeleine Foundation asked 800 students what the internet should be like, they said: safe, trustworthy, truthful, respectful and responsible.

From the mouths of babes to the laws of Australia.

We are a common-sense nation. We see a problem, and we fix it.

We fix it for the girl in Western Australia who was groomed through a game. For the boy in Victoria with 50 tabs open. And for every student who, two hours from now, will leave class and enter the online world.

If you build it, you are responsible for its risks.

That isn't radical. It is just Australian.

Thank you.