Communications Minister Anika Wells has defended the federal government’s duty of care laws, arguing tech giants are “live testing” their products on Australians without basic safety standards.
Speaking on ABC News on Thursday, Ms Wells compared online safety to compulsory crash testing for child car seats, insisting the burden needed to shift from parents and teachers to social media platforms.
“What I’m worried about is the serious harm that Australian children are suffering on online services,” Ms Wells said.
“At the moment we have tech companies live testing their products on Australians, without ever having to go through a basic safety standard.
“We don’t expect Australian parents to crash test car seats, we expect it to be sold safely off the shelves.”
She said there was no one safety testing online products until children had them “in their pockets” and were using them for hours every day.
“It’s basic safety standards that every other industry is already subject to,” Ms Wells said.
“At the moment the risk is being borne by Australian parents and teachers, seeing the change in our children.
“It’s not fair these things be live tested on our children by companies who make money out of it.”
Under the proposed legislation tech giants face cumulative fines of more than $200m from the eSafety Commissioner if they breach both the social media minimum age laws and the digital duty of care, with individual fines reaching $109m.
Ms Wells has confirmed the legislation, which will be introduced into the House later on Thursday, has been amended, scrapping the ministerial powers to define new harms.
New harms can instead be added by parliament through legislative amendment.
“It has been a clear stumbling block for other political parties. They wanted parliament to have that scrutiny so what will happen now is I will bring in an amendment to the Online Safety Act when I feel that we need to declare a serious harm and the parliament will consider it,” she told Today.
There would also be a “carve-out” for professional news material.
More to come