Social Media Regulation

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:40): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on the Malinauskas government's plan to ban social media for children, along with the reaction to this initiative?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:40): I want to thank the member for Adelaide for her question. It's a question I know that is on the mind of not just the member for Adelaide or indeed the entirety of the parliamentary team in the Labor Party but of parents around the country.

Today on the front page of every daily metropolitan we saw the announcement that the commonwealth, with bipartisan support at a federal level, is taking up the cause of putting an age limit in place for access to social media. There was one paper in the country that didn't have it on the front page because they had other news they had to cover, and that is quite understandable, but this is an example of South Australia leading the country.

That is something I hope that South Australians can take a degree of satisfaction in, because it was South Australia through this government that initiated the French review that examined how we could implement a ban on social media services themselves providing access to young people getting on their accounts. The reason why this matters so much is we definitively know, from a growing body of peer-reviewed research internationally, that social media platforms are doing children harm. They industrialise addiction, they profiteer very deliberately off that addiction, and it does children harm.

In every other circumstance for every other product and service that we can think of as a community that we know does children harm and there is evidence to demonstrate that, governments and parliaments step in and act. We were willing to do that here in South Australia. It led to the commissioning of former Chief Justice of the High Court Robert French providing the South Australian government with a report—276 pages worth. It is truly a report that best demonstrates what thoughtful engagement with stakeholders looks like and the practical application of the law can look like.

The fact that this report has now not just been accepted by this government but basically every other jurisdiction around the country, including now the commonwealth, demonstrates the value of Mr Robert French's work. I want to pay my gratitude, along with the state government's gratitude, to him for his commitment. He did this without any benefit in terms of remuneration, he did this as a service to the young people of our country, and we all owe him great thanks for it.

The prospect, as announced by the Prime Minister today, that this is legislation that will pass the federal parliament, ideally this year, speaks to the urgency that we want to see. It speaks to the fact that this matters to parents and children now. Every day that passes where these social media companies can operate completely unregulated with reckless abandon to the impact that it is having on children and parents needs to come to an end, and that is why the urgency is very much welcomed.

The other point I will make, as has been reflected in the Prime Minister's remarks and reflected in the report itself, is it is not just about a change in the law, it is not just about an imposition on social media services. It is also about working with families, working with parents. It is almost an impossible task for a parent to look at a young child and tell them they are not allowed to engage with their friends. Social media services have become part of the necessary infrastructure for children to be able to do that, and that represents a sad state of affairs where social media services act as critical infrastructure to engage with one another. We want to remove that from the equation. We want to give parents the ability to be able to say no, in the knowledge that they are supported by the law. The reform that we are delivering here in South Australia is nation-leading to the extent that it is now national policy, and that is something we should be very grateful for indeed.