Nicolette Boele MP for Bradfield

My question is for the Minister for Social Services.

The Minister is the longest-serving woman in the House, and I'm Bradfield's first female member. Recently, I delivered a speech here written by young women from my electorate, but I fear that the violent attack on the Member for Indi will teach them to retreat from public life.

Violence against women, whether physical, spoken, or in writing, is used to silence them. When it keeps women out of this place, it decides who represents us. That is not democracy.

What does the minister say to the young women of Australia now, wondering whether public life is safe for them?

Minister for Social Services - Tanya Plibersek

Thank you so much, Mr Speaker, and thank you so much to the member for Bradfield for really a very important question.

I'm not surprised if there are young women all over Australia looking at the horrific attack on Helen Haines and wondering whether a life in public is worth it, whether it's safe for them.

What I would say to them is: 100 per cent, it is worth it.

Every single day in this place, we make important decisions that change this country, change it for the better, and we can't vacate the field to the people who would stop us from doing that.

It's true that in my time here, almost three decades, the tenor of public debate has changed a great deal. It is more violent in its tone, and I think the industrial scale of the abuse that all of us receive, but particularly the women here, has changed. It's been supercharged by social media.

But I'd say this about social media: that's no accident either.

Social media companies profit from the division they drive in our society, and that's why all of us have a responsibility to resist that too, to resist that division, to resist the violence and discord that the big tech giants are forcing on us.

We see it not just in political commentary; we see it in relationships between people, and particularly our youngest Australians.

It's no coincidence that the explosion of social media tracks pretty closely with the explosion of sexual violence we've seen, where both the perpetrator and the victim are under the age of 18.

It's also no coincidence that practices like strangulation have exploded at the same time as social media, online pornography and the manosphere are promoting those sorts of violent, dangerous practices.

So we have an opportunity, all of us as elected members, to play our role as individuals and as a Parliament. As individuals, to use this moment to change the way each of us behaves, but as a collective, as a parliament, to resist the pernicious influence of social media, to resist the tech giants trying to tell us how to run our democracy, how to run our relationships.

And I think if we miss this opportunity to take this time as a turning point for our country, we will have missed a really important opportunity.