E&OE TRANSCRIPT

PRESS CONFERENCE

BRISBANE

WEDNESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2026

Subjects: Preventing Tech-based Abuse of Women Grants Program; Digital Duty of Care; OpenAI breach; Brisbane 2032

RENEE COFFEY, MEMBER FOR GRIFFITH: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Davies Park in West End. It's wonderful to welcome back here Minister Plibersek and Minister Wells alongside the eSafety Commissioner and Will from the Museum of Sticks and Stones.

Today, I'm really pleased to welcome the ministers back into the community to talk about one of the ways that the Albanese Labor Government is addressing violence against women. We know that what happens online has an impact on people in the real world, in homes, on the street, in our schools, and in our universities. One of the surprising things that I encountered in coming into public life was actually the amount of online abuse that I receive. Its viciousness, its relentlessness, and if you speak to any Australian woman in public life, you’ll hear the same thing. Indeed, any Australian woman experiences this. And with the rise of the manosphere and the hurtful, hate-filled ideologies online, it's really important that this work happens. So, it's my absolute honour to introduce Minister Wells this morning.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND MINISTER FOR SPORT ANIKA WELLS: Thank you to the pride of Brisbane, Renee, who was elected in the 2025 election. We're so glad to have her on the good side, fighting the good fight with us in Canberra.

Thank you for coming this morning. In many ways, online technology has made life easier, whether that is using your banking apps or signing excursion notes and learning to run 5K on an app. But those same tools can be used for abuse, from bullying and harassment, to stalking and to coercive control. Every Australian should feel safe when they are using their phone, a tablet, or a computer. But we know that that's not the case for everybody, and overwhelmingly, it is women and girls that are targeted online. More than two-thirds of complaints to the eSafety Commissioner about cyber-based abuse or image-based abuse are from women and girls, and at the same time, boys and young men are being fed content that pushes them towards the manosphere with lightning speed. This needs to change, and the Albanese Government is tackling it from all angles.

So today, I'm proud to announce the outcome of Round 3 of the Preventing Tech-based Abuse of Women Grants Program. Under this round, we are investing $3.5 million in 12 projects. This program supports grassroots projects that create positive online experiences that empower people to challenge harmful narratives online and give women and girls the tools they need to address this kind of abuse. But the responsibility cannot just be on people to stop tech-facilitated abuse or for us to deal with the harm after it has occurred. The Digital Duty of Care will require online services to identify the harms that their platforms may create and to mitigate against those harms before they occur. And it calls out misogynistic content as causing harm to young people alongside physical and sexual violence. It will also ban nudifying apps, which just have no place in our country. Everyone in Australia has the right to be safe online. That's what the Digital Duty of Care will deliver.

I'll hand over to Tanya and then to Julie to talk us through this program and then to William from the Museum of Stick and Stones, who was a previous grant recipient.

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Thank you so much. It's so great to be here with Minister Anika Wells, with the eSafety Commissioner, and of course, with Renee Coffey, who's the local member of this beautiful part of Brisbane.

We know that a lot of harm from the online world is spilling into real life. Parents will tell you that. Experts will tell you that. We see it with our own eyes. It's particularly true for young men. We know that a young man can be looking at soccer scores one minute, looking up car videos, and within 23 minutes, that young man is being fed misogynistic content online. And unfortunately, that is spilling over into real world harms. Sixty percent of young people will tell you they've experienced sexual strangulation in a sexual encounter. There is no safe way to strangle someone. This is something that's being promoted through social media, through online pornography, and the harms of it are very clearly spilling into the real world.

In fact, what we've seen in recent years is a lot of great progress on family, domestic, and sexual violence, but some areas of real emerging concern. We see that teenage boys are now the most likely perpetrators of sexual violence, and teenage girls are the most likely victims of sexual violence. The sort of assaults that we're seeing, including dangerous practices like strangulation, again, spilling over from the online world into the real world. Parents and teachers are reporting a rise in misogynistic language and disrespectful behavior in classrooms. You see that online influence spilling into the real world in a way that is profoundly harmful. And yet, we have an opportunity with grant programs like this to use the online world as a force for good, for positive communication, and to give young people a sense of belonging and information that can help them navigate the complexities of the modern world as well.

So this is an opportunity, through this grant program, to start to counter some of those harmful influences that we're seeing. Our Commonwealth Government has invested more than any previous government in reducing rates of family, domestic and sexual violence, more than $4.4 billion since coming to government. And this program is one example, from the communications portfolio, of the very important work that's being done in that portfolio. I think this is a reminder of another important change that our federal government is making. The business of reducing family, domestic, and sexual violence is not the work of one level of government or of one portfolio. It's something that we need to address right across government, across different levels of government, bringing to bear every tool that we have to reduce those rates of family, domestic and sexual violence.

The National Cabinet has recently agreed that the next National Action Plan for Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence will have a focus on sexual assault and will have a focus on online harms. Projects like this will help us meet this new challenge.

JULIE INMAN GRANT, ESAFETY COMMISSIONER: Thank you Ministers and Renee and Will.

As Minister Wells indicated, being the eSafety Commissioner can be a tough gig. We're dealing with people in distress all the time. My investigators are looking at child sexual abuse material, image-based abuse and, increasingly, AI-enabled harms, which have the same impact on the victim-survivor as if their own intimate image had been shared without consent. But doing a grant program like this is what brings a smile to our face. Through this, we have the opportunity to really nurture seeds of hope and help those grow and flourish into optimism and to community-based programs that really make a difference. This is the third round of Tech-Based Abuse Against Women Grants, and we had about 225 excellent applications worth about $70 million for a $3.5 million pot. So that tells you how much need there is and how much community-based work needs to be done.

And I think it's also worth saying that it's not the online world itself that's given rise to the manosphere, but rather it created spaces and places for this ideology to fester. Big tech, the tech bros, are called that for a reason, and the manosphere influencers are profiting from teen insecurity. And the work around the Digital Duty of Care and My Feed, My Way very much goes to the “outragement” that fills those algorithms and makes the recommender systems send these young men – where they may be looking for fitness information, for role models – into rabbit holes that they never intended to go down.

So we have to take a holistic approach to all of this work, prevention, education through strong regulatory tools, both investigations and complaints, but also these systemic tools, where we're putting the onus back on the platforms to create safer spaces by design. And then also future casting and looking at future trends so that we can get ahead of these trends and give Australian boys and men and women and girls the supports that they need. Thank you very much.

WILLIAM SMITH-STUBBS, MUSEUM OF STICKS AND STONES: Morning. I think it’s really tempting to talk about young men being in crisis, but I really want to relay to you what's more important is the message that young men are responding to crisis. Over the last few generations, we have deteriorated as social scaffolding that helps young men figure out how to become men and then looking ahead at a future that looks increasingly bleak and increasingly hopeless. Our research, with thanks to eSafety's funding, allowed us to talk to young men and find out why they're being drawn into misogynistic content and the manosphere itself. And the reality is there is a logic to it. They are seeking hope, they are seeking belonging, a community and validation and some guidance about how to be a man. And as a young man, if you are looking for that guidance, the natural place you'll turn is the internet. And while we absolutely admit there is wonderful things on the internet, it is vitally important that we do invest in those real-world scaffolding to help young men to find community, to find hope, to understand there is a future they can be part of. And with this work, in a couple of months we'll be releasing a research report about our work, what we've heard from young men, as well as documentary and workshops for schools.

But the most important thing that we can take away from this work that we've learned, and has surprised us, is that there is a logic and an empathy that we must have in talking to young men, not at them but with them, about what their future looks like. And that’s the only way we will help them to live fulfilling, healthy and more empathetic lives. Thank you.

JOURNALIST: One second, just before you head off, would you be able to just explain [indistinct] grant recipient, tell me a little bit about what you’re using that money for?

SMITH-STUBBS: Yeah, sure. So, Museum of Sticks and Stones. We are a mental health charity, we've been around since 2011. Our earliest campaign was called “Soften the F Up”, aimed at young men, male suicides. So, we've been talking about men and their issues for a long, long time. And it's something that I personally have experience in. We approached eSafety and that grant and we were a bit cheeky and said, look, we know it's about helping women, but the way to do that is to understand what men are going through and how to help them.

So the first tranche of that work was a research process. We spoke with over 200 young men in depth with the Social Research Centre as a partner to understand what their experiences are, what are they seeing online. What they told us is that misogynistic content is actually very common. It's normalised. And our question was, do you understand it’s actually harmful? And the response was, yes, that's the point. It’s a method of communication to express their rage and their anger – misguided, but it is a communication effort.

After that, our documentary comes out in October/November, and then we’re working with schools and young men to help them craft a future that is more hopeful, more inclusive, and more community focused.

JOURNALIST: Ministers, Commissioner, the tech space is constantly evolving. Is it possible to get in front of all the potential tech-based harms?

WELLS: Thanks Ellen. I think that's why I talked today about this being something that we attack from all angles in the Albanese Government. Yes, we have grant programs that helps people like William do great work with the people that are interacting with today, tonight online. Giving people the tools that they need to address the harms, think positively about what we want men to see themselves, positive role modelling for men, equipping women with tools that they need to grapple with the harm that they are suffering online. But the answer to your question is Digital Duty of Care disrupts the current ecosystem. It resets so that the balance and the onus is placed on the shoulders of big tech to identify harm, and to mitigate against harm before it happens, rather than the onus being on the shoulders of victims, which is where it currently sits.

INMAN GRANT: I was just going to say I’ve either worked in the technology industry or regulated the technology industry for more than 35 years, and when I entered in the 1990s, you go in with a sense of hope and optimism that technology will change things, and it has. But we now find ourselves in a very, very different atmosphere. And I’m just grateful that the government has backed us all the way through. We have a leader who was just at the UN, standing up for digital safety and for wanting to move the bar on AI forward.

I will say there has never been a more fraught (indistinct) environment and it's becoming geopolitical. The asymmetries between the power, wealth and stealth that the technology companies have versus small regulators like ours in Australia is unbalanced but that doesn't mean we won't take a swing, and this is why we're also focused on engaging with regulators around the globe. We were the first in the world, for the first seven years, and we started the Global Online Safety Regulators Network. We will be hosting that network of regulators in Australia later in November. We are stronger and better together.

JOURNALIST: I guess just on that, the AI companies met with Donald Trump overnight. They signed a voluntary accord that said every company is responsible for developing its own technologies safely. Are you comfortable with the ability of these big AI companies to police themselves?

INMAN GRANT: Well, clearly, they haven't policed themselves or we wouldn't have had the OpenAI Medicare hack or the Hugging Face hack or anything else. In 2018, I tried to work with industry to build this safety by design initiative, because I knew it had to be done with industry to industry. But there are some incentives in the system, and with the way that technology is being built, and this is now a mainstream conversation about algorithms. For years and years companies have said that safety means friction, but I say let’s harness that information to make things safer places. But when you have algorithms that are optimised for outrage and hate, and there's a vicious circle where the more outrageous you are, the more you're rewarded, the more the technology company is rewarded, means safety is not a primary concern and that's again what the Digital Duty of Care means to do. For 30 years, we've given them an opportunity to create safer spaces online. I don't think anybody standing here or anyone in Australia thinks they've achieved that. They've had time - the end of self-regulation is over. And it's great to see that we, along with others, want to take this on and create better online futures for our people.

JOURNALIST: You said earlier that when you first started, you felt like technology was a sort of hopeful industry, I suppose, or it looked for the betterment of humankind. Do you think that has changed in the sense that now the tech bros, as you put it, are more malevolent in their intent? And what does that mean for trying to regulate when you need them on side?

INMAN GRANT: Well, I think there are good people everywhere in the tech industry including the AI industry. What is really disappointing is that we've got patterns in history, whether it was the beginning of the internet or the rise of social media of moving fast and breaking things, AI did exactly the same thing in 2023. What I find astounding is that they are actually saying: we can't control the technology we've built, you need to regulate us. But at the same time, we have this AI whiplash – regulate us, don’t regulate us, regulate us the way we want to be regulated, maybe come up with a global organisation, let’s develop standards. I think we’ve given them enough time to show that they can build safety by design through every stage of the lifecycle. That hasn't happened, and this is where we find ourselves, in a very perilous place. We have to take control now. We of course will always rather work with the industry rather than against them, but something has to change.

JOURNALIST: This might be better placed to the minister, but on the nuts and bolts of exactly how this specific program will work, can you just talk us through- like, will this be an advertising blitz? Will you be going into schools and talking to students? How will this play out?

WELLS: It’s not really those things. It's $3.5 million that has been allocated to 12 programs. So like, William who runs Museum of Sticks and Stones, put in a bid to roll out a program, and that looks different across the 12 different projects. So, there's projects that will help First Nations women and girls up in Far North Queensland, in particular, cultural impacts that they experience online. Project Rockit in Melbourne which looks at young people, mental health in young people in particular. By design, these are grants being allocated to NGOs who are doing this good work and just need more support to do it.

JOURNALIST: Just following on from what Julie had to say just before, we’re a small regulator it’s difficult- we need the AI companies to play ball effectively. What’s the discussion been like with them, and do you have confidence that they are interested in being regulated?

WELLS: A pledge is welcomed, but a promise is not protection. And Australians have been very clear that they want both the benefits of AI, and the protections that come alongside that. And we do not believe those to be opposing objectives. We also believe that the safety of Australians online should always be set in Canberra and not left to Silicon Valley.

JOURNALIST: After those comments overnight, what do you think this means? What can the government do now for global protections in this space?

WELLS: So, we as a sovereign nation set laws that impact companies that do business in Australia. The Digital Duty of Care impacts companies that want to do business on Australian shores in our nation. Other nations are welcome to do whatever they like offshore. I work with many colleagues through bilateral relationships because, as a middle power, Australia is really proud to be leading the way in online safety, and people want to peer under the hood with me and talk about how the social media minimum age is rolling out and what we’re doing next. And the next frontier is our Digital Duty of Care, which we say completely upsets the balance and puts the responsibility on the shoulders of big tech, not the responsibility on the shoulders of victims.

JOURNAIST: Just on that, Donald Trump’s been critical of the opt-out model and the Digital Duty of Care. Do you put much weight in comments from someone like the US President?

WELLS: Well, like I said, we set laws for Australians, and Australians have been very clear that they are worried about the safety and welfare of Australians online, and they want government to do more. Like the Commissioner said, we have had 30 years of self-regulation in this space, and another world leader, President Macron, called it the Wild, Wild West late last year. So, Australians want us to deliver a Digital Duty of Care so that big tech is forced to identify the risks on their own platform and mitigate against those risks. And I’ll say again: the Digital Duty of Care is not about what people are saying online. It is about what platforms are doing online and making sure that platforms are doing the right thing.

JOURNALIST: What are you expecting to get out of OpenAI for its recent breaches?

WELLS: So, the investigation is on foot. You understand that there’s a number of different departments working away on that. We as the Department of Communications and the eSafety Commission will play our part in that and we’ll be transparent about it. I spoke last week at a press conference about being disappointed that OpenAI did not feel obliged to speak up more quickly but left it as long as they did. That is obviously a discourse on the online environment that we find ourselves in and the stakeholders that we are navigating. I say, whilst it being disparate from Digital Duty of Care, it points to the reluctance that we have from some of these players to engage and obey Australian law. And that's why we've given the eSafety Commissioner more powers and we’ve doubled the fines.

JOURNALIST: Julie, just on the Digital Duty of Care, what do you make of all these concerns that have been raised about political censorship? Are you disappointed by the tenor of some of the discussions around this?

INMAN GRANT: Well, clearly the people who are spreading the mis- and disinformation haven’t read the exposure draft. We deal with content through our complaints and investigation schemes. There were definitions around illegal harms and serious harms that have either been on the Australian books for 20 years or were developed through the Online Safety Act and were debated by Parliament, so we've been using those definitions for the past 11 years. As the minister said, the Digital Duty of Care is really about how companies are designing, developing and deploying their services into our market, assessing the risks and harms and baking in the safety rather than bolting it on after the harm’s been done.

I also think it's a great opportunity to address the issue of sock puppets, because sock puppets are tools that any regulator has to be able to test the claim that a company might make that their algorithm is doing X or Y or Z, or that an under-16 user is- are they being asked a facial age estimate or are they being sent right through? These are common tools. These are to test the claims of companies and to survey what is happening on the platform. This is not about surveilling people at all. Technology companies use sock puppets and research tools all the time, as do regulators and academics. We need to be able to observe what the platforms are actually doing to see if their features and functionalities are working the way that they're meant to, and this is how we arrived at the Roblox enforceable undertaking. We tested their safety claims, and we found that they weren’t living up to them.

JOURNALIST: Very quickly, to the eSafety Commissioner. Your term ends in January. Are you planning to seek reappointment, and has the minister asked you to?

INMAN GRANT: I think 10 years is a long time. With this new Digital Duty of Care and this new era coming about, I think it will be great to have new leadership, and my focus now is to achieve as much as I can with the runway I have and to make sure that I leave the eSafety Commission team and office in the best possible hands for the next leader.

JOURNALIST: And there's been some discussion about chatbots potentially being added to the under-16 ban list. Is that something that has been considered?

INMAN GRANT: We already have tools in our codes and standards. We're the first country in the world that require AI chatbots and companions to prevent the hosting of violence, sexually explicit content, suicidal ideation and eating disorders to under-18s. We have a 90 per cent success rate from most of the adult sites in terms of age assurance. And I'll say that the porn sites are doing much better on compliance than the social media companies are at the moment. So, we have those tools in place. Obviously, with the package that comes forward, the Albanese Government will look to strengthen those powers further.

JOURNALIST: There's no plan, though, to look at placing them under the same category as social media?

INMAN GRANT: No, and we have a different set of regulatory tools to deal with AI chatbots and companions which are just as powerful.

JOURNALIST: Just on the government’s [indistinct], you sound like you're not particularly satisfied with OpenAI's apology for the Medicare hack. Would that be correct?

WELLS: And I will be seeking to remedy that through legislating a Digital Duty of Care, which we will introduce to the Parliament in October.

JOURNALIST: Can I just ask on North Queensland, who have been particularly vocal about the changes to working holiday visas, worried that it will sort of decimate economies that rely on fruit pickers, people that work in the tourism industry. As a Queenslander, is that something that concerns you? What's the federal government going to do to make sure that it doesn't significantly impact places like North Queensland [indistinct]?

WELLS: Yeah, so obviously working holiday visas are at an all-time high, a historic high at the moment, and we've always said that we're going to need to be flexible to manage trying to reduce the NOM with the needs of businesses and workers, which include places that rely on working holidaymaker visas. Speaking as the former aged care minister, I understand how important it is having our visa system adequately supply the workers that we need to do jobs that Australians absolutely rely upon, so it’s always something that we take into consideration. And the minister has said we will stay flexible and we will monitor the outcomes.

JOURNALIST: I have a question on Olympics. Economists have raised concerns that Olympics usually run over budget. How confident are you that Queensland can do this on time and on budget?

WELLS: As the federal government, we've said that we're capping the infrastructure budget at $3.435 billion. The new Queensland Government has said that that's what they'll match it, and that's what I’m sure you’ll hear about more at the National Press Club later today as the Treasurer talks about how he is delivering that budget.

I would say as the vice president of OCOG, we are thinking very carefully about the sequencing of Brisbane 2032, what needs to happen when. I am highly mindful that we are a state prone to major weather events, and we need to allow for that in the next six years. That's why I think you’ve seen a real impetus around trying to get shovels into the ground with venue infrastructure. But my job as the Sport Minister is to make sure that our athletes are ready, our high performance programs are ready and that our grassroots base is as broad as possible so that we have the most people who are able to contribute, whether it is as athletes, whether it is as support staff, nutritionists, coaches, we have the broadest base of talented Australians ready for the games. So that's why we put in additional money for the high-performance program over the past couple of years through the federal budget, because we need as many Australians at LA 2028, because it is our strongest possible prep for a strong finish in Brisbane 2032.

So I guess my point, in short, is lots of us are working in lots of different ways to make sure that Brisbane 2032 is a success, it isn’t just down to the venue fracas that has dragged on for certainly in all my time as the Sport Minister, four and a half years.

JOURNALIST: On the Rocky environmental concerns you raised last week, do you believe Minister Watt should intervene and disrupt the state government’s plans on [indistinct] …?

WELLS: Ellen, I didn’t raise this last week. Courier Mail journalist Hayden Johnson asked me a series of questions about Rocky rowing, and I think one of those questions was would you agree that it is signed, sealed and delivered? And I said, by definition it can’t be, because we haven’t received the PVR (project validation report) in the federal government, amidst other things. So that is the point that I am making, and I always listen to athletes and the federations because my job as the sport minister is to make sure that those people are best served by the decisions that we make at OCOG.

JOURNALIST: Very quickly, what have you made of the logo dripped out over the last couple of days?

WELLS: I love the logo.

JOURNALIST: Have you seen the finalised logo?

WELLS: Yes.

JOURNALIST: Can you give us any hint?

WELLS: I’m a vote on the logo, and I love it and I can’t wait for you to see it on Monday.

ENDS.