What Australia's Digital Duty of Care Bill Can Learn From the Road Toll
When the Digital Duty of Care was introduced to Parliament, the Minister, Anika Wells likened it to the safety standards we already expect of our food, our cars and our children's toys, and of all those comparisons the car is the one worth sitting with, because Australia once led the world in making its roads safer and did so by refusing to choose between the vehicle and the person behind the wheel.
Victoria made seatbelts compulsory in 1970, the first place anywhere to do so, and over the years that followed manufacturers were pushed towards crumple zones, padded dashboards and brakes that held on wet bitumen. Had we stopped there, the decades since would have told a very different story, because what finally bent the road toll downwards was the patient and unglamorous work of expecting more from drivers as well, through licences that could be lost, demerit points that arrived in the letterbox within weeks, and random breath testing, which began in New South Wales in 1982 and quietly rewrote an entire generation's sense of what they could get away with on a Friday night.
The Bill now before Parliament is a thoroughly modern version of the first half of that story, with its design standards, its choice to opt out of the algorithm and its twenty four hour response times for abuse complaints, and families will welcome every one of those changes. What it lacks is any equivalent of the breath test, so the person who joins a coordinated pile on, or who sends hundreds of messages that each sit just beneath the legal threshold, will wake up the morning after the Bill passes with exactly the same confidence they had the night before, which is that nobody is ever going to knock on the door.
Criminologists have understood for a long time that people are moved far less by how severe a punishment might be than by how certain and how swift it feels, which is precisely why the sight of a breath testing unit on a country road changed more drinking habits than any maximum penalty ever printed in a statute. Online, the odds of being stopped feel like zero, even though using a carriage service to menace or harass has been a federal offence for more than twenty years and threats and stalking were crimes long before the first smartphone, and a law that is almost never enforced works about as well as a speed limit on a road with no cameras and no police.
The road gives us a gentler lesson about young people too, because we never hand a seventeen year old the keys and a criminal record in the same moment. We give them L plates, supervised hours and P plates, with consequences that arrive early, scale with their age and come wrapped in the expectation that they will learn, and a young person who harms someone online deserves that same graduated path, with a quick and proportionate response and an adult who helps them understand what their words did, long before anyone mentions a courtroom.
There is one more lesson hiding in the analogy. If we had fined road authorities $109.2 million for every reasonably foreseeable crash, the sensible response would have been to close roads and drop every limit to walking pace, and the people left stranded would have been those who most needed to travel. A platform facing that penalty will do the digital equivalent and remove first, assess later, and the people it strands will be the survivor telling her own story, the teenager with a question too tender to ask at home and the advocate whose unpopular argument may prove right in time.
The road toll fell because we built safer cars and expected more of the people driving them, and nobody ever imagined that the second weakened the first. While this Bill is still before Parliament there is time to give it the missing half, and the country that pioneered seatbelt laws is well placed to show the world how it is done.
#OnlineSafety #DigitalDutyOfCare #YouthJustice #FreeSpeech #LawReform
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