“Those who are the most marginalised in our society are also the people who experience the greatest harm online.”
That’s not an activist talking. It’s Delia Rickard PSM, the Albanese Government’s own independent reviewer, in her October 2024 report on how to fix Australia’s online safety laws.
She named who bears the brunt: First Nations people, people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, women, children, people with disability. This report was one of the catalysts for the digital duty of care introduced by the government. Her recommendation 5 requires the duty of care to cover, at a minimum, attacks based on race, ethnicity and religion, alongside sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age.”
I’ve read the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, released for consultation this week, against that recommendation. Section 25C sets out what counts as seriously harmful material for adults including:
- child exploitation
- sexual violence
- Extreme violence or cruelty
- terrorism
- self-harm promotion
Section 25D adds harms specific to children, including hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality.
Race does not appear. Religion does not appear. Of the eight protected characteristics Rickard told the government to cover, seven are gone. Gender survived, but only in the provision covering children, not the one covering everyone else. This isn’t the free speech fight everyone else is having about this bill. It’s not about limiting what people can say, but about who is protected by the accountability demanded of platforms
The omission isn’t abstract. It’s a glaring gap over one of the most well-known documented harms in Australian digital life. In 2025, the eSafety Commissioner, released a report that found sexually diverse adults (36%) and Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander adults (34%) were among the most likely of any targeted group surveyed to personally experience online hate.
SNAICC, the national peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, told the National Indigenous Times that what First Nations children experience online ‘goes beyond random trolling’. Mundanara Bayles, co-founder of BlackCard, award-winning podcast host, and respected Indigenous educator told me “Online racism doesn’t stay online. It follows our kids home, into how they see themselves, into whether they feel safe being who they are. If we’re serious about protecting people from harm on these platforms, that has to include us”.
A Deakin University and UTS Jumbunna Institute analysis of three million online posts found First Nations public figures absorb racial hate at rates far beyond comparable public figures. More than a quarter of posts mentioning then-Minister Linda Burney were coded as racial identity hate, with Lidia Thorpe, Noel Pearson and Adam Briggs targeted at similarly high rates.
None of this is unknown to government. What’s curiously missing is the legislative follow-through.
The government has repeatedly pointed to the UK’s Online Safety Act as inspiration for this reform. That law is more direct than ours on this exact point. Section 16 of the UK Act names race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability and gender reassignment as characteristics platforms must specifically protect users against abuse targeting. Our government doesn’t appear to be extending that model.
I support the concept of a digital duty of care. At its core, this bill asks something basic of platforms: assess the risks your systems create, and take reasonable steps to keep the people using them safe. As the mother of a ten-year-old boy, I want the algorithm opt-out and I want the manosphere and misogyny kept away from him as much as anyone does. But if we’re building a law to stop him being fed one kind of hate, it should stop him being fed all of them, including racist content, not just the kind currently on the list.
The consultation period is open now. Before this bill is finalised, someone in government needs to explain why protections its own reviewer said mattered for some of the most vulnerable groups in the community have been omitted.