Peta Credlin:
All right, let’s get straight into it. Tuesday night panel, Deputy Executive Director of the IPA, Daniel Wild and broadcaster extraordinaire Lucy Zelic, welcome to you both. Let’s put the horrible events that have occurred in relation to Helen Haines to one side. Let’s pivot to how quickly this is being used by the government in relation to their digital duty of care. Here’s a prime minister last night.
Anthony Albanese:
The concern, if you look at anyone’s social media feeds and look at the comments, people will say things that they would never say face to face, but the temperature has undoubtedly been increased.
Peta Credlin:
This is shameless, Dan.
Daniel Wild:
It is. And it’s quite sad because every tragedy offers an opportunity for self-reflection and to do better. But as you suggest, it’s straightaway gone down into the usual political demarcations. And I think suggesting that social media is the cause of these issues is lazy and it’ll also be ineffective. Now, I’m no fan of social media in many ways. There’s a lot of vitriol on there. You’d be exposed to all kinds of things, we all are, but social media doesn’t cause people to form certain opinions and it certainly doesn’t cause people to act on those opinions. There are many reasons why people choose to do things that they do. So it’s simply trying to say this is social media’s fault is a way of trying to get out of providing leadership.
And as you’ve also suggested, I think it’s incredibly unfortunate that the government has decided to basically use this as a bit of a cudgel to nudge people into supporting its digital duty of care legislation. You’ll remember that they said it was all about protecting kids. Now they’re suggesting it’s about combating online extremism. Well, if online extremism is a problem, which it certainly is in certain contexts, that would surely be a matter for the security agencies, not for social media regulation.
Peta Credlin:
Yeah, I might add there’s already a myriad of laws to deal with online extremism. That’s how we’ve locked up half the terrorists in this country. It’s not for dent of laws at all. Now, the problem I’ve got here though, is as soon as it was revealed by some in the media that he may well have been influenced by the hard left side of politics, we’ve basically moved off discussion of this individual and moved on to the realm of digital duty of care. And you’ve got people like Hannah Ferguson, Lucy, the left-wing activist, put onto TV this morning. She talked about male violence and a whole lot of other stuff, but look at what she said herself or posted herself, basically celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and saying that there were acceptable levels of violence.
Lucy Zelic:
Absolutely disgraceful, Peta. And I think that’s what gets most people’s noses out of joint is the rank hypocrisy that we are hearing, not just from these left-wing activists like Hannah Ferguson who asked the question after Charlie Kirk’s death, “Is violence sometimes necessary? Yes.” But also from the Labour government. And I know it’s a difficult day to have to point fingers, but as I said, that hypocrisy is what people are really struggling to deal with. Just recently, the Prime Minister himself had to withdraw inflammatory comments directed at the leader of the opposition, Angus Taylor, in question time recently where he hurled abuse in him and called him fake. And this is the guy that’s telling us to turn the temperature down. What about the Attorney General Michelle Rowland, who victim blamed Pauline Hanson recently? Awful, awful hypocrisy from all of them.
Peta Credlin:
Let’s go to private health insurance because we’ve got half a million part rate pensioners out there that are going to be hit hard with Labor’s… I know it got knocked off in the Senate, but it’s being confirmed by the government. They’re going to come for seniors again, Dan. This is in relation to that rebate for private health insurance.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is an example of what happens when the government starts running out of money. They come after your money. And these are often people that have put in the hard yards throughout their careers. They’ve done the right thing, they saved, they’ve gotten ahead, and they find now that as they get towards the end of their working lives, or in fact are actually in the retirement stage, that the government’s going to pull the rug from underneath them. So this is really a pathetic attempt by the government to try to get its budget in order. It needs to engage in some serious restraint on the spending side rather than going after Australians who have worked hard.
Peta Credlin:
Right Terona, I’m going to get into the EU free trade agreement. The Nats have already come out to say they will not support it. It’s a dodgy deal for Australian farmers, but I’m running out of time. Thank you to you both.
This transcript with Daniel Wild talking on Credlin – News24 from 20 October 2026 has been edited for clarity.
