Mornings with Mark Levy, 2GB, 3 June 2026

Mark Levy: Sarah Henderson, we’re going to have a chat about the social media ban and Grace Tame being employed by the ABC. Senator, good morning.

Senator Henderon: A very good morning to you, Mark.

Mark Levy: You’re with me or against me on this, Senator?

Senator Henderson: I am against you. I have to say though, for Vegemite, it’s got to be smeared very thinly – you cannot have too much Vegemite, then it’s disgusting – on hot sourdough with butter. Forget margarine, margarine is awful, only butter and then it is absolutely delicious.

Mark Levy: Look, Sarah, you’ve been in politics a long time, this is not a good way to get the talk presenter offside at the start of an interview?

Senator Henderson: We know in politics, honesty matters. The truth matters. I’m saying it and I think most Australians are – it is un-Australian, Mark, and I would suggest that you go away, buy some good sourdough, layer the Vegemite very thinly with very good butter, toast only, not untoasted. And I think you will have to review your position. I look forward to you reneging and backing in Vegemite tomorrow morning.

Mark Levy: I stand my ground. I stand my ground, Senator. I will not be shirking my task as a proud Australian. Anyway, let’s move on to other things.

Senator Henderson: Anyway, you sound like you’re having a lot of fun.

Mark Levy: We are, we’ve got to. Hey onto serious things, I had a conversation yesterday off the back of a report in the United Kingdom that 9 in 10 parents over there want a social media ban like we’ve got here in Australia. And I put it out to the listeners, I said, look, if you’re a parent, is the actual social media ban working? And I took call after call after call from people saying, ‘No, Mark, the kids have got around the ban, it means nothing’. And I even heard from a nine-year-old girl, her name is Laura. Have a listen to what she had to say yesterday to me on the open line:

Laura: Me, my brothers and all my friends are allowed to access social media.
Mark Levy: How do you do it, Laura, out of interest?
Laura: It’s really easy, like you can’t get banned off it anymore. Well, not people that I know get banned off it, like you can still access it and everything.

Mark Levy: So Senator, we had all this noise late last year about the government’s fantastic social media ban but clearly it’s not working?

Senator Henderson: Look, it’s not working and it’s been very poorly designed, rushed out, poorly implemented. The survey from the Safety Commissioner shows that around 70 per cent of teenagers are on social media, meaning there is very poor compliance with the ban. But this goes directly to Anika Wells, the Communications Minister, who talked a big game on the social media ban, made very big claims about its success in January, and it’s letting down parents and teenagers. And look, you know, I think there is a real controversy because I know that some young people do want to be on social media, particularly YouTube, which has got some real educational merit.

But look, the cat’s out of the bag because yesterday there was a report of an interview with Julie Inman-Grant, the eSafety Commissioner, who was scathing about the design of the social media ban. She said ‘it was a very blunt force approach. If we are going to make these platforms safer, we’re going to have to take a holistic approach.’ She said it’s very ‘thin scaffolding.’ She doesn’t have enough potent powers and she was scathing of the minister’s competence. And as I said in my media release, the minister was filleted over lunch on Labor’s deficient social media ban. So this is just another example, Mark, where the government is all headline, all puff, but when it comes to delivering on the policy substance on making a real difference to the lives of everyday Australians, this government is failing over and over.

Mark Levy: Well isn’t it funny when it comes to Anika Wells, I mean, she’s too busy ducking and weaving the so-called travel rorts saga that she’s been through. I mean, she was happy to fly to the UN and spruik these changes. She was happy to get up there on the floor of Parliament and tell everybody how wonderful they’ve been. I don’t think we’ve heard from her since because she’s ducking and weaving all the media pressure on her at the moment. Is that a fair comment or not?

Senator Henderson: Look it is, and she even herself admitted she was a minister on training wheels. She really has brought the government into disrepute, not only with the breaches that have been found in relation to her travel claims, but the absolute joke of the trip to Adelaide where she flew over for a birthday party, then tried to concoct some meetings to justify claiming this on the taxpayer’s purse. I mean, she says she had a meeting with a South Australian minister at a birthday party of his wife. I mean, who has a sideline meeting, an official ministerial meeting at a birthday party on a Saturday night?

Australians are not stupid, Australians are not mugs. She should have told the truth, she hasn’t in my view and it’s just not good enough. But as I say, these are the standards that we can expect from this government. The Prime Minister should have stood her down, as I called for on a number of occasions. He is backing her in very wrongly which, frankly, given it very much appears that she has breached the ministerial code of conduct, is pretty disgraceful. And this is just one more reason why Australians are turning their backs on this government. They no longer trust this government. We’ve seen that in spades on the Budget. We’ve seen that in relation to so many different things that the government is doing, but the Prime Minister’s inability to say to Anika Wells, that is not good enough, we will not accept that standard, you need to go, tells us everything we need to know about this Prime Minister.

Mark Levy: Just one more on this before I get to the ABC and Grace Tame and this podcast that she’ll be hosting. Maybe you can explain this for me, right. So we were told that when this was all announced by the government that the companies, the social media companies, would be fined up to $50 million dollars for breaching these rules and not trying to keep kids off social media. What’s the point of telling everybody that they’ve got these fines available to them but not actually using them? Is the eSafety Commissioner in a position where she’s effectively a toothless tiger or not?

Senator Henderson: Well we don’t have a great insight because, regrettably, the eSafety Commissioner did not raise these concerns in Senate Estimates last week. She raised her concerns in an interview with a journalist over lunch and that’s, frankly, not good enough. But parents have every right to feel very disappointed because, as I say, the government – and as you’ve made very clear- the government talked big on the very substantial penalties that would flow if teenagers remained on social media, fines of up to $50 million.  And yet we’ve seen no action, we’ve seen very large-scale non-compliance. But we’ve also seen a scheme where I think the government has made false promises.  And even now the eSafety Commissioner is saying you cannot ring fence an ocean and we need to do other things. Well, frankly, she should have spoken out about that.

But what on earth is this minister doing? They have put all their eggs in one basket, they’re not holding the tech platforms to account. They’re not getting tough on the scams, I mean the outrageous scams that are being peddled on the likes of Facebook, what is the government doing to shut these down? There are so many failings by this government and this is just another one.

Mark Levy: Yeah, I agree. But before you go, I had a bit to say earlier about Grace Tame, admittedly this was a story around late yesterday but you are the Shadow Communications Minister, so I’ll ask you about this. The ABC has employed Grace Tame to host a podcast on autism. The ABC says that Grace has autism, she’s high profile, she should be the host, so they’re not backing away from this. This is a young woman who I had in the studio after she was announced as Australian of the Year, and I thought this woman is inspiring, she’s got a very important story to share, a message to tell around sexual assault, sexual violence, and the fact that she was groomed as a young woman. But ever since she was announced as the Australian of the Year, she’s become an angry activist and some of the things that she said in respect of our Jewish community here in Australia, is just disgraceful. How can the ABC possibly think that this is a good idea to employ Grace Tame into a position that is paid for by the taxpayer to host a podcast? This is madness, surely.

Senator Henderson: Well Mark, you are correct. Grace Tame was the Australian of the Year in 2021 and she was a very strong advocate against sexual abuse, including telling her very gruesome story of what happened to her as a child. But in recent years she has become an activist, including against Jewish Australians. And her conduct at the Sydney Town Hall rally, where she was chanting ‘From Gaza to Gadigal, globalise the Intifada’ which is a call for violence against Jewish people around the world was completely disgraceful. She then went on to give a radio interview where she said that reports of Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli women was just propaganda, which had been debunked, and to be fair to the radio host on ABC, he pushed back on that quite hard at the time. But these are disgraceful comments which have caused deep offence to the Jewish community.

Grace Tame is now nothing more than an anti-Israel activist in my view, and it is quite inappropriate for the ABC to be hiring an activist because they have a very high duty to ensure that they disseminate information impartially and accurately. And, Mark, at a time when antisemitism is at record levels in Australia, when the Royal Commission is underway, the national broadcaster must be exercising the highest standards of judgement, not rewarding people like Grace Tame who’ve undermined social cohesion and spread horrendously false information about the Hamas terrorist attack.

Mark Levy: One last question, Senator, and I thank you for your time on what’s a busy day in Canberra. You are apparently the alternative government. I know the polls would indicate that One Nation’s ahead of both Labor and the Coalition at the moment, but under a Coalition government, I think this goes to this mentality of those at the ABC at the moment who think that they are unaccountable to the Australian taxpayers who effectively fund their operation, the public broadcaster. What would the ABC look like, funding-wise, under a Coalition government?

Senator Henderson: Look, we haven’t made any announcement about any change in that whatsoever but what our focus is very much fixed on – and for me as the Shadow Minister for Communications and Digital Safety – Australians deserve an ABC which acts in the best interests of all Australians.

Mark Levy: But surely you would have a position, though, Senator, and the fact that we spend over a billion dollars a year of taxpayer money on the ABC. Are you happy with that as the Shadow Communications Minister?

Senator Henderson: I am not happy spending more than $1.2 billion a year when the ABC does not perform as it should. So there are very strong requirements of the ABC to disseminate news and information impartially and accurately, and time and time again, the ABC is failing to do that. I mean, even last week, Kim Williams, the Chair of the ABC, did a podcast in Tasmania saying that One Nation had no policies, just statements. Now that’s just so wrong and for the chair of the organisation to be setting that sort of example when we have seen time and time again when the ABC has failed to reach the appropriate standards. Look at the Heston Russell case. Look what Heston Russell, an acclaimed special forces soldier, went through over the fake gunshots scandal. The ABC spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending the indefensible. We have seen so many mistakes made by the ABC and as I say, I am a supporter of the ABC but the ABC must do so much better than it is currently doing.

Mark Levy: Alright, let me squeeze this in because this news is breaking. I’ll get a response from you. It’s without notice. We’ve just seen new economic data from the ABS showing that the economy grew by just 0.3 per cent in the March quarter. It’s fallen from 2.6 to 2.5 per cent year-on-year. What does that say about the government’s economic approach?

Senator Henderson: Well Mark, the economy is crashing under this government. We’re seeing that right now in the housing market. We are seeing gross economic incompetence. These are very dark days for our country. Labor, at a time when the economy is crashing by reason of their policies, then turns around and pushes tax hikes on millions of Australians. And we’ve made it very clear, we are working day and night to get rid of this dreadful government, and our number one mission is to axe Labor’s toxic taxes and to deliver much bigger tax cuts to help Australians with the cost of living crisis we are facing. This is an economy literally going off the rails because this is an incompetent government, which does not know how to manage this nation and all Australians are paying a very heavy price.

Mark Levy: Alright and Sarah Henderson will be declaring the next time we speak that she’s anti-Vegemite as well, isn’t that right?

Senator Henderson: No way. I want you to go away, please, go and find some really good sourdough, good butter, and you will be a converted man.

Mark Levy: I’ve got to run. Thank you for your time, Senator. I appreciate it.