Youth-led Policy on Digital Safety and AI Governance

Australia is at a defining moment in AI governance, establishing its AI Safety Institute, developing a National AI Plan, and preparing Digital Duty of Care legislation. This session presents findings from the La Trobe Digital Duty of Care Taskforce — a 15-member, cross-disciplinary youth cohort who spent several months researching, debating, and drafting a formal recommendation paper on digital safety and AI governance. We share what serious, structured youth-led policy work actually produces, then open the floor to a participatory discussion with attendees. The central question is forward-looking: how do we build AI governance frameworks that are robust precisely because they draw on the lived experience of those most immersed in AI-mediated environments? Participants will leave with concrete, actionable ideas for embedding youth perspectives into governance processes at the institutional, state, and federal levels. This workshop advances the forum's cross-sector collaboration goals by bringing a constituency whose analytical contribution to AI safety is underutilised, and demonstrating what changes when they are genuinely at the table.