Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026

Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (12:56): A few weeks ago, the United Kingdom announced that it too would introduce a minimum age for social media use, and when the British government set out how it would be done it said its ban would be built, in their words, using the 'same model' as Australia. I read that with a sense of pride, because keeping children safe online is something we should all agree on, no matter your political persuasion or the country you call home.

I think that, by leading the way, we have put those words into action, and now the world is following. When we pass our laws we're out on our own. There was no shortage of people lining up to tell us it couldn't be done.

Our government ignored those naysayers. We saw the data from experts, we listened to those with lived experience and we delivered sensible measures that are now keeping our children safe. What we heard from the UK prime minister in his announcement speech was a phrase that we had heard throughout the debate last year in this chamber, which was that this was about giving children their childhood back.

While the UK is taking the next step, the likes of Canada and parts of Europe are also considering doing the same. The formula they are using came into effect in Australia on 10 December last year, when our government brought in a minimum age for social media and took under-16s off the platforms that were doing them harm. The idea behind it is as simple as it gets: keeping kids safe from these platforms should not be the job of 14-year-olds or their parents around the kitchen table; it should be the job of the people who have built the platforms in the first place.

We did not undertake these measures because we thought badly of young people or we didn't trust them. We did it because they had been allowed into a world that had been designed to target them, not to support their development, and today with the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 we make that law stronger, and I'm very proud to support it.

Before being elected to this parliament, I trained as an educational and developmental psychologist. I spent years studying how young minds grow, and it has stuck with me. So let me tell you how I see these platforms, because I think we keep describing them all wrong.

We talk about social media like it's somewhere people go to hang out in the same way my generation hung out at Hungry Jacks, the local park or a shopping centre. It's not that. These platforms are not public areas that happen to have a few teenagers in them.

They are products that are brilliantly built, backed by billionaires and designed to do one thing above all else, which is to get a hold of a person's attention and never let go. We all know what being a teenager is like. As a parent, I've seen it from both sides.

The science confirms that, in all of the years of your life, it is when your attention is the easiest to grab. Your mind is at its most curious because you're working out who you are, and what people think of you feels like the biggest thing in the world. Part of your brain chases that next hit of excitement, and that part is way out in front of the part of the brain that's meant to say: 'Wait.

Hang on—maybe not.' And there's nothing wrong with that. That's simply how growing up works and how it always has. What my daughters are experiencing now is exactly what I and my siblings experienced a little while back.

But what's new is that we've handed some of the cleverest companies on earth a direct line into exactly that, and we've let them turn it into profit. The endless doomscrolling, the notifications pinging left and right, the little lift that you get when someone likes your post and the gut punch when nobody does—none of that happens by accident; it is the whole design.

It's doing precisely what it was built to do. But the Online Safety Act 2021 is already pushing back. Since it came in, parents in my community have told me what it's meant at home, and the stories rhyme.

At the beginning it was difficult, but now the evenings are calmer. The late night scrolling has stopped. Bedtime is a thing again, and even the odd kid has picked up a book.

Others whose children are not quite at the age of wanting social media have also said what a relief it is that they now have these laws to point to when eventually they have the conversation with their children. So change is happening in homes right across Maribyrnong and right across the country, yet, in the months since, we have learnt something else, and that is why this bill is before us today.

Some of these platforms have looked at their obligation and decided that the bare minimum will do just fine. Earlier this year, the eSafety Commissioner put out an update on how the law is going, and the headline number was good: more than five million underage accounts removed or restricted. It also said that these measures swept through the platforms.

But the same update found something else: too many kids are still getting back on, not because the law is weak but because these companies are letting them. A kid gets knocked back because of age restrictions, so they just try the age check again and again until it finally clicks. An account gets shut down on Monday, and it's back up again on Tuesday.

And a parent who goes looking for somewhere to report to finds, half the time, there's no-one on these platforms listening. We know these aren't accidents. They are deliberate choices, and we've seen this playbook before from some of the very same companies.

They believe they can do as little as they like and get away with it while telling everyone they're doing heaps. They also make it as hard as possible for anyone outside to check whether it's true. If they receive a fine, they treat it as if it's just a cost of doing business.

Because they have done this over and over, we know the game, and our response is that the bare minimum does not cut it when we're talking about children's safety. The bill strengthens the law we've already got, and it does it in two ways. The first is about getting to the truth.

Right now, when a platform tells the commissioner it's taking reasonable steps, that's a very hard claim to check from the outside because the platform is basically the only witness to its own behaviour. This bill addresses that head on. It lets the eSafety Commissioner demand information and documents not just from the platforms but from anyone who holds the goods on whether the law is being followed—the age check providers included.

So, basically, if a company says its age assurance works, the commissioner can go and ask the people who built the age checker and find out whether that's actually true. The second change is about consequences. The bill lifts the maximum penalty for breaking the minimum age rule to $99 million.

These are companies that can build a car that drives itself and build software that writes emails for you, but somehow they can't tell a 13-year-old from a 30-year-old—I don't buy it. Our government doesn't buy it, and I'd hazard a guess that most parents don't either. Lifting that penalty and lining it up with the changes we've already made under our consumer law will make sure that doing the right thing is the cheaper option and that doing the wrong thing is not.

To be fair to these companies, they're not short of money or brains or talent. They can clear this bar without breaking a sweat. The only real question—the only one there's ever been—is whether they'll choose to, and our government is determined to make sure the answer is yes.

When I discuss these restrictions, I always come back to the parents, because this goes to something I feel strongly about. No parent, however on the ball they may be, wins this by themselves. You can take the phone from them at night; they'll still find a way.

You can set every control the device has got, and the design on the other side is still a step ahead of you. One parent, on their own against a massive company with AI on its side, gets worn down, worked around and, in the end, ignored. But a whole country and its government that sets a clear rule, stands behind it and hands its regulator the teeth it needs to back it up is a lot harder to ignore.

The whole point of doing this is to give our kids the time they need to grow and to give Australian parents some breathing room. I know there are members in this House and people throughout the country who still don't believe in these restrictions. I sometimes hear the argument that a kid who is determined to get around the rules will find a way and that, by pushing them off the big platforms, we might push them somewhere worse.

I get it. But what I will say is that you don't judge a law by whether someone is determined to break it. We don't scrap the speed limit because some people speed.

You continue to set the standard. You make doing the wrong thing harder rather than easier, and the evidence right in front of us says that there are fewer kids on this platform today than there were a year ago. So it is working.

We know this because the data says so and because parents are telling us so. The idea that you have to get everything right all the time is nonsense. Legislation, especially legislation involving technology, will always require room to grow.

The debate in this chamber shows that, while others may wish to continue to bury their heads in the sand so they can continue to play cheap politics, our government understands the modern world in which we live. In the end, while this legislation and the restrictions it aims to strengthen are about technology, it is really about childhood and what we owe it. I've spent my whole working life arguing that the early years of a child's life aren't a warm-up act for the important stuff later on; they are the important stuff.

And these years, the teenage years, matter every bit as much in their own messy but brilliant way. They're not a rehearsal; they are the real deal. They are the years that decide who our kids turn into and how they come to see themselves.

We all get one shot at it. My own two girls are growing up in this online world, the same as every child across Maribyrnong—the same as every child across this country. I want them to have a childhood with a bit of room left in it—room to be bored, to be curious, to muck around, to be young for as long as they get to be before the world starts to ask them to be something else.

Our government is not handing that over to a handful of companies that are more interested in their profits and performance. We have made a cracking start. We are leading the world, and this bill seeks only to make it stronger for parents and safer for our kids.

I commend the bill to the House.