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

Ms COFFEY (Griffith) (13:20): It's school holidays in my home state of Queensland, and, across Griffith, families will be out and about enjoying time with their kids. They will be at South Bank, one of our local parks like Raymond Park, at a local pool like Musgrave Park Swim Centre, at the movies like Hawthorne cinemas or the Dendy at Coorparoo, at one of our local libraries or just at home where parents are trying to fill in the days.

As a parent of two beautiful young men myself, I know how great these days are. There is noise, mess, sunscreen, snacks. The kids are asking what they can do next and us parents are doing our best to keep everyone busy and happy.

There is another part too, and many parents know it too well. There is the constant pull of the phone, the tablet, the group chat, the notifications and the platforms that want a child's attention and do not give it back easily. Ask any parent what has changed most in childhood and many will point to the phone.

It follows children into bedrooms, schoolyards and weekends, carrying pressures that parents can feel but cannot always see. It is the young person who cannot sleep after something cruel was said online. It's the child who feels left out after seeing photos from an event that they were not invited to.

It's been a year since I was elected into this government, and, in that time, one of the things I am most proud of is our social media ban for under 16s for those exact reasons. I am the mother of an 11-year-old and a 13-year old boy. Like so many parents, I want my children to grow up curious, kind, confident and safe.

I want them to make friends in real life, learn how to be bored, play sport, ride bikes, read books, tell terrible jokes like their stepfather, argue over board games and spend time in the world around them. Most of all, I want them to have the space to become themselves before a platform starts measuring them, ranking them, tracking them and selling their attention.

The world has changed since I was a primary school student. I remember playing Chuck Yeager's Air Combat on my father's PC somewhere in the 1990s. I also remember playing DOOM, and I have to admit I thought the graphics looked pretty good back then.

That was a very different type of screen time. It belonged to a very different childhood. The game stayed on the computer.

That screen time did not follow me to school, sit by my bed, buzz in my pocket, count my likes or push endless content to me when I was meant to be asleep—although I will admit occasionally I did have the radio underneath my pillow when I was meant to be going to sleep. It did not learn what made me anxious, angry, excited or insecure then serve me more of it.

Children today face something far more powerful. Social media platforms are designed to hold attention, learn behaviour, reward reaction, push comparison and turn popularity into a visible score. For adults that can be hard enough to manage.

For children, it can be totally overwhelming. A child of 12 or 13 does not have an adult brain, an adult sense of risk or an adult ability to step back and see that a platform is trying to keep them there. Yet too often we ask children to resist systems built by some of the richest companies on earth.

That is not fair on children, and it's also not fair on parents. Australian parents led this movement. Parents told us they were tired of fighting alone.

They were tired of platform rules that looked good on paper but failed in practice. They were tired of children being exposed to bullying, violent content, sexualised content, scams, manipulation and social pressure before they were ready. They told us they needed more than advice.

They needed the law to be on their side. The Albanese Labor government listened, and we acted to delay access to social media to the age of 16. Since our minimum age law began on 10 December, more than five million underage accounts have been removed, deactivated or restricted.

These are children who have been given back time to sleep, move, study, talk, play and step away from the pressure of being constantly watched and judged. We started seeing early signs of change. A recent YouGov survey found that 30 per cent of young Australians aged 13 to 15 are spending more time playing sport, 27 per cent report better sleep, online bullying is down nine per cent, and exposure to inappropriate and violent content has fallen by 18 per cent.

Our laws have made a strong start, but some platforms are still not doing enough. The eSafety Commissioner's public compliance update in March 2026 raised serious concerns. A substantial share of Australian children under 16 still hold accounts, create new accounts or bypass age checks, as we've heard in this chamber this morning.

Some platforms appear to allow underage users to try age checks again and again until they pass. Some do too little to stop a child whose account has been closed from opening a new one straightaway, and some make it too hard for parents and others to report underage users. These are gaps that children can slip through, and they are failures by companies with the money, people and technical skills to do better.

The eSafety Commissioner is now actively investigating potential noncompliance of five platforms, and we can guess who they are: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. These are not small startups or backyard businesses; they are some of the largest and most powerful digital companies in the world. They have the engineers.

They have the data. They have the money. They have the skill to build products that can hold a child's attention for hours.

They can use those same resources to comply with Australian law. The Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 strengthens the enforcement framework behind the social media minimum age law. It does two main things: (1) it increases penalties for noncompliance and (2) it gives the eSafety Commissioner strong powers to gather information and documents.

The bill doubles the maximum penalty for breaches of the minimum age obligation, bringing the maximum penalty to $99 million. That is a serious penalty, and it needs to be serious for these multinational tech companies to take it seriously. The increase brings these penalties into line with recent changes to competition and consumer law, and it reflects the scale of the companies this parliament is regulating.

A small penalty can become just the cost of doing business; a strong penalty sends a different message. We are firmly signalling to these multinational tech companies that, if you want to do business in Australia, then you must comply with Australian laws. It says children's safety cannot be treated as a public relations issue.

It says platforms cannot make promises in public then do too little in private. A strong and robust regulator like the eSafety Commission cannot enforce the law with public statements alone. It needs evidence, documents, records and the power to test what platforms say against what platforms do.

These new changes will give the eSafety Commissioner stronger tools to get the information needed to assess compliance. The commissioner will be able to issue notices requiring information and documents from any person where the commissioner reasonably believes that person holds material relevant to the minimum age framework. That can include the platform itself.

It can include third parties, age assurance providers, app store providers and others who hold information that can test a platform's claims. This is a practical change, and it goes to the heart of enforcement. Platforms should not be able to mark their own homework.

They should not be able to say 'trust us' and then refuse to provide the evidence. For example, a platform may say its age-check system works; a third-party provider may hold information that shows the system fails. A platform may say it has closed underage accounts; other records may show that many of those children came straight back through the front door.

A platform may claim that parents have simple reporting paths; evidence may show those paths are hard to find, hard to use or slow to act. If a platform fails to comply with information-gathering notices from the eSafety Commissioner, we are doubling the penalty for doing so. This bill will help the commissioner get to the truth, and that is exactly how enforcement works: you find the facts, you test the claims and you act where the law has been broken.

We should never lose sight of the people at the centre of this debate: children. It's about the year-seven student who has just started high school and feels pressure to be on the same apps as everybody else. It's about the 13-year-old who lies awake at night thinking about a message that no child should ever have received.

It's about the 14-year-old who scrolls for hours and feels worse after every swipe. It's about a child who is bullied in the schoolyard and then followed home through their own phone. It's about the parent who wants to protect their child but feels outnumbered by technology built to break down every boundary.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour, and the member will be granted leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.