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

Ms McKENZIE (Flinders) (17:13): Is it any surprise that we find ourselves here? Let me start with a history lesson, because, in respect of this reform and its failures which today we are here trying to mop up, a history lesson actually matters. Back in the 46th Parliament, my friend—a strong-minded, most clever coalition MP—the member for Fisher led an inquiry into age verification for pornography and gambling sites.

That committee concluded in its report, which was called Protecting the age of innocence, that age verification is not a silver bullet but a useful tool to create a barrier to young people's access to harmful online content. Protecting the a ge of i nnocence was handed down on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it set out a future course of conduct, including that the Digital Transformation Agency should lead the development of standards for online age verification, that the eSafety Commissioner should lead development of a roadmap for mandatory age verification for online pornographic material, that the Australian government should implement mandatory age verification for online wagering alongside existing identity verification requirements and, finally, that some educational resources for parents should be prepared.

That report was largely bipartisan, but, in Labor's minimal additional comments at the time, they posted a warning to their future selves, where they quoted the eSafety Commissioner: Age verification is a nascent field, and if it is to be leveraged to protect children and young people from accessing online pornography, then we need to develop a supportive ecosystem, develop robust technical standards and requirements for this type of technology, and better understand the effectiveness and impact of age verification solutions in addressing this policy concern.

They also drew attention to comments by the Communications Alliance: Translating this objective [of ensuring that Australians younger than 18 years should not have access to online wagering and pornography sites] into a robust and practicable framework that also protects the privacy and cyber security of individual users of an age verification system is, however, a complex task that must be approached carefully and methodically.

Further, they said: Labor members of the Committee acknowledge that the necessary review and research requires time, expertise and resources to properly examine the complex range of issues that age verification gives rise to, across data security, trust, privacy and freedom of expression. Many of the members of the then House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs remain on the government's benches today—the members for Newcastle and Macarthur.

While the formidable former member for Dunkley Peta Murphy is no longer here, her presence is felt loudly and proudly for her leadership on the topic of age verification and gambling. Her impact remains felt in this chamber each and every day. Learning from his strong leadership in this policy space, the member for Fisher became my firm friend after I got up in my very first speech and discussed the impact of screening and social media on the generation of young Australians that had just come through the COVID era.

In that speech, I reflected on the period the Mornington Peninsula had just passed through and what it had done to the relationship between young people and screens. I said: The 262 days of lockdown in metro Melbourne, in which the Mornington Peninsula, bafflingly, found itself included, further embedded their generation's relationship with screens, social media and other online content.

Whatever systems our households had in place to balance online time with offline time in the form of study, sports, sleep or social activity collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse still, the school system became the dealer of the digital drug, putting laptops and tablets into every lounge or bedroom. I went on: … increasingly, data shows us that today's adolescents—24/7 connected to devices, addled by algorithms and autoplay—are showing signs of stress and, indeed, in some cases, distress.

Self-control difficulties, impulsivity, family conflict, sleep disturbance, inactivity, concentration impairment and poor language development are often observed among those children whose technology use is above the recommended two hours a day. Of highest concern is the well-documented epidemic of anxiety and depression in teenage girls, which we know correlates with high use of social media.

At the time, I admit, no-one much was listening, but it was a conversation I continued with former colleagues in tech and telco from my time on the NBN board, with families and teachers across my electorate, and with researchers and policymakers around the world. The work by Professor Jean Twenge was already detailing the impact of technology on young people.

Published in 2017, her book iGen detailed the impact of technology on the generation who had grown up with it in their hands. She studied the cohort of young people born between 1995 and 2012 and the impact internet enabled devices were having on that generation. Twenge's book iGen provided reams of data on what we were seeing in terms of behavioural change, cultural change, and social and economic change due to social media but also on mental health, social cohesion and to a lesser extent radicalisation.

I thank Professor Twenge for the time she has given me personally while being here speaking in Australia. Her work has been pivotal in giving me the data and determination I needed for what I could already see was happening in our homes and communities over the last decade. Twenge's work was followed by Jonathan Haidt's more popular work of 2024, The Anxious Generation, which captured the public's attention.

It also captured interest in this place. Many of my colleagues pulled me aside, saying: 'I remember you mentioning this in your maiden speech. Can we have a chat?' It was perhaps helpful that many by then had kids who were in their teens and the battle over iPhones and platforms was real and rife at the dining room table.

Haidt's thesis was that we had 'rewired childhood' and that we had let play cede way to phones. Again, Haidt detailed a number of perils—social isolation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction—particularly the trap of the compulsive dopamine driven design of many of the social media platforms. Early in 2024, my then leader Peter Dutton stood up and said, 'There's an age verification regime which has been recommended by the eSafety Commissioner from 2023.

We think that's something that the government should pick up straightaway as well, but the Online Safety Act has significant powers in it, we passed it when we were in government and it needs to be enforced. If the laws are inadequate and they need to be strengthened or added to, then we would support any effort from the government.' By then, a number of parents groups had already got organised and were running hard, demanding reform, like the Heads Up Alliance, and 36 months and News Corp's Let Them Be Kids campaign had kicked off in May 2024.

A local hero from the Mornington Peninsula, dad Wayne Holdsworth, had started his SmackTalk outreach work across the country. All these efforts were getting increased public attention. Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen visited Australia a number of times.

Listeners will recall she was the person who revealed that Meta knew exactly how much damage was being done to young people, particularly girls, on their platforms. I thank Frances for coming to Flinders and for meeting with me and my local schools to talk to young people about their experience with social media. On 13 June 2024, Peter Dutton made an even clearer statement committing a future coalition government to implementing an age limit of 16 for social media platform use and making it a top priority for his first hundred days in office.

Premiers Minns of New South Wales and Malinauskas of South Australia were quick to read the room and held a summit a few months later. But, for months, Australia's Prime Minister remained largely silent on the issue, as was his then communications minister. In May, the Prime Minister sought to pump the issue into the long grass, referring the matter to a select committee, the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society.

Unsurprisingly, the member for Fisher and I bullied and begged our way onto that committee. I do recommend the committee report to all and sundry to read, as indeed I did this morning when talking to Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, an Independent Quebecoise senator in Canada. Julie rounds out conversations and communications I have had with policymakers and influencers in New Zealand, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the EU and the OECD since 2022 on this issue.

It has always been clear to me that Australia will not get there alone—without bigger, more substantive and more lucrative markets getting on board to force change and practice within the social media business model. But there's another reason why the joint select committee's report is worth reading. That is because, in the final report, called Social media: the good, the bad and the ugly, nowhere in it do the Labor members of the committee recommend a ban on under-16s holding social media accounts, the accounts being the vector for algorithmic push and influence.

The coalition members' comments, written by the member for Fisher and me, argued for meaningful measures to address recommender systems, persuasive design features and customised feeds. We demanded that platforms report on foreign interference and transnational crime, as well as intelligence relating to child sexual abuse material, child sexual exploitation material and non-consensual sexual images.

We demanded action on scams which flourish on Australian social media platforms but not elsewhere, and we demanded additional resources for the eSafety Commissioner and the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation. We demanded a statutory duty of care on social media platforms, and we demanded concerted action in relation to the possible perils of generative artificial intelligence as well.

But, above all, we demanded that Australia create an effective market for safer social media as it concerns young people. On 8 November, after a National Cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister announced an intention to legislate a minimum age for access to social media, and many of the committee's coalition members' recommendations found their way into a speech given by the then Minister for Communications at the Sydney Institute on 13 November 2024.

I sat up the back of the room that night, somewhat flabbergasted to hear her commitment to all the things which the member for Fisher and I had argued for throughout the select committee process but which had gone unsaid, unsought and unfought for by her colleagues on the committee. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 was passed on 29 November 2024 with bipartisan support.

But, in the eSafety Commissioner's own words, which she has subsequently shared publicly, she was not given the powers she needed to do the job. In a lunch with Jacqueline Maley, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the legislation was drafted 'very quickly' and said: … if you're going to take on the biggest technology companies in the world … it's not like you're sticking a pink parking ticket on a windshield … She said: What you're effectively asking us to do with this is fence the ocean.

We might be able to create some friction and some degree of safety but it's a futile exercise if you think you're totally stemming the ocean. That would all be fair comment if the government who had given her instructions in these tasks without the requisite powers had not been on notice for at least 2½ years, if not, in fact, four. At the time, my side knew the reform was flawed, but we were on the eve of an election and something, anything, was better than nothing.

We were comforted that, should we be successful at that election, we'd be able to make the reform more rigorous. Frankly, as we've heard from others, parents were desperate. When I quietly said to parents groups, 'I cannot promise you yet that this will work,' they would invariably reply, 'I am desperate; you have to give me something to strengthen my arm at the nightly battle at the dinner table,' and so we did.

The social media platforms had a year to adapt to the reforms, but, rather than rigorously test the adequacy of the implementation, this government got busy on a world victory tour. It was shameless, it was grandiose, it was decadent, and it was a dereliction of duty. We had the new minister for communications spend some hundred thousand dollars to wear the shiny ribbon of reform at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September 2025 before a single social media account had been cancelled.

On the weekend just passed, almost out of nowhere, the Prime Minister declared that the reform had failed and recognised that failure by social media companies to comply with our 'world-leading law' needed to be addressed. Then, to double down on this government's ineptitude, this bill was rushed in yesterday afternoon—so rushed that there were no copies of the bill at the table yesterday when the minister god up to give her second reading speech.

It seems this government is determined to repeat its mistakes through haste and being seen to address issues rather than addressing them in any meaningful way. We are being asked to pass this bill within 24 hours, and it is not clear from the content of this bill that it will actually bring about change and efficacy in the operation of this reform. Efficacy here is not optional.

The rest of the world is watching us. I addressed a political tech conference in Berlin in January of this year which brought together hundreds of politicians, public policy makers and regulators in the social media space across all continents regarding our laws and especially the importance of the EU, France and Germany following suit to provide ballast and back in the reforms with a 450-million person market.

This time last year, I met with the French president's advisers at the Elysee on this topic, and, in January, France's National Assembly passed a bill to ban social media accounts for under-15s. In February of this year, I met with members of the German Bundestag, looking at this as a possible reform. I was in the room at the CDU national conference in Stuttgart when the then-ruling CDU committed to a ban for under-14-year-olds.

I'm proud to say that, unlike the Minister for Communications, the Australian taxpayer didn't need to pay a single dollar for me to have these conversations with policymakers around the world. I do thank the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Meliore Foundation for their support, and I thank others for agreeing to meet with me and to do work together on my self-funded holidays to get meaningful reform done.