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

Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (17:45): Unfortunately, the Labor members have all just departed the chamber. It is unfortunate because they could have actually learned something. Between you, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander, and me, with our experience in this particular area, we could teach them a lesson.

But the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 is a very important bill, and it's one that I know that you have a great deal of interest in, because you and I have worked very closely together over the years on the protection of young people. No government has any greater responsibility than the protection of its citizens.

Drilling down into that even further, that is particularly so when we talk about the protection of its most vulnerable—that is, children. There's an old phrase that goes something like this: you can always judge the state of a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. The issues that we have looked at together, Mr Deputy Speaker, over a number of years, with the harms that are being caused by social media to young people, are very significant.

When the coalition was in government, we led the charge on things such as the implementation of the eSafety Commissioner. When the eSafety Commissioner was first introduced, the role was actually called the Children's eSafety Commissioner, and then the coalition expanded the role across all age groups because we recognised that, unfortunately, bad things were happening online.

Not only did we create the Children's eSafety Commissioner in 2015; in 2017 we built the world's first scheme to force platforms to take down intimate images shared without consent, which is sometimes referred to as revenge pawn, and hit perpetrators and non-compliant platforms with real financial penalties. In 2021, the coalition introduced and passed the Online Safety Act.

It was the most comprehensive online safety regime in the nation's history. We codified the basic online safety expectations, created an adult cyberabuse take-down scheme and slashed the time platforms have to strip illegal and terrorist content from their feeds. This wasn't window dressing, Mr Deputy Speaker.

This was real reform. You and I both sat on that inquiry of the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, which I chaired, and you named the report Protecting the age of innocence. I'll be forever grateful for the work that you and I did because that really kicked off in this parliament the importance of age assurance.

In that inquiry, we looked at restricting, with an effort to eliminating, online pornography and gambling for under 18-year-olds, and we wanted to introduce that age assurance. That was the first time that this place had considered that, and, unfortunately, still today, in 2026, those recommendations have not been fully implemented. I lament that.

It is very unfortunate that those two issues of online pornography and online gambling for under-18s are still not properly looked after. But I digress. The social media ban for under-16-year-olds was a coalition conviction.

It was a coalition policy born out of the good work that we did on the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. In 2023, in November, there was a coalition private member's bill—which, if I remember correctly, was moved by then shadow minister David Coleman—to force age verification onto the agenda for social media, and Labor knocked it back. This Labor government knocked it back.

This Labor government has been dragged kicking and screaming to introduce a social media ban. Those members opposite will try and rewrite history, especially those members opposite who are new to the party or new to this place and who are given the talking points by the Labor Party. But the reality is the under-16s ban was born of and from the coalition.

The Labor Party wanted nothing to do with it. That was until a group of parents who had lost children to the sort of abuse that many children experience on social media—mums like Emma Mason, who lost her daughter Matilda to the most wicked forms of online abuse. Mr Deputy Speaker, when you and I were lads—you were a lad a fair bit longer ago than I was a lad.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Freelander ): Correct. Mr WALLACE: When you and I were lads, bullying stopped at the school gate. But, now, bullying continues day in, day out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Poor little Tilly succumbed to that bullying and took her own life in her own backyard. Emma Mason led the charge with a number of other parents to force this government to act. She then went to the UN and did some great work in the UN—if it's possible to do any great work in the UN, but I digress again.

The work done by those family members, those parents, brought this to the front of mind of Australians and showed that this is not just some sort of boutique issue; this is something that is costing Australian lives. I want to thank them again for their work. In May of 2024, there was a parliamentary inquiry which was engaged and begun under this government, but at the coalition's behest, when David Coleman was the shadow communications minister.

I remember serving on that committee with the member for Flinders, and we did some really good work once again to look at bringing those age assurance issues into social media. I'm pleased that the government finally woke up to itself and adopted that recommendation. We also made recommendations around the significance of algorithms and recommender systems and how those systems can significantly sway what young people—all of us but particularly young people—see on their screens and how that can have a significant, deleterious impact on their mental wellbeing.

I know, Mr Deputy Speaker, how much you, as a renowned paediatrician, take those matters very seriously. I want to thank the member for Flinders for her outstanding work on that committee because she helped me immeasurably in the recommendations that we ended up putting up. I want to acknowledge the great work of David Coleman and the former opposition leader Peter Dutton, who made a commitment, at the last election, that within the first 100 days of a coalition government we would introduce a social media ban for under-16s.

But things haven't gone so well since then. The Labor Party took what was a good policy and they wrecked it. The numbers don't lie.

The eSafety Commissioner's own March 2026 compliance update identified that 70 per cent of children under 16 are still on social media. A landmark British Medical Journal study identified that 85 per cent of under-16s are still logging on. Its verdict was 'limited implementation, incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention'.

The eSafety Commissioner herself called the ban a 'very blunt force approach' that was thrown together 'very quickly' with 'very thin scaffolding' and no 'potent powers'. In her words, taking on the world's biggest tech companies is not like 'sticking a pink parking ticket on a windshield'. She also described it as like trying to 'fence the ocean'.

The amending bill before the House tonight is actually a confession of the Labor government. Labor is rushing to bolt on the powers it should have built in from day one. Today, as the law stands, the commissioner can only compel a platform or platform providers.

This bill allows the eSafety Commissioner to compel documents from age-assurance providers, app store operators and anyone reasonably believed to hold compliance information. It provides penalties with bite. It provides for the doubling of penalties, up to $99 million for a corporation and up to $19.8 million for an individual.

These are all good things, but they are late to the party. It would be remiss of me not to comment on the sorts of dangers and ills that we are experiencing today on social media. Did you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that in the 2024-25 financial year the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received 82,764 reports of online child exploitation?

That's 227 reports each and every single day. This is something that we as Australians should be ashamed of, and there is much more work for the minister to do. There are some really simple things that this government could do.

There are, unfortunately, bad actors that are operating in the dark web, which has led to child sexual exploitation being absolutely rife throughout the dark web. There are ways and means that this government should be using to identify perpetrators and victims. I'm not sold on this particular product, but there's a product out there called Clearview AI, which enables law enforcement to identify perpetrators and victims.

But we can't use products like Clearview AI which scrape the dark web, because some genius in the privacy commission decided that that was a breach of Australian privacy law. So we are at the mercy of these grubs that operate on the dark web who seek to exploit children in Australia and around the world, and this government won't arm our law enforcement agencies with the tools that they need to identify victims and perpetrators.

I implore those members opposite—the Attorney-General, the Minister for Communications and anybody on the government benches—to have a look at the concept of a proprietary product called Clearview AI. It identifies perpetrators and victims so that we can charge and arrest these grubs and try to identify victims and help them get away from the situations that they're in.