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

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (18:29): I certainly support the amendment put forward by the member for Lindsay in relation to the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. Today, I spoke to and listened to the Lutheran School Wagga Wagga, a primary school of children visiting on their excursion to Parliament House in Canberra. I gave to those youngsters, as I do to all school groups, two bits of advice.

One of those bits of advice is to not smoke, because it's dumb, it's unhealthy and it's expensive. The other bit of advice I always give the children—these days, the primary school ones are not or should not be on social media, but I always say this to them—is, 'When you do get on social media at a later age, don't write something about someone else that you wouldn't like said about yourself,' because online bullying is every bit as bad as every other type of bullying.

Face-to-face bullying, bullying by exclusion, bullying by any means—it is unacceptable in the schoolyard, in the classroom and anywhere else. The difficulty for children these days is that bullying doesn't just stop at the school gate. It doesn't just stop a little bit after three o'clock, when the school bell tolls to end the school day.

It continues online. It continues via TikTok, it continues via Snapchat, it continues via Facebook, it continues via any other social media platform for children and for adults. And it's not nice.

Sometimes, when the schoolchildren visit Parliament House, we are hardly an example of good behaviour, I'm sad to say. We should reflect upon that. But this is a robust debating chamber, and there are things said across this table that are contested.

Whilst I don't always agree with the members opposite, I respect their views, for them to be able to represent their electorates, their policies and their philosophies—even though I don't necessarily always agree with what is being said. On other elements to this particular amendment which worry me, I do believe that this is the government scrambling and playing catch-up.

I appreciate that the member for Lilley, the minister, has done some good work in this space and place. I appreciate, too, that there are different views on this legislation. I commend the government, of sorts, for some of the elements they've put forward—and the minister too—because our children do matter.

Our children do need protection. I grew up in—well, I began reading in the late sixties, and, certainly, by the seventies, I was very much a fan of Enid Blyton. Mr Hill: Hear, hear!

Mr McCORMACK: I thought you were about to say, 'You probably still are!' and I am. I know that some of the publications of the late Enid Blyton have been banned. But it was an age where children played outdoors and where books were read and enjoyed.

It was a much calmer, better stage, I believe, for kids growing up— Mr Hill: The faraway tree! Mr McCORMACK: The Magic Faraway Tree—with Mr Watzisname and others! I do feel for children these days.

I'm now a grandfather. I have two grandchildren. I read to little Adeline down in Melbourne.

She loves books. She's probably too young to appreciate fully the books that I'm reading her, but she loves books. I want what's going to be best for my grandchildren, and I know that any parent or grandparent would feel the same.

It doesn't matter what you achieve or do in life; it's what you are able to pass on to the next generation that's going to be the most important thing. Long after our time in parliament is finished—and anything else we ever achieve in the workplace—our families are not going to remember or care about it. They're just going to remember that we were 'Dad' or 'Pop' and that we were a good father or grandfather or whatever the case might be.

The coalition has done some good work in this space. We don't just talk about online safety. Our words are also our actions.

We built, constructed and established the global model for it. All the major protections that Labor now relies upon were legislated by the coalition. In 2015, we created the Children's eSafety Commissioner.

It was the first dedicated online safety regulator anywhere, and we're proud of that fact. The world didn't lead us; we led the world. That's a good thing.

Other democracies are following our model. In 2017, we put together the first scheme to force platforms to take down intimate images shared without consent. It's image based abuse.

We whacked perpetrators and non-compliant platforms with financial penalties which had meaning—and they can never be too severe, quite frankly. These tech companies, these big global giants, are making an extraordinary amount of money. I appreciate there are difficulties, but, if they want to do business in Australia, they have to comply with Australian law, whether that's law put in by us in the past or laws put in by Labor presently.

I think we would all agree—everyone in this chamber, everyone in this parliament, all 226 of us—that our children are 100 per cent worth it. No big tech company making decisions in some overseas boardroom, with their big tech mogul executives making big tech mogul paycheques, cares about our kids like we do. But we care—the coalition does; the government does.

In 2021, the Online Safety Act introduced the most comprehensive online safety regime in Australia's history. The basic online safety expectations were codified, an adult cyberabuse takedown scheme was implemented and the timeframes for platforms to strip illegal and terrorist content from feeds were slashed. That's a record.

That's what we did. It was important work. The under-16 ban was born of a coalition conviction that childhood is worth protecting.

In November 2023, a private member's bill by the coalition brought four-stage verification onto the agenda. At the time, it wasn't agreed to by the government, but it bowed to pressure and it funded a trial in the 2024 budget. And I say thank you, because it doesn't matter who brings the legislation to the parliament.

If it's going to protect just one child—if it's going to prevent one child from self-harm or taking their own life, which is such a tragedy—then it's worth it. The parliament agreed that more needed to be done, but Labor's two-year implementation has been marked with missteps, unfortunately. The eSafety Commissioner's own March 2026 compliance update reported that 70 per cent of children were still on social media.

I know it's hard, sometimes, to make kids do what they're supposed to. I'm a parent; I get that. A landmark British Medical Journal study showed that 85 per cent of under-16s are still logging onto platforms that they should not be.

Its verdict was limited implementation, incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention—getting around it. I know some will say that kids will find a way, and kids are smart—much smarter than us when it comes to these little devices. But certain actions need to be taken to ensure that children who are under 16 have their minds on something other than a damn mobile device.

We have to put in place measures that are going to ensure that the law is not only implemented but also being followed. Whilst the framework was collapsing in homes across Australia, unfortunately the minister went overseas to talk at the United Nations about the ban. I'm not sure that the trip was entirely value for taxpayer money.

That said, I do understand that the Labor government wants to spruik what it's done in this regard. I get that. But whilst this was all happening, children were still circumventing the ban and using social media platforms.

This amendment is coming in now because the proper work on the ground—via stakeholders and via any other means to ensure that children would not get around the ban—wasn't done when the ban was introduced in the first place. Politics is like anything: you have to do the groundwork; you have to fully explore every detail before you come into this place, put a bill down, have it read by the clerks and then vote on it.

Unfortunately, all too often since May 2022 we have seen rushed legislation. I say to the government: sometimes you need to calm the farm. Sometimes you've just got to take a breath, take a step back and fully examine the legislation.

This might be an idea: have a chat to the coalition about it, or the crossbench—the member for Clark is a smart person—and sometimes, on issues such as this, take on board the views of those opposite, because there are people of goodwill here, particularly on issues such as this, where our children's health and harm is at stake. Be a little bit more bipartisan, because what Labor is doing all too often is bringing legislation into this place, rushing it through—ramming it through, because they've got a 50-plus seat majority—and then going over to the Senate and doing dirty deals with organisations such as the Greens political party.

And the Greens, I will warn, do not have the same views or philosophies about a better Australia as the coalition has. So this is a mistake. We then see Labor playing catch-up.

We then see legislation such as this being brought back and amendments having to be put through. I appreciate that this is going to sit and rest, as I'm told, over the recess period. That is good, because it might give the government some time to, again, take a breath, look at it and make sure that the follies and the missteps taken when the legislation was first introduced by the Labor government are not repeated.

This is too important to get wrong again. This is too important because children's lives are at stake. It is that serious.

We need to make sure that, at every step of the way at the moment, in every measure, we get this legislation right and we protect kids' lives online.