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

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (19:01): Here we go again—the fiction that the social media age ban is working. We see the government continuing to trumpet this broken policy as one of their most significant achievements. It's depressing to watch a government go out and do this in the face of all of the evidence that we have that says it's not working.

You can book a business class ticket to New York and spruik this, or you could look at the evidence. As Greens, we would rather look at the evidence and look at what eSafety has said. eSafety reports that the number of bullying complaints, the evidence of kids being bullied, is pretty much exactly the same before and after this ban. It hasn't moved the dial one jot.

That's when you read eSafety's actual reports and the evidence. Does anyone know an under-16-year-old kid in Australia who's actually been denied a social media account and hasn't been able to find one? We said at the outset that this rushed, badly considered, thought bubble of legislation, which is what this was last year, would be worked around by every 14-year-old in the country and every 15-year-old in the country, and they did.

They're just laughing at the government on this. If that's all it was—if it was just the government being humiliated by 15-year-olds, and the coalition and One Nation were willing players in this—that'd be one thing. But it's actually caused harm.

This whole process is like some distorted episode from Utopia where everyone's laughing at the minister but no-one has the guts to tell them: 'It doesn't work. It's not working. The kids have worked around it.' We told you it wouldn't work, and we said, when you rushed it through in your moral outrage last year for an announceable, that it wouldn't work, and we said we'd be back here again, having to fix it up.

I don't think this is really fixing it up, but it's the inevitable. It's the inevitable return to a bunch of rushed, badly thought out, unworkable proposals. What it ended up doing was, instead of having platforms work to try and make at least that one part of their operation for under-16-year-olds safer—limiting the advertising or hopefully excluding advertising, putting time limits on it, preventing direct messages—and instead of having that safety by design, you've got under-16-year-olds pretending to be adults and getting accounts with no limitations on them or going into even more dangerous, unregulated parts of the internet and going onto platforms that have no controls and none of those protections.

That's what you've produced. At the time that this broken policy was being rushed through here with your collective moral outrage—and I want to be clear; we see the damage the platforms do. We see the damage and the greed and the self-interest of the platforms, the Metas of this world.

We see it, but we kind of like policies that address their greed and self-interest and profits and put good design and our children and protecting us from being driven down dangerous, extremist pathways or suicidal ideation—we actually put good design, good policy and good law ahead of a sugar hit of moral outrage, which is what drove this social media ban last year.

We want to keep kids safe. We want to keep adults safe. We said then—and we say it again—that a digital duty of care that works, that cuts into the profit making of these big platforms that feed off division and extremism and addiction, and that applies across all online spaces and to all people, young and old, is what is needed.

That's what we've been pushing. That was always a better option than trying and failing to kick kids off a handful of platforms, driving them into less regulated spaces—feeling like they can't tell their parents what they're doing. That's what you've created.

You've created a set of laws that means kids are off doing what they're doing, getting around the restrictions and going into spaces. You've created laws that encourage less communication between kids and their parents about what they're doing online. Kids are not going to be coming and saying—well, a bunch of them aren't.

Some may. Some will, but a bunch of them won't. They're not going to be going to say, 'Mum and dad, I've got this adult Instagram account.

Let me show you what's happening,' or, 'I'll let you know what my account is so you can follow me. It's an adult account on Instagram.' Those conversations aren't happening. You've broken trust between kids and their parents.

You come in here and say that the answer to the unholy mess that you created with your moral outrage is to double the penalties. That's the answer from Labor: 'We're going to double the penalties for platforms that aren't enforcing the age ban.' Let me try and remember exactly how many prosecutions you've launched so far with the existing penalties. Senator Hanson-Young, can you help me here?

How many have they lodged? Senator Hanson-Young: Zero. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: They've lodged zero.

You've done zero prosecutions with the current penalties, but you say the answer is to double the penalties. Then you can have double the penalties with zero prosecutions—all fixed! Labor's fixed their social media ban!

I said this is like an episode from Utopia, only less funny. If you want penalties that the likes of Meta, X or others will actually listen to—doubling the penalties is still a cost of doing business for them. Doubling the penalties is hardly going to ruffle their feathers.

This government has been told repeatedly—it was in the recommendations of the Rickard review—that the only penalties these global vampires listen to are penalties attached to their global turnover, penalties that are economically meaningful to them. A hundred Australian dollars isn't going to fuss Elon Musk, because he knows it's the maximum penalty anyhow. It's not an issue.

You attach a penalty to global turnover. That's the kind of penalty that they might even listen to. The watch-my-hand strategy here of doubling the penalties is stock-in-trade for the Albanese government now.

You've got a difficult social problem. You've got a failure to comply. It's not working.

What you've been doing isn't working. Corporate Australia isn't listening to you. Internet multinationals aren't listening to you.

The policy doesn't work. It's all broken. What do you do?

You roll in here and you double the penalties, and we have exactly the same zero prosecutions with a double penalty. We've heard it. I think I've seen this film before.

What the hell? That being said, when you pull apart the bill and you have a look at it—you look at its entrails—there are little bits that are useful. Empowering eSafety to get additional information and actually create a good precedent to get some additional information from some of these platforms is useful.

That's good. We can see some sense in that. Although many of the powers that are being granted now in this bill are needed only because of the rush job that happened when this legislation was first rammed through, I can see sense in those.

The Greens can see some sense in those, and I acknowledge the comments and the work of my colleague Senator Hanson in addressing that— Senator Hanson-Young: Hanson-Young, even. Senator SHOEBRIDGE: Sorry, Senator Hanson-Young. I'm going to correct the record twice now—Senator Hanson-Young, Senator Hanson-Young, Senator Hanson-Young.

It must be after seven o'clock, and I'm tired. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Ciccone ): Did you have a point of order, Senator Hanson-Young? Senator SHOEBRIDGE: She does, and it's a very valid one.

I've taken it twice and three times now. Thank you, Chair. I just want to acknowledge the work of my colleague in doing this and keeping it on the record and pressing forward on this, because we come back to this point: doubling penalties that aren't working won't fix anything.

Doubling down on bad policy that isn't working and that the kids are working around won't fix anything. Fixing the feed, putting the duty of care in, holding the platforms to account—and I again acknowledge there's this slither in this bill that actually is doing some of that work—is the right pathway. To pretend that this bill is about keeping kids safe is just plainly wrong.

This bill is about trying to keep the government safe. I don't think it's going to work.