Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026
Senator WHITTEN (Western Australia) (11:11): I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. Handing the eSafety Commissioner the power to demand documents from any person in relation to the social media ban was cause enough for alarm. That power already reached past the platforms; it reached into households.
On the face of the drafting, that included children. Isn't all this hoo-ha about protecting the children? When the government amendments came through, I could barely believe my eyes.
Those documents demanded the power stay. On top of that, Labor now wants the eSafety Commissioner to be able to summon anyone and question them under oath. That includes our kids who might have snuck around Labor's weak under-16 ban.
If someone doesn't want to answer, it's 12 months jail. There's a thousand penalty units or $364,000 fines sitting next to that prison term. This is compulsion backed by criminal law.
This is Orwellian. Labor made a hash of the first policy. The under-16 ban was sold as a clean shield for children.
Platforms were told to keep kids off. Parents were told Canberra had it in hand. Then the plan met reality.
Teenagers worked around the rules. So what does Labor do when the sales pitch fails? It doesn't go back to parents.
It doesn't admit that the design was rushed. It demands powers to interrogate anyone who won't play along. The proposed amendments fundamentally change this bill.
The chamber isn't being asked to vote on the bill that went to committee. It's being asked to vote on a different instrument—summons, oaths, private examinations, records of those examinations and jail for silence. It shouldn't pass without going back to committee.
We can't pretend they scrutinised the power that wasn't in the text when the committee sat. Let's talk about what this bill actually does. Yes, children should be protected online.
Of course they should be. Exploitation is real. Criminal abuse is real.
Predatory contact is real. One Nation doesn't pretend the internet is harmless. But this bill extends far beyond the remit of looking after kids.
It's about power. It's about control. It's about giving government and its regulators more authority over what Australians do, see and say online.
We've seen this story before. Governments introduce extraordinary powers and claim they're needed for a narrow purpose. They promise safeguards, then the scope expands.
The exceptional becomes the normal. The temporary becomes permanent, and the power gets used for things that were never in the original sales pitch. That's how freedoms disappear—not always overnight but one amendment at a time.
These amendments bestow sweeping, enforceable powers on the eSafety Commissioner, including a new examination power to issue a summons to attend. There is a duty to give evidence, a duty to produce documents and a duty to answer questions under oath or affirmation. Examinations can be held in private.
A record can be made, and refusing is a crime. Labor have said they will provide immunity from self-incrimination, by applying use immunity to answers and not allowing them to be used in court. It doesn't fix the real problem: the state putting a child, a parent or a political opponent in a room and demanding answers of them under threat of a year in prison.
When you strip out the noise, this is about freedom. The under-16 regime already cuts into the rights of parents. Parents, not bureaucrats, know their children.
They know their maturity, their circumstances and what's right for their family. A 15-year-old keeping up with sport isn't the same as a 12-year-old being groomed in a chat. This law swaps parental judgement for a national rule.
Arm the parents with the tools they need. Labor seem to think Canberra knows better. That's the habit of this government.
They trust politicians and bureaucrats more than parents. Now they want to put even more power in the hands of regulators. The eSafety Commissioner was set up to deal with genuine online safety problems: image based abuse, child sexual exploitation and targeted criminal harassment.
These are real wrongs, and they deserve a serious look, but we've already seen the eSafety Commissioner engaging in fights over speech and political expression well outside her intended remit. That should be a warning. The parliament needs to sit up and listen.
Our overzealous eSafety Commissioner has already been in the courts and the tribunal, trying to police what Australians see and say online, and she hasn't come out of those fights well. She went before the Federal Court to force X to hide the Wakeley church stabbing video from the entire world, not just Australia. Justice Kennett refused to extend the injunction.
Geoblocking this country was one thing, but global censorship was a bridge too far. The case was then dropped but not before wasting $60,000 of taxpayer money. She even drew the ire of the United States Congress, and I note this morning that the president is now showing his ire.
House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jim Jordan, in a letter seeking her testimony, called her a 'noted zealot for global take-downs'. He said her reading of the Online Safety Act, including extraterritorial reach, threatened American free speech. One of our closest allies looked at an Australian official and saw someone trying to dictate what the rest of the world could watch.
That should shame this government. Instead, Labor wants to hand the same office a summons book. She issued a cyberabuse removal notice over a political post by Chris Elston, aka Billboard Chris, about a World Health Organization appointment.
The Administrative Review Tribunal set that notice aside. Causing offence isn't the same as intending serious harm. The law required the latter, and she couldn't prove it.
Speech that some people find confronting must remain free. She decided Celine Baumgarten's post criticising a primary school 'queer club' wasn't cyberabuse, so she couldn't lawfully order it down. That didn't stop her sending X an informal complaint alert that got the post geoblocked anyway.
The tribunal found that step was reviewable. She appealed to the full Federal Court. The full court dismissed her appeal—another $329,000 of taxpayers' money down the proverbial.
That's the record—aggressive overreach and lost cases. When the legal test wasn't met, the machinery was used anyway. Informal channels were used when formal power wouldn't stretch, and this bill gives the same office the power to summon under oath, demand documents and threaten 12 months of jail on a refusal to answer—man, woman or child.
Labor wants to expand the machinery. That's dangerous because, once a government appointed regulator has broad power over online communication, the question isn't technical anymore. The question is: who decides what Australians are allowed to say?
That brings us to Labor's proposed digital duty of care. Labor has flagged forcing platforms and algorithms to prevent or reduce harm. Fine.
Define harm. What is it? Who decides?
Political disagreement isn't harm. Criticism isn't harm. Holding government to account isn't harm.
Satire isn't harm. A parent arguing about what's taught in primary school isn't harm. A woman saying biological sex is real isn't harm.
Yes, the government will reach for words like 'manosphere', as if a few billy goats on the internet explain every problem in the country. I have two points. First, the government can't even define 'man 'and 'woman', so it's going to have trouble finding the manosphere.
Second, if particular men are threatening, stalking or abusing people, platforms already have rules and the criminal law already has offences. AFP, go out and get them. Will the government and the commissioner go after the toxic femosphere with the same energy?
I doubt it. Is toxicity a one-way charge? We've already heard the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications say that this is mostly about children. 'Mostly' is doing a lot of work these days. 'Mostly' keeps the press release clean while the statute runs wider. 'Mostly' is how the child protection argument becomes an information gathering argument, then a summons argument and then a duty of care argument about harm in the adult public square.
Labor has already shown its hostility to political opponents. Labor treats One Nation as harmful. We've been called 'dangerous'.
We've heard claims that bots and trolls explain our rise even days after a decisive electoral victory in Secret Harbour. It looks like those bots are voting! So forgive us for being sceptical when Labor says it wants to wipe out 'harm'.
What happens when they decide criticism of Labor is harmful? What happens when an alternative political movement is tagged as harmful? What happens when a post about immigration, sex, religion, veterans or the cost of living is filed under 'unsafe' because it makes the wrong people uncomfortable?
We cannot hand over these subjective definitions with real-life consequences to such highly politicised bureaucrats. Look overseas. In the United Kingdom, people have had police at the door over social media posts and electronic messages.
Britain doesn't publish a neat official total labelled 'arrest for a tweet'. Campaign groups and newspapers had to pull the numbers from police forces through freedom of information requests because—surprise, surprise—governments that want to control free speech hate transparency. Figures for 2021 to 2025 found at least 62,000 arrests under communications offences.
About 18,500 were charged, and about 12,300 were convicted. Some of those cases will have been genuine threats, but the gap is the point—tens of thousands of arrests with only a fraction ending in conviction. In a free country, arrest is meant to be a step toward proving a crime, not a punishment that does the political work even when the charge later falls over.
A knock at the door is enough. A night in custody is enough. After that, a lot of people never post again and self-censoring begins.
Once that becomes normal, once everyone knows what could happen, everyone else goes quiet to avoid being next. That should be a warning, not a model. Australia mustn't sleepwalk into a system where a growing bureaucracy decides what its citizens can say online.
This isn't the slow creep. Big Brother is watching. It's always for the children.
It's always for your safety. Safeguards get promised then drifted so wide they don't constrain the people they were meant to constrain. We cannot replicate the sort of system where people are silenced not always by a conviction in a courtroom but by making the cost of speaking higher than most people will pay.
One Nation will not accept that. Australians will not accept that. Of course there are things online that go too far.
There are genuine threats. There is criminal abuse. There is exploitation.
The criminal law should be used against people who prey on children. I'll go one further. Let's significantly increase the penalty for crimes against children.
Let's go after the paedophiles. Our penalties need to be much more severe for those that go online to cause children harm or peddle child abuse material. Lock the paedos up and throw out the key, I say.
None of that requires a summons pointed at any person or a year in jail for someone who won't be compelled to answer questions. The answer isn't to hand government sweeping powers over speech and to take control away from parents. Government controlled speech isn't safety— Senator Hanson-Young: Do you know that he's accused of using child sexual exploitation material?
Senator WHITTEN: Shush! The e-safety government has proven time and time again that they will act out of political interest. If that means silencing free speech, so be it!
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Hodgins-May ): Senator Whitten, please take your seat. Senator Hanson-Young? Senator Hanson-Young: On a point of order, if Senator Whitten would like me to repeat what I said, for the record, I am willing to.
If he's asking me to withdraw something, then he needs to say that. He can't just tell people to shush. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: That's not a point of order.
Senator Hanson-Young: On a point of order, I would like to put on the record that Senator Whitten is talking about people who have been— The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: That's a debating point. Senator WHITTEN: The answer isn't to hand government sweeping powers over speech and take control away from parents. Government controlled speech isn't safety.
The eSafety Commissioner has proven time and time again that they will act out of political interests. If that means silencing free speech, so be it. Free speech is the most fundamental right we have.
If you can't criticise the government, how do you hold it to account? If you can't challenge the prevailing story, how do you change the country? If you can't speak freely, how do you defend any other freedom?
That's why One Nation will always stand for free speech. We'll stand for the right of Australians to debate, disagree, criticise and challenge those in power. Senator Hanson-Young interjecting— Senator WHITTEN: However, we do like a bit of respect when we're standing up talking and not have other people talk over us.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Whitten, please be seated for a moment. Senator Hanson-Young, please allow the senator to speak in silence and avoid interjecting. Senator WHITTEN: We'll stand for the rights of parents, and we'll stand against the creep of government authority.
Stop pretending that Australians must surrender their freedoms for their own protection. These powers are far too wide. Senator Hanson-Young: What about the freedom to choose?
Senator WHITTEN: They reach far beyond the people this legislation is supposed to target. Senator Hanson-Young: You just want big tech to decide. Senator WHITTEN: They set a dangerous precedent: when a policy doesn't work, the remedy is always more compulsion.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Whitten, please take your seat. Senator Green? Senator Green: On a point of order, interjections are disorderly.
I know that Senator Hanson-Young is very passionate about this topic, but she should let the— The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I've asked Senator Hanson-Young to please refrain from interjecting, and I'll remind her to please allow the senator to be heard in silence. Senator WHITTEN: One Nation will vote against this bill. We will not vote to hand more power to bureaucrats with a penchant for attacking free speech.
These laws, along with their amendments, are a sledgehammer looking for free speech—the only way Labor knows how. One Nation will keep fighting these laws and will protect Australians' rights, because the cure for bad speech is more and better speech.