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

Senator HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia—Manager of Australian Greens Business in the Senate) (10:23): by leave—I move Australian Greens amendments (1) to (4) on sheet 4091 together: (1) Schedule 1, page 3 (before line 4), before item 1, insert: 1A Section 5 (after the definition of age-restricted user ) Insert: annual global turnover has the meaning given by section 21A. 1B After section 21 Insert: 21A Annual global turnover (1) The annual global turnover of a body corporate, during a financial year, is the sum of the values of all the supplies that the body corporate, and any body corporate related to the body corporate, have made, or are likely to make, during that year, other than the following supplies: (a) supplies made from any of those bodies corporate to any other of those bodies corporate; (b) supplies that are input taxed; (c) supplies that are not for consideration (and are not taxable supplies under section 72-5 of the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999); (d) supplies that are not made in connection with an enterprise that the body corporate carries on.

(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), it is immaterial whether the supplies were made, or are likely to be made, within or outside Australia. (3) Expressions used in subsections (1) and (2) that are also used in the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999 have the same meaning in those subsections as they have in that Act. (4) The question whether 2 bodies corporate are related to each other is to be determined for the purposes of subsection (1) in the same way as for the purposes of the Corporations Act 2001.

(2) Schedule 1, item 1, page 3 (line 5), omit "60,000", substitute "10% of the annual global turnover of the provider in the previous financial year." (3) Schedule 1, item 2, page 3 (line 7), omit "60,000", substitute "10% of the annual global turnover of the provider in the previous financial year." (4) Schedule 1, item 3, page 3 (line 9), omit "60,000", substitute "10% of the annual global turnover of the provider in the previous financial year." These amendments are really important.

This entire piece of legislation is about enforcement of the law and making sure big tech abides by what this parliament agrees to. If we want people to be safe online, big tech has to be held to account. We, of course, know that the social media ban has been an absolute failure.

It was destined to fail from the beginning. You don't need to take my word for it. The fact that the government is now having to introduce the duty of care bill, which actually goes to the need to protect people, to make their online experience safe, to force companies to provide safety for their users, proves that the social media ban for under-16s has been an utter failure.

However, what I am concerned about is that, unless we send a message to big tech that, when the parliament agrees to protect their citizens, when we agree that people should have the right to choose what is in their own feeds, when Australians have the right to be able to be online without being bombarded with harmful content and tricked and manipulated with addictive algorithms, if Big Tech flouts those rules, there will be consequences for them.

In the current legislation, it's a slap on the wrist. It's 100 million bucks for these huge gorilla big tech companies who make billions and billions of dollars a year; 100 million bucks is nothing to them. It's not just the cost of doing business; it's like the morning coffee run for the office for big tech.

It's nothing. So, if we're serious about holding big tech to account and putting in place penalties that will actually deter bad behaviour and force them to clean up their act, then we really need to increase these penalties. The rest of the world, when they're looking at how they take on big tech and hold them to account, talk about the need to consider revenue and about how the penalties must be a percentage of their revenue because of course, otherwise, they just keep carrying on this bad behaviour.

The difference between the fine and what their profits are just gets bigger and bigger. The only way to have a meaningful penalty on big tech and these huge, enormous companies that are manipulating, addicting and profiting off harm is to make the penalties a percentage of global revenue. Australia wouldn't be the first country in the world to do this.

The EU has introduced a similar percentage of global revenue for Meta. Other countries around the world are moving in that direction because everybody knows that the way these companies get away with this is that they country shop based on where they bank their business. You can't just have it.

You can't even just have a percentage on domestic revenue, because they just put their bank account in Singapore. They do all their business through Ireland. We know that Meta here in Australia is already flouting our tax rules because they don't pay their fair share of tax because they offshore their profits.

Not only are they profiting off a product that is deliberately addictive, that is harmful, that is manipulating and using Australians; they then have the gall to offshore their profits overseas so that they don't even have to pay tax on their harmful product. So the only way to seriously hold these tech companies, these big global gorillas, to account is to make sure we have a percentage of global revenue as part of the penalty regime.

That's what this amendment does. It's a penalty of 10 per cent of global revenue. I think that's fair enough.

These are the richest companies in the world. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, a trillionaire, and he gets his kicks out of running a platform that is deliberately designed to be addictive and harmful. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest men in the world; he gets his kicks out of and makes profit off of a product that is deliberately designed to be addictive and harmful.

If we're going to actually take a swing at that, if we're going to put Australians back in control of what we see in our social media feeds, if we want to be safe online, we've got to hit these buggers where it hurts. It's got to be a much bigger fine than 100 million bucks. That is peanuts to them.

So let's get serious. Let's make it a percentage of global revenue, and let's hit them where it hurts.