Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Hansard source

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.

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