Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026, and I move the second reading amendment circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) recognises that the former Coalition Government delivered world-leading online safety reforms, including the enactment of the Online Safety Act 2021, which set an international benchmark for protecting Australians, and children in particular, online;

(2) notes the Government's social media age restrictions were poorly designed, and badly implemented which has compromised the online safety of Australian children and failed parents, and this bill is an embarrassing admission the Government is failing;

(3) expresses concern the Government's proposed digital duty of care remains ill-defined and uncertain in its scope and operation, and that the Government has failed to explain how it would work, what obligations it would impose, or how it would be enforced without creating unintended consequences; and

(4) expresses further concern that much more needs to be done to protect children online, including by giving parents access to effective mobile device safety tools, and combating the addictive algorithms which fuel harmful 'doom scrolling' on social media feeds".

I do so with a simple observation. The Albanese Labor government has been forced back to the parliament to fix a law it told Australians it had already fixed. Let us be clear about what this announcement really is: doubling the maximum penalty to $99 million and legislating new information-gathering powers. These are not the actions of a government that has got it right. They are the admissions of a government that got it wrong. The Albanese Labor government's social media ban is half baked, poorly designed, rushed and badly implemented, and every Australian parent who was promised that their children would be safer is today learning the truth—that this ban was built on very thin scaffolding indeed.

You don't just have to take my word for it. The eSafety Commissioner herself described this ban as a 'very blunt force approach', developed very quickly. She now says she was 'not keen on it' when it was first discussed. She said it did not give her the 'potent powers' that she needed. When your own regulator tells you the tools don't work, there's a real problem, and that problem has a name: incompetence.

The evidence is damning. A landmark Australian study published just last week in the British Medical Journal found that 85 per cent of under-16s are still accessing social media—we know this; we see this out and about in our communities—and that ban was unlikely to improve adolescent mental health in the short term. The study concluded there had been limited implementation, incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention. The eSafety Commissioner's own compliance update in March this year found that 70 per cent of children remain on these platforms. That is a verdict on the Albanese Labor government's signature child-safety policy.

And, while children slip through the cracks, the minister flies around the world taking credit for a policy that this side of the House made possible. Minister, the work that needed to be done was here at home—the hard work of design, of enforcement, of getting it right. That work was never done. Worse, the government continues to mislead Australians, boasting that more than five million accounts have been removed. But we know a large proportion of those are Google accounts used for Gmail and other purposes that have nothing to do with social media accounts. Australians deserve honesty, not spin dressed up as success.

The coalition will not be lectured by this government when it comes to protecting children online, because, when it comes to online safety, it is this side of the House that built the frameworks that Labor now leans on. It was the coalition that established the eSafety Commissioner, the first dedicated online safety regulator of its kind anywhere in the world—although I have questioned the overuse of the eSafety Commissioner's powers. We did not follow other nations. We led them. Australia became the global benchmark, and governments around the world looked to what we had built and sought to replicate it.

It was the coalition, through the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act, that first gave Australia a Children's eSafety Commissioner, with powers to have cyberbullying material taken down, protecting young Australians from the torment of online abuse. It was the coalition that expanded that office in 2017 to protect all Australians, not just children, recognising that online harm does not stop at the age of 18. It was the coalition that delivered the landmark Online Safety Act 2021, the most comprehensive online safety regime in the country's history. We halved the time platforms have to remove harmful content, from 48 hours to 24, and built an adult cyberabuse scheme, strengthening protections against intimate images being shared without consent. And the coalition put in place the basic online safety expectations, putting the onus squarely on the tech giants to make their platforms safe by design, not as an afterthought. It was the coalition that gave the eSafety Commissioner the power to order the removal of the very worst content—and I think everyone would agree: child sexual abuse material, pro-terror content, abhorrent violent material—no matter where in the world it is hosted. That's a record. That's leadership. That is the hard, methodical work of governing by designing laws that actually function, which stands in stark contrast to what we have seen from the Albanese Labor government.

The coalition supported a minimum age for social media. We want to keep children safe, but supporting the goal was never the same as endorsing Labor's execution, and on execution the Albanese Labor government has failed. Labor inherited a world-leading framework and a world-first regulator, and it still managed to deliver a ban that 85 per cent of under-16s simply ignore. They had every tool the coalition built at their disposal. They have now squandered the goodwill of this parliament through incompetence, haste and a minister out of her depth. So let this be said plainly: much more must be done for our children. Parents must be given proper mobile device safety tools. We must confront the addictive algorithms that fuel doomscrolling and prey on young minds, and we must block the live streaming that enables the very horrors of child sexual abuse. The online safety of our children is not a press release, nor is it a photo opportunity; it is a solemn responsibility. On this government's watch, that responsibility has been dropped. Australian parents deserve better, and Australian children deserve better. Until this government does the hard work it has so far avoided, the coalition will hold it to account every single day.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Leon Rebello (McPherson, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Jo Briskey (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

A few weeks ago, the United Kingdom announced that it too would introduce a minimum age for social media use, and when the British government set out how it would be done it said its ban would be built, in their words, using the 'same model' as Australia. I read that with a sense of pride, because keeping children safe online is something we should all agree on, no matter your political persuasion or the country you call home. I think that, by leading the way, we have put those words into action, and now the world is following.

When we pass our laws we're out on our own. There was no shortage of people lining up to tell us it couldn't be done. Our government ignored those naysayers. We saw the data from experts, we listened to those with lived experience and we delivered sensible measures that are now keeping our children safe. What we heard from the UK prime minister in his announcement speech was a phrase that we had heard throughout the debate last year in this chamber, which was that this was about giving children their childhood back. While the UK is taking the next step, the likes of Canada and parts of Europe are also considering doing the same. The formula they are using came into effect in Australia on 10 December last year, when our government brought in a minimum age for social media and took under-16s off the platforms that were doing them harm.

The idea behind it is as simple as it gets: keeping kids safe from these platforms should not be the job of 14-year-olds or their parents around the kitchen table; it should be the job of the people who have built the platforms in the first place. We did not undertake these measures because we thought badly of young people or we didn't trust them. We did it because they had been allowed into a world that had been designed to target them, not to support their development, and today with the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 we make that law stronger, and I'm very proud to support it.

Before being elected to this parliament, I trained as an educational and developmental psychologist. I spent years studying how young minds grow, and it has stuck with me. So let me tell you how I see these platforms, because I think we keep describing them all wrong. We talk about social media like it's somewhere people go to hang out in the same way my generation hung out at Hungry Jacks, the local park or a shopping centre. It's not that. These platforms are not public areas that happen to have a few teenagers in them. They are products that are brilliantly built, backed by billionaires and designed to do one thing above all else, which is to get a hold of a person's attention and never let go.

We all know what being a teenager is like. As a parent, I've seen it from both sides. The science confirms that, in all of the years of your life, it is when your attention is the easiest to grab. Your mind is at its most curious because you're working out who you are, and what people think of you feels like the biggest thing in the world. Part of your brain chases that next hit of excitement, and that part is way out in front of the part of the brain that's meant to say: 'Wait. Hang on—maybe not.' And there's nothing wrong with that. That's simply how growing up works and how it always has. What my daughters are experiencing now is exactly what I and my siblings experienced a little while back.

But what's new is that we've handed some of the cleverest companies on earth a direct line into exactly that, and we've let them turn it into profit. The endless doomscrolling, the notifications pinging left and right, the little lift that you get when someone likes your post and the gut punch when nobody does—none of that happens by accident; it is the whole design. It's doing precisely what it was built to do. But the Online Safety Act 2021 is already pushing back. Since it came in, parents in my community have told me what it's meant at home, and the stories rhyme. At the beginning it was difficult, but now the evenings are calmer. The late night scrolling has stopped. Bedtime is a thing again, and even the odd kid has picked up a book. Others whose children are not quite at the age of wanting social media have also said what a relief it is that they now have these laws to point to when eventually they have the conversation with their children.

So change is happening in homes right across Maribyrnong and right across the country, yet, in the months since, we have learnt something else, and that is why this bill is before us today. Some of these platforms have looked at their obligation and decided that the bare minimum will do just fine. Earlier this year, the eSafety Commissioner put out an update on how the law is going, and the headline number was good: more than five million underage accounts removed or restricted. It also said that these measures swept through the platforms. But the same update found something else: too many kids are still getting back on, not because the law is weak but because these companies are letting them. A kid gets knocked back because of age restrictions, so they just try the age check again and again until it finally clicks. An account gets shut down on Monday, and it's back up again on Tuesday. And a parent who goes looking for somewhere to report to finds, half the time, there's no-one on these platforms listening.

We know these aren't accidents. They are deliberate choices, and we've seen this playbook before from some of the very same companies. They believe they can do as little as they like and get away with it while telling everyone they're doing heaps. They also make it as hard as possible for anyone outside to check whether it's true. If they receive a fine, they treat it as if it's just a cost of doing business. Because they have done this over and over, we know the game, and our response is that the bare minimum does not cut it when we're talking about children's safety.

The bill strengthens the law we've already got, and it does it in two ways. The first is about getting to the truth. Right now, when a platform tells the commissioner it's taking reasonable steps, that's a very hard claim to check from the outside because the platform is basically the only witness to its own behaviour. This bill addresses that head on. It lets the eSafety Commissioner demand information and documents not just from the platforms but from anyone who holds the goods on whether the law is being followed—the age check providers included. So, basically, if a company says its age assurance works, the commissioner can go and ask the people who built the age checker and find out whether that's actually true.

The second change is about consequences. The bill lifts the maximum penalty for breaking the minimum age rule to $99 million. These are companies that can build a car that drives itself and build software that writes emails for you, but somehow they can't tell a 13-year-old from a 30-year-old—I don't buy it. Our government doesn't buy it, and I'd hazard a guess that most parents don't either. Lifting that penalty and lining it up with the changes we've already made under our consumer law will make sure that doing the right thing is the cheaper option and that doing the wrong thing is not. To be fair to these companies, they're not short of money or brains or talent. They can clear this bar without breaking a sweat. The only real question—the only one there's ever been—is whether they'll choose to, and our government is determined to make sure the answer is yes.

When I discuss these restrictions, I always come back to the parents, because this goes to something I feel strongly about. No parent, however on the ball they may be, wins this by themselves. You can take the phone from them at night; they'll still find a way. You can set every control the device has got, and the design on the other side is still a step ahead of you. One parent, on their own against a massive company with AI on its side, gets worn down, worked around and, in the end, ignored. But a whole country and its government that sets a clear rule, stands behind it and hands its regulator the teeth it needs to back it up is a lot harder to ignore. The whole point of doing this is to give our kids the time they need to grow and to give Australian parents some breathing room.

I know there are members in this House and people throughout the country who still don't believe in these restrictions. I sometimes hear the argument that a kid who is determined to get around the rules will find a way and that, by pushing them off the big platforms, we might push them somewhere worse. I get it. But what I will say is that you don't judge a law by whether someone is determined to break it. We don't scrap the speed limit because some people speed. You continue to set the standard. You make doing the wrong thing harder rather than easier, and the evidence right in front of us says that there are fewer kids on this platform today than there were a year ago.

So it is working. We know this because the data says so and because parents are telling us so. The idea that you have to get everything right all the time is nonsense. Legislation, especially legislation involving technology, will always require room to grow. The debate in this chamber shows that, while others may wish to continue to bury their heads in the sand so they can continue to play cheap politics, our government understands the modern world in which we live. In the end, while this legislation and the restrictions it aims to strengthen are about technology, it is really about childhood and what we owe it.

I've spent my whole working life arguing that the early years of a child's life aren't a warm-up act for the important stuff later on; they are the important stuff. And these years, the teenage years, matter every bit as much in their own messy but brilliant way. They're not a rehearsal; they are the real deal. They are the years that decide who our kids turn into and how they come to see themselves. We all get one shot at it. My own two girls are growing up in this online world, the same as every child across Maribyrnong—the same as every child across this country. I want them to have a childhood with a bit of room left in it—room to be bored, to be curious, to muck around, to be young for as long as they get to be before the world starts to ask them to be something else.

Our government is not handing that over to a handful of companies that are more interested in their profits and performance. We have made a cracking start. We are leading the world, and this bill seeks only to make it stronger for parents and safer for our kids. I commend the bill to the House.

Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. Sometimes I reflect on the promise of the internet, of social media and of our digital platforms. We thought that they would be a place to connect, to cross oceans and skies, to stay in touch with family and loved ones despite the distance. We thought they would give everyone the opportunity to have their say. Suddenly, all you needed to have your voice heard was a phone and an internet connection, and we thought that that would contribute to a flourishing democracy. We thought that they'd be spaces for children to learn and for people to find support and friendships. We thought they'd spark incredible productivity and growth.

Imagine sitting down with someone from the 1970s or 1980s and telling them this: within 50 years, nearly everyone on earth will carry a device in their pocket that gives them instant access to the sum of human knowledge—every book, every paper, every fact, available in seconds. They would have assumed the obvious consequence: productivity would soar. But it hasn't. Productivity has declined, and almost all of the promises of our online spaces have fallen flat. It is not necessarily because the potential wasn't there but because the downsides of our online spaces have well and truly trumped the positives. Our online spaces are now vectors for incredibly harmful material: child sexual abuse material, suicidal content, aggressive bullying, radicalisation and racism. But the harms are actually deeper than this. Social media is now home to a constant negativity and enshittification that wears people down—constant misinformation, constant AI slop, constant misogynistic and racist comments, constant outrage and polarisation.

So many of the adults and children I speak to don't like social media. They're sick of algorithms that produce outrage and negativity, but they feel obliged to use it. They feel obliged to use it because we've welcomed these technologies into our lives without thinking about the harms they would cause, and now it is too late. Our lives are so entwined with social media and digital platforms that it's impossible to undo, and it makes unpicking the harms really difficult—not to mention that the big tech companies are now as powerful as many nation-states.

In this context, I strongly commend the Australian government's world-leading work in regulating online spaces. The under-16 social media ban is world leading. It required courage to implement, and I congratulate the government for this courage. It's great to see so many countries overseas now following in our footsteps, and I'm glad to see we're not stopping there. The government's commitment to a digital duty of care could be a transformative policy for improving our online spaces. It wouldn't just protect children by removing them. It would force companies to make their platforms into better sites and experiences.

But there's no question that the implementation of the under-16 ban has been questionable. The vast majority of teenagers I speak to have made their way around the ban. Studies show around 80 per cent have found their way through the ban. And part of the reason it's not working is because our eSafety Commissioner hasn't had the powers or the resourcing to properly enforce the ban. The eSafety Commissioner herself described it as trying to fence the ocean. This bill will make a difference here. It gives the eSafety Commissioner expanded powers to compel documents from digital platforms and other related stakeholders to assess whether the social media companies are actually doing as much as they can—and I have no doubt that they're not. These companies want this ban to fail. If it fails here, it means other countries won't pursue the same policy. If it works here—and we can make it work—we set an example for the rest of the world to follow. So I strongly support the greater empowerment of the eSafety Commissioner. I also support the doubling of penalties for noncompliance, although I don't think a $100 million fine is a huge deterrent for some of the world's wealthiest companies.

I also remain concerned by the eSafety Commissioner's budget. The commission will need to take on these technology giants in court, and it remains unclear whether it has a sufficient litigation budget to take them on. The minister has said that that is something that she's aware of and that she will guard against, and I will take her at her word on that. Without a doubt, properly resourcing and empowering the eSafety Commissioner will be essential for the success of the under-16 social media ban and essential to Australia's long-term approach to online safety.

Beyond the social media ban, the next step is a digital duty of care. Establishing a digital duty of care places an obligation on all digital platforms and services to take reasonable steps to prevent harm to users, including through AI chatbots, social media sites and other digital platforms that incorporate AI. This is an online safety framework that's proactive rather than reactive, a framework that requires platforms to be safe by design, not endlessly catching up with the latest harms. It would mean that social media platforms would not just have to remove extreme content but would also have to reconsider how their algorithms are developed in the first place. Similarly, an AI chatbot developer, if covered by a digital duty of care, that builds a product it knows is likely to be used by children for emotional support cannot claim it bears no responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.

In practice, a digital duty of care would require digital platforms—including AI developers, I think—to take steps like conducting risk assessments before deploying new products or features, implementing age-assurance measures where their products are likely to be used by children, implementing effective mitigation measures to remedy risks identified in assessments, designing recommendation systems that do not exploit psychological vulnerabilities, having accessible and effective mechanisms for users to report harm and taking prompt action when harms are identified. It could also require operating systems to be required to integrate an AI classifier that's set to block illegal child sex abuse material. Overall, it will shift responsibility to those who can actually prevent the harm in the first place.

The government has committed to implementing this digital duty of care, and there are a few design features that are essential to make it effective. Firstly, it's important that there is a single overarching duty. This would mean platforms have a general obligation to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm to their users, rather than a list of named specific obligations. And the difference is significant. A list of specific duties only captures what the drafters anticipated, not new and emerging harms, and this space is moving so fast that legislators cannot keep up with an ongoing list of harms as they become apparent. Specific duties for the highest risk categories could sit underneath an overarching obligation to give industries and regulators greater clarity, but the overarching duty must not be traded away. This is about creating a new culture where platforms think about those safety issues before they roll out new products, rather than taking a strict compliance approach.

Secondly, the framework must capture the full range of harms. The government's current issues paper sets the threshold at 'serious harm', but serious harm means loss of life or severe physical injury, and that threshold risks leaving out harms that are less acute or immediate but deeply damaging and widespread. This could include the erosion of a child's developmental capacity through unhealthy relationships with AI companions or the slow degradation of mental health in a teenager who spends years in an algorithmic environment that continues to serve up distressing content. None of these may clearly meet a serious harm threshold as currently framed, but they are still deeply problematic, and the government must lower the bar to use a threshold of harm rather than serious harm.

Thirdly, the eSafety Commissioner must be properly resourced and empowered. A well-designed duty of care on paper means nothing without a regulator capable of enforcing it. This bill is an important step towards this, but the government will have to continue to monitor the situation and empower and resource the commissioner as required as this space changes when we recognise a digital duty of care.

Fourthly, strong enforcement measures and penalties are needed. This would ensure that platforms actually meet the digital duty of care and are held to account. Again, that involves the eSafety Commissioner having resources and powers to compel the production of documents and data from platforms and audit algorithms. This bill is a step in the right direction there, too. The eSafety Commissioner also needs resourcing to litigate any appeals, because these big tech companies are not going to go quietly. Penalties must be substantial enough to change behaviour.

Fifthly, transparency requirements are needed to ensure the government and the public understand and can monitor how digital platforms are managing the risks. This would involve regular transparency reporting to government on key metrics such as usage statistics and quantitative data on exposure of children to harmful content. This would also involve requirements for platforms to make data available publicly to increase transparency.

Sixthly, AI models—like general-purpose chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT—need to be included. This is currently ambiguous, but these cause a range of novel harms like attachment hacking and erosion of critical thinking, and in 15 years we don't want to be in the same position with AI that we are now in with social media. We need to get the framework right so that it is actually dealing with technology as it continues to change.

I commend the government for its approach to online safety so far. We have been world leading with the under 16's ban. We need to back that up with this bill to ensure that we can enforce that and make it meaningful, partly for all the other countries who are looking to see if we can pull this off. I urge the government to continue to be brave and consultative and to listen to the community as it develops that digital duty of care so that we can lead the world and make sure that we are creating spaces that can be used safely. I commend the bill to the House.

Renee Coffey (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It's school holidays in my home state of Queensland, and, across Griffith, families will be out and about enjoying time with their kids. They will be at South Bank, one of our local parks like Raymond Park, at a local pool like Musgrave Park Swim Centre, at the movies like Hawthorne cinemas or the Dendy at Coorparoo, at one of our local libraries or just at home where parents are trying to fill in the days. As a parent of two beautiful young men myself, I know how great these days are. There is noise, mess, sunscreen, snacks. The kids are asking what they can do next and us parents are doing our best to keep everyone busy and happy.

There is another part too, and many parents know it too well. There is the constant pull of the phone, the tablet, the group chat, the notifications and the platforms that want a child's attention and do not give it back easily. Ask any parent what has changed most in childhood and many will point to the phone. It follows children into bedrooms, schoolyards and weekends, carrying pressures that parents can feel but cannot always see. It is the young person who cannot sleep after something cruel was said online. It's the child who feels left out after seeing photos from an event that they were not invited to.

It's been a year since I was elected into this government, and, in that time, one of the things I am most proud of is our social media ban for under 16s for those exact reasons. I am the mother of an 11-year-old and a 13-year old boy. Like so many parents, I want my children to grow up curious, kind, confident and safe. I want them to make friends in real life, learn how to be bored, play sport, ride bikes, read books, tell terrible jokes like their stepfather, argue over board games and spend time in the world around them. Most of all, I want them to have the space to become themselves before a platform starts measuring them, ranking them, tracking them and selling their attention.

The world has changed since I was a primary school student. I remember playing Chuck Yeager's Air Combat on my father's PC somewhere in the 1990s. I also remember playing DOOM, and I have to admit I thought the graphics looked pretty good back then. That was a very different type of screen time. It belonged to a very different childhood. The game stayed on the computer. That screen time did not follow me to school, sit by my bed, buzz in my pocket, count my likes or push endless content to me when I was meant to be asleep—although I will admit occasionally I did have the radio underneath my pillow when I was meant to be going to sleep. It did not learn what made me anxious, angry, excited or insecure then serve me more of it.

Children today face something far more powerful. Social media platforms are designed to hold attention, learn behaviour, reward reaction, push comparison and turn popularity into a visible score. For adults that can be hard enough to manage. For children, it can be totally overwhelming. A child of 12 or 13 does not have an adult brain, an adult sense of risk or an adult ability to step back and see that a platform is trying to keep them there. Yet too often we ask children to resist systems built by some of the richest companies on earth. That is not fair on children, and it's also not fair on parents.

Australian parents led this movement. Parents told us they were tired of fighting alone. They were tired of platform rules that looked good on paper but failed in practice. They were tired of children being exposed to bullying, violent content, sexualised content, scams, manipulation and social pressure before they were ready. They told us they needed more than advice. They needed the law to be on their side. The Albanese Labor government listened, and we acted to delay access to social media to the age of 16.

Since our minimum age law began on 10 December, more than five million underage accounts have been removed, deactivated or restricted. These are children who have been given back time to sleep, move, study, talk, play and step away from the pressure of being constantly watched and judged. We started seeing early signs of change. A recent YouGov survey found that 30 per cent of young Australians aged 13 to 15 are spending more time playing sport, 27 per cent report better sleep, online bullying is down nine per cent, and exposure to inappropriate and violent content has fallen by 18 per cent.

Our laws have made a strong start, but some platforms are still not doing enough. The eSafety Commissioner's public compliance update in March 2026 raised serious concerns. A substantial share of Australian children under 16 still hold accounts, create new accounts or bypass age checks, as we've heard in this chamber this morning. Some platforms appear to allow underage users to try age checks again and again until they pass. Some do too little to stop a child whose account has been closed from opening a new one straightaway, and some make it too hard for parents and others to report underage users. These are gaps that children can slip through, and they are failures by companies with the money, people and technical skills to do better.

The eSafety Commissioner is now actively investigating potential noncompliance of five platforms, and we can guess who they are: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. These are not small startups or backyard businesses; they are some of the largest and most powerful digital companies in the world. They have the engineers. They have the data. They have the money. They have the skill to build products that can hold a child's attention for hours. They can use those same resources to comply with Australian law. The Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 strengthens the enforcement framework behind the social media minimum age law. It does two main things: (1) it increases penalties for noncompliance and (2) it gives the eSafety Commissioner strong powers to gather information and documents.

The bill doubles the maximum penalty for breaches of the minimum age obligation, bringing the maximum penalty to $99 million. That is a serious penalty, and it needs to be serious for these multinational tech companies to take it seriously. The increase brings these penalties into line with recent changes to competition and consumer law, and it reflects the scale of the companies this parliament is regulating. A small penalty can become just the cost of doing business; a strong penalty sends a different message. We are firmly signalling to these multinational tech companies that, if you want to do business in Australia, then you must comply with Australian laws. It says children's safety cannot be treated as a public relations issue. It says platforms cannot make promises in public then do too little in private.

A strong and robust regulator like the eSafety Commission cannot enforce the law with public statements alone. It needs evidence, documents, records and the power to test what platforms say against what platforms do. These new changes will give the eSafety Commissioner stronger tools to get the information needed to assess compliance. The commissioner will be able to issue notices requiring information and documents from any person where the commissioner reasonably believes that person holds material relevant to the minimum age framework. That can include the platform itself. It can include third parties, age assurance providers, app store providers and others who hold information that can test a platform's claims. This is a practical change, and it goes to the heart of enforcement.

Platforms should not be able to mark their own homework. They should not be able to say 'trust us' and then refuse to provide the evidence. For example, a platform may say its age-check system works; a third-party provider may hold information that shows the system fails. A platform may say it has closed underage accounts; other records may show that many of those children came straight back through the front door. A platform may claim that parents have simple reporting paths; evidence may show those paths are hard to find, hard to use or slow to act. If a platform fails to comply with information-gathering notices from the eSafety Commissioner, we are doubling the penalty for doing so. This bill will help the commissioner get to the truth, and that is exactly how enforcement works: you find the facts, you test the claims and you act where the law has been broken.

We should never lose sight of the people at the centre of this debate: children. It's about the year-seven student who has just started high school and feels pressure to be on the same apps as everybody else. It's about the 13-year-old who lies awake at night thinking about a message that no child should ever have received. It's about the 14-year-old who scrolls for hours and feels worse after every swipe. It's about a child who is bullied in the schoolyard and then followed home through their own phone. It's about the parent who wants to protect their child but feels outnumbered by technology built to break down every boundary.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour, and the member will be granted leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.