I rise to continue speaking on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. It is absolutely as clear as day that this bill has been introduced by the government to clean up their own mess.

The coalition is focused on putting parents back in control of their children's online safety and forcing greater transparency from big tech. Australian families absolutely deserve more choice, more control and more transparency online. And parents should be in charge of how they protect their children online, not Silicon Valley and not Canberra. But, as I said, the amendments that this bill is bringing are admission that this government has not appropriately applied the safety measures we called out at the time this bill came forward. We supported it, but at the same time we said that the implementation is going to be absolutely critical, and the way the government was doing it and was projecting to do it was wrong. And we predicted that we would be back here at some future time to make amends. Unfortunately, though, this bill does not actually deal with the problems.

The eSafety Commissioner herself has publicly stated that the current social media minimum-age framework was developed very quickly—yes, that's right; it was—and has very thin scaffolding, which is also true, and did not give her the potent powers to effectively execute her role. A study published by the British Medical Journal found that 85 per cent of under-16s were still accessing social media and that the ban was therefore unlikely to improve adolescents' mental health in the short term. The eSafety Commissioner has also reported that the proportion of under-16s still using social media platforms has fallen by just 4.4 percentage points—I mean, hardly a ringing endorsement of success.

Now we have the government's second attempt in this bill before the Senate. As I've said, it's fundamentally flawed and cannot be supported in its current form. We are proposing some amendments that would go a long way to resolving the issues. We can all agree—and I'm sure there is unanimity in this place—that social media, online use and children accessing social media can be very harmful. I've seen it. I've seen it with family members, I've seen it with members of the community and I've seen the challenge it has brought and the scourge that it is within our communities. So it's important that this issue is dealt with. As I said, I'm sure we can all agree that there is a problem. But the way the government and the way this bill is approaching it is not at all sufficient. In fact, it can be quite dangerous.

The Senate Economics and Communications Legislation Committee tabled its report on its inquiry into the bill just two weeks ago. The Law Council of Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commissioner and the Institute of Public Affairs all submitted that the bill needed to be amended to confine the eSafety Commissioner's powers under the bill to their intended purposes. We must make sure that there are very strict guardrails around the powers of the eSafety Commissioner. I've got serious worries and concerns about the encroachment and the reach that the eSafety Commissioner has, and it's I hope this parliament's good intent to deal with the problem. It's given too much, though, to the eSafety Commissioner.

The commissioner's inability to compel information from digital platforms understandably impacts the ability to enforce Australian regulations. But that does not justify giving the eSafety Commissioner sweeping powers that could extend well beyond digital platforms and relevant third parties to parents and children themselves. And now, at the 11th hour, the government has introduced even more extraordinary compulsory powers, backed by very large fines and the threat of up to 12 months of imprisonment. These are serious coercive powers being brought before the Senate, unfortunately without proper scrutiny—not good. Protecting children online matters enormously, but that does not give the government a blank cheque to expand the coercive power of the state.

The committee also heard evidence regarding the lack of transparency around algorithms and social media platforms, which one parent, Ms Mason, called 'the social heroin that is killing our children'. The safety of our children online is a crisis unfolding in real time in bedrooms, on school nights, on devices where parents are completely unaware. The coalition has reiterated that the online safety of Australians, especially our children, is the single most important part of this debate. During National Child Protection Week, whose focus this year is on shifting conversations to action, importantly, this parliament has a responsibility to make sure that our online safety laws actually deliver meaningful protection for children.

Earlier this week, an article published by the Sydney Morning Herald served a grim reminder that there is still so much more to be done to keep our children safe online. The reality is that children can now be targeted, groomed and exploited without an offender even having to approach them in person. Police revealed a pattern that should stop every one of us in this chamber. Children are being groomed, coerced and manipulated into producing exploitative materials of themselves, not by strangers in dark alleys but by offenders who have never seen them face to face. For years, child protection agencies here and overseas have told us the same thing. Offenders no longer need to approach a child physically to inflict lasting harm. All they need is an online game, a social media platform or a streaming device.

What was once rare and shocking is now, in the words of officers investigating it, 'growing, accelerating and outpacing us.' And, once the harm is done, it does not end. Material that is coerced out of a child does not disappear; it is copied, it's traded and it's recirculated again and again long after the abuse has stopped. Law enforcement has said that they are running to keep pace with offenders who exploit new technology faster than our systems can respond.

The scale of this problem is enormous. In the 2024-25 financial year, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation triage unit recorded a whopping 82,764 reports of child sexual exploitation—a 41 per cent increase over the previous year. Listen to that. That is up from 58,503 the previous year. And it's been growing. It was 36,600 the year before—I beg your pardon, in 2021-22.

In the Education and Employment References Committee's inquiry into the quality and safety of Australia's early childhood education and care system, Mr McCartney, a representative from the Australian Federal Police, said:

I'm going to be honest: the crime of online child sexual exploitation is not getting better; it's getting worse.

He also said, 'It's simply not something police can tackle alone, making it essential for parents, carers and the wider community to take an active role in protecting our vulnerable young people.'

At the same time, children continue to access social media at very young ages. Research by the eSafety Commissioner found that 80 per cent of children aged eight to 12 used social media in 2024, despite platforms already having policies prohibiting child users under the age of 13. That's an important lesson for this parliament. Passing an age restriction is one thing, but making platforms actually comply is another.

We also know that an age restriction alone will not address every risk that children face online. Children are increasingly exposed to pornography, harmful content and exploitative behaviour at young ages. Research has linked exposure to pornography with harmful sexual behaviours among some children and young people, while eSafety's own work has highlighted concerns among young men about desensitisation, consent and the objectification of women is a major problem. These are difficult issues, but they reinforce the need for parents, platforms and governments to take online safety seriously. But the principal responsibility of keeping children safe is actually in the home, with families, with parents. We've got to have a system that provides more control for parents.

That's why I want to, in the remaining time that I have in this contribution to this legislation, deal with one of the amendments that Senator Henderson is proposing here for the Senate. It's very good, and I thank Senator Henderson for bringing it before us. That is providing parents with the same capability that enterprises or that businesses have and that Parliament House has over us, as members of parliament and staff in this place. They have control over the management of our devices. Your employer has control. Why are we not allowing parents to have control?

Unfortunately, the vendors—Apple, Google and others—do not provide parents with the same level of access over the management of the devices that they are providing to their children. It's therefore very, very simple and easy for kids, who are smarter than us when it comes to use of technology—we Boomers, as they say, even though I'm gen X—

Speak for yourself, Senator!

I'll speak for myself.

I'm sure you are, Senator.

That's right. It's ludicrous that parents do not have the same control that an employer has over employer issued device. If you, as a parent, are issuing a device for your child, you should be able to have management control over that device. So the amendment that Senator Henderson is proposing is to make it mandatory for the vendors of these devices that are provided to children, if parents choose to have management over that device, to restrict what apps can be used and to restrict what content can be viewed on that device. Then we go a long way to actually dealing with it.

Kids right now are just putting VPNs on their phone, getting around the social media ban and registering in other countries. Pornography is accessed by registering in the United States or anywhere else in the world where they don't have a geoblocking restriction on access to this sort of content. It's easy for them to do it. They're getting access to it. They're shown on the bus how to access it and in classrooms how to access it. It's happening, so what we need to do is empower parents. We believe, as a coalition, that parents know best how to care for their children. Let's give them the tools to be able to do it. I ask this parliament, this chamber, to support this very good amendment that Senator Henderson has brought before us. (Time expired)

I rise to speak on the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. I think a lot of people here know that I did grow up on the internet. I remember Instagram becoming a thing, Snapchat taking off and Musical.ly turning into TikTok. Social media has been a part of almost my entire life, and I still use it.

I won't stand here and pretend that social media is 100 per cent terrible because I don't think that's true. It keeps people connected. It helps people find communities, learn new things, organise, create and stay in touch. It can be genuinely funny and interesting and useful, but it's also incredibly addictive. I know the experience of opening TikTok because someone sent you one video and then finding yourself there 40 minutes later.

I know what it's like to grow up in a world where there's always a group chat, always something happening and always something you haven't seen yet. For young people now, there isn't really an online world and an offline world. It's all mixed together. Previous generations could have a terrible day at school, come home, shut the front door and get a break from it. For a lot of young people today, the group chat comes home with you. The comments come home with you. The comparison comes home with you. The person who was horrible to you at school can still reach you at 9 o'clock that night.

If everyone else is online, putting your phone away doesn't feel like taking a break. Sometimes it feels like removing yourself from your own social life. I think many older people sometimes underestimate that. We talk about young people being addicted to their phones as though an entire generation collectively developed this strange character flaw, but these platforms have been deliberately designed to hold people's attention. Some of the biggest and most sophisticated tech companies in the world employ the smartest people to work around the clock to figure out what will keep us watching, clicking and coming back. Kids didn't design that system. Kids didn't build the algorithms. They aren't the ones making billions of dollars from keeping people scrolling, so I don't think the way forward is another round of adults lecturing teenagers about their screen time.

The responsibility has to sit with the platforms as well. That is the principle behind Australia's social media minimum age. We have asked age restricted social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. We haven't made parents the internet police, and we haven't put the legal burden on a 14-year-old to somehow resist products that have been designed by enormous companies to keep them using them. We have put that responsibility where it belongs: with the companies running the platforms. And we were the first country in the world to do it. That means learning as we go.

More than five million underage accounts have already been deactivated. That is a huge number, and it shows that these laws are having an effect. The eSafety Commissioner has identified serious compliance concerns and poor practices with investigations now underway into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. That is where this bill comes in. The eSafety Commissioner has been doing the job parliament asked her to do and in the process has found places where she needs stronger powers to properly investigate whether these enormous companies are complying with the law, so we're giving her those powers.

We're also making the penalties more serious because the consequences have to mean something to companies of this size. The maximum civil penalty for noncompliance with the minimum age obligation will double to $109.2 million, and the amendments will give eSafety greater ability to get behind the corporate response and actually find out what happened, including questioning decision-makers and executives and seeking evidence from former employees. I don't think we need to overcomplicate the reason for doing that. If a social media company tells Australians it has taken reasonable steps to keep under-16s off the platform, our regulator should be able to check. If something clearly isn't working, we should be able to ask the people making the decisions why, and, if a company is breaking Australian law, the penalty shouldn't be an amount it can comfortably absorb as the cost of doing business.

These are some of the richest companies in the world. They know an extraordinary amount about their users. They know what we watch. They know what we click. They know what ads are most likely to work on us. They can work out that I have become interested in something based on three seconds of hesitation over a video. They can build incredibly detailed pictures of what people look like, what keeps them engaged and what will bring them back tomorrow. But, when governments start asking questions about age verification and child safety, suddenly we hear a lot about how technically difficult everything is. Australians are entitled to be a little bit sceptical about that.

Nobody expects a perfect system, and of course some will try and find workarounds. I'm 22. It was not so long ago that I was a teenager myself. I can assure the chamber that telling a 15-year-old that they are absolutely forbidden from doing something has never, ever guaranteed that they won't do it. But there is a pretty big difference between a teenager finding a clever workaround and a platform barely trying in the first place. That is why the law talks about reasonable steps, and I think that gets lost sometimes when we talk about this policy.

The social media minimum age is often discussed as though the government has decided young people can't be trusted with the internet. I don't see it that way. Young people have been dealing with the consequences of these platforms for years. We know what it feels like when a photo of you you don't like gets posted. We know what it feels like to see everyone at something you weren't invited to. We know how quickly a joke can turn nasty online. We know about cyberbullying. We know about the constant comparison. We know about the pressure that comes from seeing hundreds of edited, filtered, carefully selected versions of other people's lives every day and trying not to compare them with our own. For teenage girls in particular, this comparison can be relentless. You can scroll through hundreds of faces and bodies in an hour, many of them filtered, edited, posed or AI generated, and somehow you're supposed to remember the whole time that none of it is a reasonable standard against which to judge yourself. That is a lot to ask of a 13-year-old.

Then there's the pressure to be available all the time. A message comes through and people can see you've read it. Someone sends a message in the group chat and everyone else is reacting. Someone leaves you on 'seen' and suddenly you're wondering what that means. These things can sound trivial when you describe them in parliament, but when you're 14 they don't feel trivial. Your friends are your world at that age. School is your world. Being included matters enormously. And now all those social dynamics can continue every hour of the day.

That's why we have to be careful about treating this issue as a question of individual self-control. Adults struggle with these platforms, too. I struggle to put my phone down sometimes. I see plenty of people in this building who struggle to put their phone down. Yet we expect a 13-year-old to demonstrate perfect discipline against products that are designed specifically to keep them engaged.

Parents have been left trying to manage this all at home. They're deciding when their child gets a phone, which apps they're allowed to use, how much screen time is too much, whether phones stay out of bedrooms at night, whether they should be checking messages, and how much privacy a teenager should have. And the rules that might work for one family might be completely impossible for another, because if every kid in the class is using something then banning your own child from it has social consequences. I have a lot of sympathy for parents trying to work that out. There isn't a handbook. A lot of parents themselves are working through a technological change that they never experienced themselves. And every few years there's another platform, another trend, another feature and another problem they're expected to understand.

Government can't make those decisions for every family, but we can stop pretending that families should carry the whole load themselves. Parents should be able to say, 'There are rules here.' Platforms have responsibilities as well. And young people should be able to expect the same thing, because I don't think young Australians want to be treated like they're stupid. When I speak to young people they're usually very aware of the trade-offs. They know social media can be brilliant and terrible at the same time. They know they probably spend too much time on it. They know some of what they see isn't good for them. They also know that telling them to delete Instagram when all their friends are on it is not a viable plan.

Young people want the environments they use to be better, and there are things only the companies controlling those environments can change. They control the algorithms. They control the recommendations and the notifications. They control what gets amplified and what doesn't. They decide how easy it is to report abuse, how quickly that report is dealt with and what happens next. They know exactly how design affects behaviour, because their businesses depend on it. So when we're asking them to put some of that expertise towards keeping kids safer, I don't think we're asking too much.

For years, the response to problems online has tended to come back to the user: block them, report them, change the settings, spend less time online, parents should supervise their kids more closely, young people should be more careful about what they post. All those things can be useful advice, but the company that built the environment can't be allowed to disappear from the conversation. That is the shift we are trying to make.

We have said that social media companies have responsibilities to the people who are using their products. We have said that children deserve particular protection, and we have said that when parliament puts those responsibilities into Australian law they have to be enforceable. It was not unexpected that this framework would require some adjustment. It was the first of its kind in the world. Technology moves ridiculously quickly. Algorithms will change. Young people will find new platforms. Companies will find different ways of doing things. Our laws need to be able to respond to the changing circumstances and practical experience as they emerge. That's what we're doing here.

The eSafety Commissioner has started enforcing the social media minimum age and has told us where the gaps are. We are closing those gaps, and we will keep watching what happens. Ultimately, I want young Australians to get the good parts of growing up online without being expected to accept all of the bad parts as the price of admission. I want them to find communities. I want them to talk to their friends. I want them to discover weird music and niche hobbies and to talk to people on the other side of the world who care about the same things they do. I want young people to be able to use technology in ways that make their lives bigger and more interesting. But I also want a 13-year old to be able to go home from school and actually escape the worst day of their life for a few hours, I want parents to feel like someone else is helping them carry this and I want the companies making enormous amounts of money from our attention to accept that they have some responsibility for what happens on the platforms that they built.

We know the platforms can do better, so we will keep pushing them to do better. We will give the eSafety Commissioner the tools to find out what is actually happening, and, when the companies don't take their obligations seriously, there will be consequences that are large enough for them to notice. I think that is a much fairer balance for parents, users and especially the kids, who are growing up in a world where being online is simply a part of being young.

The social media ban is the quintessential Albanese government policy. There was no evidence to support its implementation, but that doesn't matter when you're 'leading the world', as we keep hearing so often. It was exposed to a vigorous five-day committee inquiry before being rushed through the parliament. It was not a reform designed to support Australia's young people but a scheme to win votes by exploiting the justified fears Australian parents have about social media.

As has long been the government's messaging, anyone who criticises the policy is in the corner of the big tech companies attempting to stop the government from protecting Australian children. At estimates in October I was told by the minister at the table in a very particularly undignified outburst, 'You support the platforms over parents.' It sounds catchy, but it's not true.

The ban currently allows Aussie kids to access violent, sexual and extremist content without regulation on smaller websites like the notorious 4chan, which eSafety described in an answer to a question on notice as 'one of the most frequently reported suicide related websites to eSafety and has been implicated in deaths by suicide of Australians'. Isn't that supporting platforms over parents?

The ban allows kids to go on chat services like Discord and Roblox where predators lay in wait. Child sexual abuse advocacy organisation Bravehearts cites research on its website which found that 17 per cent of Australian children and young people had been subject to online sexual solicitation by an adult. For girls, this was as high as 26 per cent. The median age at which the solicitation occurred was 14 years old. Following reports in the Guardian, Roblox has begun to implement age verification, but it still isn't part of the ban. Isn't that supporting platforms over parents?

One of the other big concerns with social media is the ability it has to hook people in. Algorithms designed to keep you scrolling and change your brain chemistry are everywhere. The ban prevents young people from having a YouTube account. It does not prevent them from watching shorts for hours on end in a logged-out state. That's hour after hour of brain rot content, which is no different to before the ban. Isn't that supporting platforms over parents?

It is the natural instinct of the Albanese government to rush through big reforms to avoid scrutiny. The bill spent just eight days before the parliament. It was introduced in the Senate on 27 November 2024 and passed on the 28th. As I mentioned, the inquiry into the social media ban lasted just five days, and submissions were open for a mere 24 hours.

What were the key recommendations of that rushed inquiry? No. 1, the recommendation that the committee believed was most important, was 'that the Australian government legislate a digital duty of care to place a legal obligation on digital platforms to take proactive steps to protect their users'. It has been nearly two years since that recommendation was made, and we're still waiting for that digital duty of care. I was told in estimates last year that the Minister for Communications was excited about the reform, but officials from the department have said it may not come into effect until 2028. That's another two years that young people will be waiting for this digital duty of care. While I have held out hope that the government will finally make real change in the online space, I am concerned that what will be brought before the parliament is, among other things, overly reliant on delegating legislative power to the executive.

The third recommendation of the committee report is 'that the Minister for Communications provide a progress report to the parliament on the age-assurance trial by no later than 30 September 2025'. I had to force the government to produce that report, using the Senate's power to order the production of documents. Government senators opposed the production of the report. According to the Parliament House website, the document was ordered to be produced in August 2025 and wasn't provided until March of 2026. We know why the government didn't want us to see this report on age-assurance technologies. An article in ASPI's the Strategist explains:

Facial recognition tools, meant to be a privacy-friendly verification option, have proven spectacularly unreliable. Eleven-year-olds were being identified as 30. Sixteen-year-olds legitimately old enough for access were getting locked out. Tech-savvy teens discovered that drawing on fake facial hair with makeup, and in one case recruiting a pet dog, was enough to fool the algorithms.

Recommendation 7 of the committee inquiry was for the statutory review of the social media ban to be brought forward by 18 months. The review timeline was brought forward—but only by 12 months.

The implementation of the social media ban has also been one of high secrecy. Many senators in this place, including me, sought details of the government's claim that 4.7 million accounts had been deactivated after the Australian Financial Review reported:

… sources familiar with the figures who requested anonymity to speak freely said the 4.7 million number is not a fair representation of the number of active social media accounts belonging to users under the age of 16.

The report went on to say:

The figure does not represent 4.7 million individual users because it also includes inactive and duplicate accounts, as well as some that had already been deleted but still exist in the platform's backend.

How did the government respond to this? 'Oh, it's not in the public interest to provide that detail.' They wouldn't provide platform-by-platform numbers—how many accounts existed before the ban, how platforms were administrating age verification. The only number available was 4.7 million, and it was being used in every press conference and at every opportunity to showcase how this world-leading policy is being effective. So show us the numbers. Show us the breakdown.

In August last year, the Senate asked the government to produce documents about the implementation of the ban. Some documents were produced while others were withheld because their publication would 'damage commercial interests'. 'What damage could the disclosure cause?' the Senate asked. 'We're not telling,' the government replied.

In November, the Senate asked about the expectations the government had of a constitutional challenge to the social media ban. Again, the government defied the Senate, despite there being no precedent for withholding such information. They would not even confirm through estimates questions on notice whether they had sought advice as to the constitutionality of the ban.

So after all the rushing and all the secrecy, surely the ban has done the one thing it set out to do. Surely, it has taken kids off of social media, right? In April, eSafety found that 70 per cent of parents of children subject to the ban reported continued access to social media. In June, a study led by the University of Newcastle found 85 per cent of participants aged under 16 were using age-restricted social media platforms. Thus began the campaign for this, the social media ban 2.0, which is over before it began. This is not something you can just fix up. This is not something you can just keep trying until you get it right. If there ever was a chance of this working, which I doubt, it was on 10 December 2025. Noncompliance is now embedded, as eSafety warned the government may happen. No matter how much tinkering around the edges occurs, kids will find ways to continue hanging out with their friends online.

Increasing existing penalties is a classic Albanese government strategy to look like they're doing something when public confidence in the government's ability to manage a particular issue is floundering. The parliament recently passed a bill to increase penalties for illegal tobacco offences, which follows more than $300 million of investment in compliance in the last two budgets as the black market gets bigger, not smaller. Amidst the fuel crisis caused by the war in Iran, allegations of price gouging led to increased penalties for breaches of the Competition and Consumer Act. During the two-day sitting in January, laws were passed to increase penalties for existing hate speech offences. Other elements of that bill are likely to be struck down in a High Court challenge that is being heard today.

The doubling of these penalties is a message to the Australian people that the government actually don't know how to fix the social media ban, but they want to look like they do. The oft-cited but unused $49 million penalty provisions for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent kids under 16 from holding accounts will be doubled to $99 million. Why not a billion dollars? Why not a trillion? They've never been used, and, even if they were, I would not be betting on eSafety winning in a courtroom. The agency's poor understanding of the laws that govern it was brought into focus by the recent Baumgarten decision, where eSafety made an informal takedown request without reference to any part of the Online Safety Act then, when challenged, declared that it had no case to answer as there was no official decision under the act to review. A lawyers' picnic ensued, which eSafety clearly lost at great expense to the taxpayer. That was against an individual who had a post on X taken down. What hope would eSafety have in a battle against Meta or Google and their lawyers? Very little, I would suggest.

What is the other earth-shattering reform to the social media ban? Instead of the eSafety Commissioner only being able to seek information and documents from social media platforms and electronic services, the commissioner would now be able to ask anyone who has information relevant to a platform's interaction with the social media ban. Yes, that's probably why the ban isn't working, because 85 per cent of kids under 16 are still on social media because the existing information-gathering powers aren't broad enough. These powers, as drafted, would allow the eSafety Commissioner to order parents and even children to produce documents. New amendments circulated last night would also empower eSafety to summon people and compel them to answer questions or risk imprisonment. This is based on existing powers the eSafety Commissioner has in relation to other enforcement areas, but these ASIO-style powers seem disproportionate to the aim of stopping kids from having accounts on certain social media platforms.

The late introduction of these amendments means that neither the Scrutiny of Bills Committee nor the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee have had a chance to consider and scrutinise them. During the inquiry into this bill, it was revealed that artificial intelligence had been used in parts of the Age Assurance Technology Trial report, which informed the government's understanding of the tools available to assess users' ages. The Age Check Certification Scheme, who produced the relevant parts of the report, initially denied using AI at all. When they were presented with incontrovertible proof by the Guardian, they did a 180 and said, 'Oh, yes, we used AI, and we actually already disclosed it, since we accidentally left ChatGPT metadata in the report.' Not only did they lie about the use of AI; they lied to the government about erroneous citation in the report. They said that the links worked at the time the report was handed over, but analysis of archived versions of those links shows that they have always pointed to incorrect references.

How does the scheme respond to these allegations? By name-calling in industry magazines. In an email quoted in biometricupdate.com, the chief executive, Tony Allen, had nothing to say about this misleading of multiple parties and instead asserted that the government was— (Time expired)

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?

Zero.

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—

Hanson-Young, even.

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.

Did you have a point of order, Senator Hanson-Young?

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.

Officially, the Online Safety Management (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 amends the Online Safety Act 2021 to strengthen the operation of the social media minimum age framework, the SMMA. The bill expands the eSafety commissar's information-gathering powers and increases civil penalties for noncompliance to around $100 million—$100 million—depending upon state. In reality, the social media minimum age framework legislation has failed, and now the government is doubling down.

One Nation does not support the social media minimum age ban, for two reasons. Firstly, what children do online is the responsibility of parents, not the nanny state. Secondly, the technology will never be smarter than a resourceful and tech-savvy child.

In November 2024, I moved an urgency motion arguing that a blanket ban expropriates parental power. Parents in the home can supervise a child's device better than a tech company or a Canberra bureaucrat. No country has made age limits work, and the ban would make parents who let children watch educational YouTube content law-breakers. I call for better parental locks from platforms and device makers instead of a nanny state rule. Parental locks from platforms and device makers have been proven to work.

I quoted the Australian Human Rights Commission warning that a ban would isolate young people. I predicted that the ban would fail because of VPNs, impersonation and other tricks while pushing children onto less supervised spaces, such as game chat rooms, peer-to-peer apps and Tor. This is exactly what's happened. The ban has failed, and the answer from the eSafety commissar is bigger fines, more power over you and more removal of human rights. A government amendment circulated overnight is draconian and terrifying. The amendment will provide powers for the eSafety commissar to demand that a person travel at the person's cost to appear before her in person and includes penalties of up to a year in prison for refusing to do so.

Which platform do you think will be the first that the eSafety commissar demands to appear? No doubt X, to continue her obsession with Elon Musk. If the commissar thinks she will be demanding that witnesses appear from overseas, I would point out that Julie Inman Grant, the commissar, refused to appear before a US congressional inquiry into her actions last year. One can't demand a higher degree of accountability than the commissioner was prepared to demonstrate herself.

The amendment abolishes a basic human right against self-incrimination. While it does say the evidence can't be used in a court of law against a person, there is a known backdoor entry to this. The amendment does not protect young people, which is ironic, given it sits in a bill supposedly designed to protect young people. The subject of an examination order can be a person of any age. There is no age restriction on that power. There are no protections requiring a minor to be legally represented or have a parent present—none. There is a right to have a lawyer and not the requirement for one. We know how that works in practice. In short, turn up and get done over or go to jail. That's life in the 'Soviet Republic of Australia' under this Albanese Labor government.

One Nation will oppose the amendment. We will oppose the bill and, when in government, we will abolish the position of the eSafety Commissioner. The role was intended all along to be a political appointment, and the incumbent is proving the truth in that statement. One Nation will not, though, throw the baby out with the bathwater. We will maintain the functions of the office of eSafety and move the staff back into the department of media and communications. The staff are doing very good work taking down abuse material, revenge porn and deepfakes and must be allowed to continue that work.

Other provisions of the bill include a doubling of fines on social media companies for failure to demonstrate reasonable steps to comply with the ban. The problem with the legislation is and continues to be the definition of 'reasonable steps', which is—hang on, there is no definition. The commissar sets the rules in a legislative instrument titled 'Social media minimum age: regulatory guidance'. Then the commissar enforces them as the commissar sees fit. Reasonable steps is anything the commissar decides it should be. Defy the commissar, and you will cop a fine that's been increased from $48 million to almost $100 million in this bill. What next? How about $200 million fines? No, $500 million fines. Do I hear a billion? That's not how legislation is supposed to be drafted, and this is not how government power is supposed to be used. This is power over the people. They should be serving the people.

The real problem around compliance from social media companies, though, is the inconvenient truth that the eSafety commissar has lost all except one court case her office has started. Perhaps strengthening the legal basis for these fines in the first place would have been more important than simply allowing the commissar to threaten a larger fine. I say 'threatened' because no social media company has been fined under legislation relating to age verification—not one. So why increase the fines—the ones that haven't been used yet? The government continues to pursue a strategy it can never win. Harsher penalties are a typical bureaucratic response to being defied when in fact the defiance is because the ban is not technically feasible.

Moving on, the bill enables the commissar to compel the production of information or documents from any person. All that's needed is for the commissar—or the commissioner—to believe on reasonable grounds that the person has information or documents relevant to compliance from a provider of an electronic service that is or may be—notice the opening of the envelope!—an age restricted social media platform. If this looks like unchecked power, it is—unchecked power over not just children and social media platforms but over every Australian, adults included. For example, information from third parties, such as age assurance providers or app store operators, may assist in validating or testing claims platforms made about their compliance with the minimum age obligation. Once again, these powers are not limited by age. An individual who discovers a workaround may be compelled to provide information around how they did that, no matter the age. The committee report recommended the bill pass as written. There were concerns from submitters whether the measures imposed, increased discovery and higher penalties, were necessary and proportionate to enforce the social media minimum age framework, the SMMA ban. the office of the information commissar made a great point that the information-gathering powers in the bill should be extended to their office. This would allow them to determine if the information that age-verification companies are collecting was being dealt with according to Australian privacy legislation.

The Law Council of Australia criticised the new information-gathering powers under section 63G as being too powerful for the stated outcome, as did Free Speech Union, and X sounded like they were lining up to challenge them in court. Multiple submitters complained about the very high fines, up to slightly over $100 million, depending upon the state. The Australian Human Rights Commission recommended a review after 12 months into the effect of the social media minimum age framework, SMMA ban on children, which is faster than the statutory two-year review. I would recommend that submission to the government. How much government is too much government? This is too much government and too much control over the people.

The Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 is supposed to be about keeping children safe online, but it barely scratches the surface of the much uglier truth. Something deeply disturbing is happening to our young people. A teenage boy opens TikTok or YouTube looking for gym videos or gaming clips. Before long, the algorithm starts pushing him somewhere much darker. They are being told women are liars, feminism is the enemy, and girls owe you sex. When a Herald journalist posed online as a 17-year-old boy, it took just 13 minutes for TikTok to serve up manosphere content—13 minutes for the algorithm to start pulling a child down a rabbit hole of vile misogyny. This stuff doesn't just stay on a screen. Teachers are seeing boys parrot Andrew Tate in classrooms. Researchers are finding terrifying attitudes towards women, consent and sexual violence amongst teenage boys and young men.

These algorithms are teaching boys how to see girls, and girls are living with the consequences. They are sexually harassed, abused, choked, assaulted, raped and killed, and those same girls opened their own phones to be bombarded with content telling them they are too fat or too ugly as thinspo and the latest skinny-tok trend take over their feeds. They see other women being mocked and trolled. They are fed content about eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. Seventy per cent of Australian children aged 10 to 15 have encountered harmful content online. This isn't some harmless teenage entertainment. We have handed some of the most powerful corporations on earth direct access to our children's minds, and they are poisoning them for profit.

These platforms have become some of the most powerful radicalisation machines humanity has ever created. Racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, far-right propaganda—the algorithm doesn't care how dangerous something is. It cares whether you keep watching. Watch one angry video, and it gives you another. Show an interest in one conspiracy, and it offers you something more extreme. Linger on some racist garbage, and suddenly your feed is overflowing with it. Now AI slop, deepfakes and industrial scale misinformation are pouring into that toxic soup, which is fuelled by the far right and their wealthy backers. I should know. I am a perpetual target.

Tech oligarchs and their loyal politicians have helped build an information system where hate and lies reach millions in an instant, giving extremists an algorithm that helps them recruit. This is radicalisation at an industrial scale. Instead of fighting the far right and instead of fighting racism and misogyny, some of the richest corporations on earth deliver them straight into our kids' pockets.

Behind these big tech and social media machines are some of the richest and most powerful men who have ever lived—men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Zuckerberg has amassed billions upon billions building deliberately addictive platforms that harm children. Elon Musk bought one of the world's biggest social media platforms, gutted its safety features and turned himself into a political powerbroker. These are not quirky tech geniuses playing with apps. These are evil men controlling what billions of people see, believe and fear. Their corporations profit from our anger and our fear.

The Greens support stronger enforcement against corporations that break the law, but taking on this crisis means taking on some of the richest and most powerful companies and billionaires on earth. Let's be real. Labor hasn't got a great track record of taking on corporations and billionaires, but the community advocates and Greens have pushed them all the way to take the steps that they have announced today. The details of the proposed duty of care model will be a test of whether Labor backs the people or the corporations in the struggle for our attention and wellbeing. To start, we can't have a situation where harmful algorithms remain the highly addictive default. Then we have to make sure penalties for social media oligarchs are more than a slap on the wrist or just another court settlement for them. We won't change their behaviour until we threaten their noxious business model.

We will be looking at the proposal extremely closely, because history teaches us that, when the choice is between corporate profits and real people being harmed, Labor always finds a way to protect profits. Boys can be funnelled into misogyny. Girls can be taught to hate their bodies. Racism and far-right extremism can be pumped into millions of homes. Our democracy can be flooded with lies. God forbid Mark Zuckerberg's bottom line takes a hit!

Enough of that. We need to break the toxic algorithms and hold these corporations legally responsible for the harms that they create. Our children—and everybody else, for that matter—do not exist to generate profits for billionaires. Our democracy is not theirs to dismantle, and our future should not be determined by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk and wherever their next billions come from.