The coalition will be supporting the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, following its passage through the House yesterday.
I’m pleased to say that the coalition has worked to strengthen the provisions of this bill. These are important changes which in our view have significantly strengthened the planned legislation in at least two areas—firstly, in relation to privacy. There will be new provisions stating that people cannot be compelled to provide digital ID or government issued identity documents such as drivers licences or passports, under this legislation. We are pleased to see this supported in the recommendations of the Senate inquiry. Secondly, following our negotiations with the government, changes will be made so that the communications minister will be able to make rules specifying information which, in order to comply with the legislation, social media platforms are not able to collect. This will enable the minister to make rules to ensure that guidelines issued under the legislation are appropriate and proportionate to the objectives of the law. These are both significant changes which materially strengthen the bill.
It is important to get this bill right and that we pass it into law because there are parents across Australia who are looking to us to take action now on the scourge that is social media, which is harming our young people. It deals with an issue on which the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, has once again led the national debate. In June, Mr Dutton committed to implementing an age limit of 16. He announced that a coalition government would raise the age of social media access to 16 and said it would be at the top of his priority list for his first 100 days in office. Five months later, the Prime Minister has come on board with legislation which the coalition has sought to strengthen, and I will have more to say on that shortly.
This debate is the latest policy lead from the coalition regarding online safety. We have been driving action on age verification, particularly in the last year, since the road map for age verification was made public. We announced plans for a trial of technologies in November last year, including $6.7 million in funding, a figure almost identical to the number the government are now using for their trial. It comes, of course, after the coalition, as I say, led this debate. In the same month, we introduced legislation for the trial to occur. This builds on the fact that it was a coalition government which established the world-leading Online Safety Act. And so, a year after we sought to legislate action to strengthen efforts for online safety, here we are, debating this bill.
We are glad the government is now on board, and we are genuinely supportive of this bill, which seeks to protect Australian teenagers from the harms and tragedies linked to social media. This is a totemic issue for Australian families, and it is well past time that action was taken. We are debating a bill which provides a vital reform designed to help young Australians and their families for generations to come.
We come to this parliament to help people in our communities across this nation. That is our task, and this bill seeks to achieve that. Not only will it provide protections for our young but, importantly, it will also arm parents with laws which will help them set rules at home with their kids. For the mums and dads of Australia, that’s a really important principle here. It’s helping them to set protective boundaries for their children, opening up family discussions about the importance of online safety and helping parents to get more involved in what is a really important issue for families. There is clear community support for these measures. Parents are telling us this, and that’s reinforced by a new poll from YouGov which has shown that 77 per cent of Australians back the under-16 social media ban.
Let me speak to the bill. It is, of course, designed to set the age limit of 16 for young people to hold a social media account. This is aimed at reducing the harms that social media is causing to young people. The bill provides for a new, broader definition of social media companies: ‘age-restricted social media platforms’. This will now capture Snapchat, as well as other major social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and X. There will be a rule-making power for the minister to exclude specific classes of services from the definition. This would carve out messaging services, online games and services which support the health and education of users, which would include YouTube, as well as WhatsApp, Messenger Kids, ReachOut’s PeerChat and Google Classroom. It requires relevant social media companies to take reasonable steps to prevent age restricted users from having an account with the social media platform.
As I mentioned earlier, privacy issues are of the utmost importance to us in the coalition, and we have worked extremely hard to strengthen this legislation. The bill prohibits platforms from using information collected for age-assurance purposes for any other purpose unless explicitly agreed by the individual. Once information has been used for age assurance it must be destroyed unless the individual agrees to it being retained. Failure to delete information constitutes a breach of the Privacy Act and will attract significant penalties. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will also provide oversight of the privacy provisions related to this bill.
Driving the need for these laws is the knowledge of widespread concern and evidence about the severe mental health impact of social media on children. We have seen disturbing global trends in youth mental health since the rise of social media, especially for girls. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there was a more than three-fold increase in the rate of intentional self-harm hospitalisations for girls under 14 from 2008-09 through to 2022-23. In recent years there have been large increases in the rate of mental health issues amongst children and young people. A 2022 independent report on self-harm commissioned by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration noted that there have been ‘very large increases in all intentional self-poisonings in older children and adolescents, aged 10 to 19, worldwide over the recent decade’.
Leading psychologist Dr Simon Wilksch, a strong supporter of setting an age limit for social media, said:
… a 200% increase in 10 to 14-year-olds experiencing an eating disorder over the last 12 years strongly overlaps with the rapid growth in social media use by children …
Clinical psychologist Dr Danielle Einstein told the Senate inquiry into this bill that any benefits of social media to mental health are far outweighed by the disadvantages. She said:
I do not see any benefits for mental health in social media. I’ve looked really hard at the evidence. Even if there were to be some, I think they are far outweighed by the disadvantages. For mental health, I do not see any benefits.
We also recall that it was the US Surgeon General who made the important point:
The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency—and social media has emerged as an important contributor.
We simply cannot ignore such evidence.
The harm being caused to young Australians has also been demonstrated in the tragic cases which we have seen in News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids coverage—families torn apart after their children fell foul to social media. I also pay credit to the work of the 36 Months group, which has secured nearly 128,000 signatures from people urging the age limit to be raised to 16. In recent weeks and months we have seen, here in this building, a number of the parents of children who have died after falling foul of social media. Some have been carrying the ashes of their dead daughters or sons. They have told terrible, tragic stories, their lives and families torn apart by social media. We must honour them and the memories of their children. We owe it to our communities to get this done and not to be distracted by those often well-meaning people who may say this is too hard or that the kid will get around this. We support the legislation and highlight the work of the coalition to strengthen this legislation, particularly in relation to privacy, which we have strongly argued is extremely important.
I support this bill because it is the right thing to do. We should not delay. We should get this important reform done right now.