Andrew initially against the Government’s social media ban for under-16s because he had a number of concerns about the ban being counter-productive, unworkable, and punishing children rather than the social media platforms.
Having seen many of these concerns vindicated, the Government brought the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 to parliament seeking to increase enforcement powers for the eSafety Commissioner and increase penalties for the social media companies. Andrew delivered the below speech on the bill outlining his view of the changes:
“I will support this bill because although I didn’t support the original bill legislating the media ban, we have it. It’s real. History can’t be unwound. And I want to make this law as good as it can be made.
Because I care as much about the safety of our young people as anyone else in this place. But I do lament that we are trying to put lipstick on a pig, because the social media ban was ill-conceived, badly designed, and has been badly implemented.
If only we could rewind history and go back and think about this from the scratch, from the beginning, and start again. And listen to all of the people who ventilated their concerns about the bill when it was being designed and legislated.
And there were a lot of people who voiced a lot of concerns. I note that there were some 13 MPs who voted against the original bill when it came before this place, and we had so many concerns. Sadly, they were pretty much all ignored.
Probably one of our most significant concerns was we hadn’t listened to young people to find out their perspective. The Government did, quite rightly, listen to parents that had been affected and other family members and heard of their concerns and tried to respond appropriately to their concerns. And that’s good in isolation, but didn’t go far enough.
I don’t know that the Government ever actually spoke to people younger than 16 who were using social media and relying on social media to hear their perspectives. About why are they on social media? What do they find harmful about social media? Do they think there’s anything that could be done to make social media safer? That would have been very beneficial…”