The Government today introduced legislation barring
under-16s from social media. Neither coalition partner will
vote for it. The Greens are opposed. Labour has not
committed. National cannot pass this without borrowing
Labour’s votes.
“When nobody else in the House will
put their name to your child protection law, the problem is
not that everyone else is soft on child safety. The problem
is the legislation,” said Jillaine Heather, Executive
Director of the Free Speech Union.
Three months into
Australia’s ban, its own regulator found 81.5 percent of
under-16s were still using an age-restricted platform, down
from 85.9 percent. More than half said the platform never
checked their age. Complaints about cyberbullying and
image-based abuse did not fall.
“The Government’s
own factsheet quotes Australian data, but it only quotes the
parts that suit it,” Heather said.
“When this
fails here, and it will, the answer will not be repeal. It
will be tighter checks, a wider definition of what counts as
a platform, and the VPN restrictions ministers keep
insisting are off the table.”
The Bill puts an
online safety regulator inside the Department of Internal
Affairs and says it will monitor platforms independently. It
will not.
“You cannot put a regulator inside a
government department and then claim it is independent.
Departments answer to ministers. That is what a department
is,” Heather said.
“One department will decide
which platforms are covered, investigate them, compel
information under threat of prosecution, and fine them a
share of their global revenue. That is not child protection.
It is the machinery of state control over speech, built
inside the department that already runs the country’s
content filtering,” Heather said.
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Budget 2026 gave
Internal Affairs $30.7 million over four years before any
law existed. In April the department advertised for a
Programme Implementation Director. Internal emails obtained
by the Free Speech Union describe the work as implementing
restrictions, not scoping options.
“We do not have
to guess how this department behaves once it holds power. It
has spent a year building this regime without Parliament’s
approval,” Heather said. “A department that would not
wait for a democratic Parliamentary process will not
restrain itself once Parliament has said
yes.”
Protecting children is a good aim, but you do
not achieve it by building a censor with power over what
every adult New Zealander says online, especially one
without appropriate checks and balances. The Free Speech
Union is reviewing the Bill and will
submit.
