David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Keeping children safe on social media is one of the defining issues of our era. It is an issue of totemic significance right across our community. We're seeing deeply disturbing mental health impacts from social media on our children, especially girls. Imagine if 20 years back we had said, 'We're going to allow young children to communicate with basically any adult on earth about anything at all.' We would have said, 'Well, we definitely can't allow that.' But that is what has happened.

The age of 13 is clearly too young to access social media. In any event, there is currently no requirement on the social media companies to actually enforce those rules. If elected, the coalition will raise the age for social media access from 13 to 16 and require the social media companies to take action to make the age limit real. We cannot let social media companies get away with zero enforcement for the rules. We welcome the Prime Minister's recent statement:

I think that sixteen is a reasonable age. That's what we're looking at in the work that we've done, that's what I've said before …

That is a welcome statement. It doesn't matter what your politics are; every parent worries about this issue. This is about protecting future generations of Australian kids. We need to come together as a country and get this done.