The Institute of Public Affairs’ Margaret Chambers appeared on 4BC Drive with Gary Hardgrave to discuss IPA research into the under 16 social media ban.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Gary Hardgrave:
Government keeps trying to do things and they muck it up. A big topic for conversation today is around the future of online safety for our kids. Australia’s social media ban for under-16 is set to come in effect in December, but today the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has publicly called for YouTube not to be exempt from these rules and raised a lot of questions about how these bans are actually going to work and the broader control of information online. I mean, it’s never worked, has it?
You shouldn’t smoke until you’re what? 16, 18, 14? I don’t know what the age group was. That really didn’t work, did it? Oh, you’re not allowed to drive a car until you’ve got a driver’s licence and 17. Your 12-year-olds are pinching cars. This is insane. Margaret Chambers is a sensible person, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and joins us. Margaret, I don’t know how you can actually get an enforcement of a certain age not being able to access social media. It means we’re all going to have to confess our age if we’ve got Twitter, Facebook, or whatever, or have I got this wrong?
Margaret Chambers:
No, I think you’re absolutely right, Gary. I think exactly what you said, it’s an absolute disaster and honestly a shame on the government and the Coalition for voting for these laws without having any clue as to how they’re actually going to enforce it. To be honest-
Gary Hardgrave:
How do we keep YouTube out of the mix? I mean, what’s YouTube doing that apparently it’s a place where a lot of kids go to see videos of things that their grandparents used to look at, on countdown like music clips and things like that?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think YouTube’s this very educational and entertaining platform where you can access different videos. I mean, honestly, I think I use YouTube every day to watch things like podcasts, tutorials. It’s quite a diverse platform. But the eSafety Commissioner, she’s come out and said that kids are seeing harmful things on YouTube, and her conclusion is that therefore every child in the country should thus be banned from accessing the platform. And I think that there’s a real problem with this logic, and we outlined it at the beginning, that we can just ban things because they’re harmful. And honestly, it’s pretty nonsensical the idea that you can be 15 years and 11 months and you can’t access YouTube and then you turn 16 and suddenly you’re fine. You suddenly learn the skills overnight. But I think the reality is that kids are quite smart. They’re going to find a way around this and they’re going to use it anyway. And honestly, I reckon if you’re going to ban it’ll only function to make it more appealing to them.
Gary Hardgrave:
Margaret, it just seems to me that every person under the age of 16 is going to invent some sort of phoney identity or some sort of phoney age. But what’s worse is I think all of us are going to have to tell whoever is monitoring this, what our age is. If we want to go onto YouTube, I’ve got to what? Tick a box to say, “Yes, I’m above the age of 16.” I don’t know how it’s going to work. This is too intrusive for me.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I think it’s deeply intrusive. And to be honest, I don’t think the government knows how it’s going to work either. They’ve said they’re going to use AI to enforce it. And I think this is honestly remarkable that on the one hand you’ve got the eSafety commissioner saying that you can’t trust the platforms to moderate their own content, but then on the other hand, we can trust them to use AI to verify people’s ages. That’s even more frightening. What happens with that information? And I think you’re exactly right. I’d hate to see this issue used as a Trojan horse to smuggle in something like the digital ID and exactly what you said, I don’t think that this will just affect kids. Every single adult in Australia will be asked to verify their age in some way, and we’ve got six months before this thing is meant to commence, and the government’s just got no clue how that’s going to happen.
Gary Hardgrave:
And that’s the problem. They’re making this stuff as they go along. Margaret, I don’t mind the idea of giving whatever information I need to access, whatever I have to access. I want my privacy on the things that are important to me. I have to get verification codes for various things, pin numbers, whatever it might happen to be. But the idea of a digital ID where all of that information is centralised, I don’t understand how secure that would be. I have very little confidence that there would be any security associated with any of this kind of centralised digital ID concept.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. Honestly, I find it deeply frightening the idea that the government would have control not only of your identity, but also what you look at, what you access, where you’re going, what you’re spending your money on. That’s deeply frightening. I don’t think it’s the hallmark of a democracy in any case. Sounds far more like something like a totalitarian dictatorship or somewhere like China than it does Australia.
Gary Hardgrave:
But this is really serious. And you’re right, both sides of politics signed up to this. I was furious with Peter Dutton and the then Coalition front bench about this stuff, but they should be now saying, “Oh, I think we got this wrong. We’ve got to stand for individual freedom, get parents involved. Parents can monitor, parents should take responsibility. But some people at 15 are more mature than others. Some people at 18 are still as silly as a 12-year-old. I mean, everybody’s different. And I don’t understand how government thinks everyone’s the same.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. Well, honestly, I think the government is pretty silly and the Coalition should be if they’re not already kicking themselves that they supported this thing. And I’ve got no doubt that there are people listening to us right now on air who are concerned about their children using social media at home and that they’d be kind of supportive of this ban by nature. But I think what we have to remember is that the ban was passed the very same week that the government decided to pull the plug on its misinformation laws. It happened within days of them abandoning that one form of legislation and they replaced it with the other. And I don’t know how the Coalition supported one but not the other. And in the same way that the misinformation was with sensor information and controlling access to information, I’m concerned that the social media ban will do the same thing that kids will be denied from accessing all these wonderful alternative points of information and opinions online that they otherwise would not hear.
Gary Hardgrave:
I mean, what is your research showing on those social attitudes? Because you’re right. A lot of people say, “Oh, this is simple. I’ll just let the nanny at Nanny State, the Department of Nanny State take over responsibility.” So if my kids see something that they shouldn’t see, then I guess I can blame somebody else. I mean, surely we need parents to gear up or people who are responsible adults to gear up and monitor what their kids are doing, take an interest in what they’re doing, at the very least.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I think it’s totally right. I think it is the responsibility of parents, and again, I’m not saying that this is an easy task, but the problem is when you import a government bureaucracy in to do the role of parents to parent children, the problem with bureaucracies is that they only ever expand and they only ever grow. Even the eSafety Commissioner’s Office started off being just about kids, and then we saw it absolutely balloon into this sprawling behemoth where she’s controlling what adults can see online and what they call adult cyber abuse, which is really just a form of censorship or opinions that the government doesn’t agree with. It might start off here with being about kids, but where does this go next? That’s what I’m really concerned about. What’s the next step?
Gary Hardgrave:
So, okay, if somebody who’s got a child who’s experienced online bullying, what should they be doing? I mean, is government the only way to solve these sorts of problems?
Margaret Chambers:
No, I think the responsibility lies with the parents. I think you should have a relationship with your kid where you can talk about it and to build trust with your child and to know what they’re actually doing on their phones. But again, that is the responsibility of parents to monitor what your child’s looking at on their phone. It’s not the responsibility of someone in Canberra.
Gary Hardgrave:
Okay. All right. Good to talk to you Margaret. Margaret Chambers, she’s a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. Someone sent in a note saying, “Pull your heads out of the sand on this one. Just use government issued ID cards to access.” Oh, they’re really reliable, aren’t they? That’ll work for a while until it doesn’t. There’s got to be tears and I just think we need to be careful about the fact everyone has to submit their date of birth, their age, and everything has to be then can be accessed by a government. Department’s got nothing to do with ID cards like your driver’s licence or whatever. If they know everything you’re buying, everything you’re transacting, everything you’re viewing, then what do they do with that information? How safe is that? This is a bigger fish. I think that’s where heads are in the sand. It’s not an easy fix. It’s onerous. It’s problematic. It could be very, very damaging. It’s not going to solve the problem of online cyber bullying either. On number 3882, you might have your own thought of-
This transcript with Margaret Chambers talking on 4BC Drive with Gary Hardgrave from 24 June 2025 has been edited for clarity.
