New Zealand’s New Dose of the Canberra Age-Gating Contagion Portends Political Purpose | American Enterprise Institute

New Zealand’s second attempt to introduce an age-based ban on access to social media by children under 16 has been announced by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. The new legislation, which will be shepherded through Parliament by Education Minister Erica Stanford, follows the sidelined 2025 private member’s bill sponsored by Tukutuki MP Catherine Wedd and the subsequent parliamentary inquiry into online harm and young people.

Whether the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill—which very closely mimics Australia’s much maligned and likely ineffective Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act of 2024—will be passed remains in doubt. With the November 7 general election looming and the prime minister’s failure to secure the support of government coalition partners ACT and New Zealand First for the proposed legislation, passage depends on gaining the support of the opposition Labour Party.

Gaining opposition support for a governing party’s bill will be a hard ask, especially in an election year, where the two main parties, Labour and Luxon’s National Party, are striving to differentiate themselves. However, stranger things have happened before in New Zealand politics, especially where conspicuous displays of political concern for child safety are called for. In 2007, then–National Party opposition leader John Key controversially but very publicly supported the passing of the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act, which removed the statutory defense of “reasonable force” to correct a child—effectively criminalizing the disciplinary tool of a light smacking—in the name of addressing New Zealand’s internationally high child abuse rate. The bill passed overwhelmingly, 113–7.

Given the comparative ineffectiveness of the Australian legislation in significantly reducing actual under-16 social media access and the plethora of other online tools available (and potentially harming) to young people that don’t fall under the country’s social media age restrictions (including violent games and communication tools such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegraph, which continue to proliferate as means of conducting online bullying behavior), it begs the question of why governments such as New Zealand’s are pursuing Australian-style age-gating regulation.

The answer, it seems, is that it makes for good politics. And good politics—at least in this case—does not make for good policy. Arguably, it paves the way for some very ill-thought-through laws that fail to balance the various free speech and privacy needs of both adults and children in a proportionate manner against the effective mitigation of demonstrable child harms. It also serves to illustrate the (ab)use of legislative powers to serve narrow party political and electoral interests.

It is likely no coincidence that National Party support for the anti-smacking law occurred in the lead-up to the 2008 general election, when the conservative Nats, in opposition, needed to bolster their caring credentials against a Labour Party strongly associated with most of New Zealand’s progressive, social justice causes. The current New Zealand three-party coalition government stands accused of not caring enough about the plight of “ordinary New Zealanders” in the face of a long-term financial downturn that has been especially acute since an apparent recovery was reversed by recent geopolitical events.

Luxon is not unaware that the unexpected landslide victory in 2025 of Australia’s Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can in part be attributed to the conspicuous signaling of a government that “cared” and “had parents’ backs” when passing its social media age-gating law. Luxon’s rhetoric strongly reflects that of his Australian counterpart: “We simply cannot accept the harm being done to a generation of New Zealand children,” he declared when announcing the online safety legislation. Arguably, he is also hoping his law will prove similarly electorally popular.

Yet like Albanese, Luxon is also acutely aware of his law’s limitations, saying: “We know that we will not get every single child off social media.” His solution: Censor the evidence. When he says that “early evidence from Australia shows minimum age requirements are already changing behaviour,” he fails to disclose that these behavioral changes involve teenage deceit (including lying, wearing masks and makeup, and using borrowed or stolen adult identities) to thwart age-detection software, migration to unregulated platforms, and an increase in the use of virtual private networks to evade Australian laws. Such activities are equal to or greater than the voluntary reduction of social media use among the under-16 population. Revealing that the very laws claiming not to make criminals of children and their parents may encourage the breaking of other laws or threaten privacy and free speech rights just would not make for very good electoral politics.

The acid test of responsible regulation should be the efficacy of the policy, not its retail political appeal. Political courage requires putting social media age-gating proposals through proportionate policy analysis rather than profiting on the political popularity of imperfect laws.