Christopher Luxon says he’ll ‘die trying’ to introduce something like our neighbour’s social media ban for under-16s. What can he learn from their effort?

New Zealand might be taking the scenic route but legislation on young people’s use of social media remains on the agenda. 

New Zealand First is against a ban, and so is Act (David Seymour reckons a ban on smartphones is a better bet). The Greens are against the idea, too, but with Labour open to a digital handshake, Erica Stanford and Christopher Luxon say they are determined to get substantial action in train by the election. The prime minister went so far as to say, “We’re going to die trying to do something”. 

Fortunately, they have a decent petri dish just across the water. Australia pressed go on its pioneering ban on social media for under-16s in December last year. The “age-restricted social media platforms” – Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X (nee Twitter) and YouTube – are required to take “reasonable steps” to prevent people under the age of 16 from having accounts.

The Australian government has recently doubled the maximum penalty for platforms which fail to uphold the ban from AU$49.5 million to AU$99 million, with five providers currently under investigation by the eSafety commissioner.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he was “heartened by the shift in conversation and the global momentum we’ve seen”, but it was “clear big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law” and “there are still too many children on social media”.

The measures, which remain a popular initiative among parents, have had an impact, albeit far from universal. An eSafety survey undertaken in March found: “Of the parents who reported their child had an account on each platform prior to 10 December 2025, around seven in 10 reported that their child still had an account on Facebook (63.6%), Instagram (69.1%), Snapchat (69.4%), and TikTok (69.3%).

But on the broader point of its success or otherwise, well, it depends who you ask. And we asked Hal Crawford. A familiar face to New Zealanders as former head of Newshub, Crawford is these days editorial director of Mumbrella, an Australian media and marketing industry publication. He is also the father of teenagers.

“As ramshackle as this is, it’s actually a good way to do legislation,” said Crawford on an episode of The Spinoff podcast At Large with Toby Manhire. 

It was true that the ban had “not worked perfectly, not at all”, he said. But “I don’t think that that is the success criteria. I think probably the success criteria that I’d be looking at is: has there been a reduction and is there a path to more complete enforcement of this in future? And if that’s the case, then the answer is yes”. 

The lawmakers had been “very canny”, he said. “They know how to write a mean piece of legislation, and they know how not to box themselves into impossible corners. One of the impossible corners would have been to define exactly how people are going to [enforce age restrictions] before it happened. So they just said: no, there’s an onus on the platforms to to work out reasonable means to exclude people under 16 from accessing these accounts, and then, what’s reasonable? We’ll work that out in future.”

So far, despite the hiking of the maximum penalty, there has been no prosecution. “The wheels turn slowly, and the commissioner has to warn the companies, and they have to get the information,” Crawford explained. “It’s complicated and it’s difficult. And if you want to build a case to take these people to the court, you have to actually make sure that you’ve given them every opportunity to rectify their wrongs.” For those under investigation (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube), it appeared the eSafety office was “building a case and getting the information”. In some examples, there had been reports of “pretty flagrant breaches”, such as a user failing the test and being encouraged to try the process again, or making it through the checks with, for example, “a black-and-white photo of Thomas Edison”.

Crawford said he was disinclined to play political adviser, but, were he hauled up to the ninth floor of the Beehive, he would tell Luxon a couple of things. First, quit the “die trying” language. “Stop being so melodramatic.”

Second, “there are some really good lessons that are out there for everyone to see already. There’s the detail lesson, which is, you know, you might want to have these recommender feature stipulations and all of that. But the really big lesson is that you can have a totally crap first pass. And it’s still better than doing nothing – you know, inaction is what creates despair. Stop being pathetic and doing nothing. Just do something, get it over the line, and then make it better after you’ve enacted it.”

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