Education Minister Erica Stanford has confirmed that the member’s bill banning under 16s from social media has been put on hold while the coalition government pursues a wider programme of work on online harm.
The bill, sponsored by National’s Catherine Wedd, was drawn from the member’s ballot in October last year after being lodged in May 2025. Formally titled the Social Media Age Restricted Users Bill, it would impose an under 16 ban modelled on Australia’s regime, which came into force this month with platform fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars for non compliance.
Speaking after Wednesday’s debate in Parliament on the Education and Workforce Committee’s interim report into online harm, Stanford told RNZ the government is undertaking a wider programme of work in this area and Wedd’s bill is on hold for the moment. She added that the coalition is continuing to work through the process and will have more to say soon.
The decision marks a softening of the timetable that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon set last November when he said he was deeply supportive of an Australian style age ban and wanted New Zealand to move quickly. Stanford was tasked at that point to lead a cross agency review covering education, justice, internal affairs and broadcasting.
Wedd did not respond to requests for comment on the pause to her bill. Her bill cleared the ballot just as Australian regulators were finalising the enforcement settings that have since seen Meta and TikTok build market specific age verification trials in anticipation of similar regimes spreading across the Tasman.
The Australian law that the New Zealand bill mirrors requires platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, X and Reddit to verify users’ ages and to deactivate or refuse accounts held by those under 16. Messaging services, online games and most education platforms are exempt. The penalty scale in the Wedd bill was drawn directly from the Australian regime, which was the model that the Education and Workforce Committee was asked to consider.
The committee released its interim report on 10 December 2025 after receiving 430 submissions from 400 individuals and organisations, with 87 oral hearings. The committee identified what it called a fundamental conflict between platforms and parents, noting that social media platforms have a commercial incentive to design their platforms to be addicting and stimulating for young people.
Among its twelve recommendations the committee called for further exploration of restricting under 16s’ access to social media, regulating deepfake tools, creating a national online safety regulator and strengthening existing legislation around harmful content. The committee said it had not yet formed a final view on the precise design of an age cut off and flagged that a final report would arrive in the first half of this year.
Labour has indicated it supports an Australian style age cut off in principle, leaving National with a clear House majority if a substantive bill is introduced. The Greens and ACT both opposed the recommendation, although for different reasons. The Greens argued that at risk young people, including queer youth and those in isolated rural communities, would lose vital peer connections if pushed off the main platforms. ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar, who originally helped initiate the inquiry, said in her dissent that the report had drifted noticeably from its intended purpose by leaning towards predetermined solutions before the foundational analysis was finished.
The ACT disagreement adds another visible policy split inside the coalition, following earlier rows over RNZ funding and conservation law. Coalition managers will be conscious that putting Wedd’s bill on hold removes one immediate flashpoint with ACT while preserving the option of a broader government bill that the smaller party can negotiate over in cabinet.
The hold on Wedd’s bill leaves the legislative pathway uncertain. A government bill drafted from within Stanford’s wider work programme would be able to absorb the committee’s recommendations on regulator structure, deepfakes and platform liability in a single piece of legislation, but would not appear before the House until late this year at the earliest. In the meantime the member’s bill remains technically alive on the order paper but without ministerial backing it is unlikely to progress.
Meta’s regional policy director told the New Zealand Herald during a Wellington visit earlier this month that the company would prefer a regime modelled on the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, which places duties of care on platforms rather than relying on a blanket age cut off. Stanford rejected that position, saying Cabinet had already made up its mind on the direction of travel, although she acknowledged the precise mechanism remains open.
A campaign group of parents whose children have died by suicide after online bullying delivered a petition to Parliament in November calling for the ban to be brought forward. Stanford promised that group action within months. The pause confirmed this week is likely to feel like a setback to those families and to the wider education sector groups that backed the original committee recommendation.
For platform operators the delay offers a short reprieve to continue refining the age assurance tooling that is already being deployed in Australia. For the coalition it preserves the option of presenting a more comprehensive package closer to the 2026 general election rather than legislating in haste from a backbench bill.
With the election due later this year, voters who want to compare party positions on online safety and a range of other issues can use Newswire’s voting tool.
What’s your view on the age ban? Should the government push ahead with a clear cut off at 16, take the broader regulatory route, or leave the decision with parents? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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