ACT leader David Seymour has floated the idea of banning smartphones for children under 16, suggesting Parliament could stop shops from selling the devices to young teenagers and allow them only simple phones that cannot reach social media. He raised the idea in a speech to business leaders in Auckland on Wednesday night, and it quickly became one of the more talked about political interventions of the week.
Seymour was speaking at the Graeme Dingle Foundation Business Leaders’ Dinner. According to reporting by RNZ and Stuff, he argued that anxiety, depression and self-harm among children and young people have climbed since smartphones became a fixture of daily life, and that a hard line on the physical device might do more good than the Government’s stalled plan to keep under-16s off social media.
His pitch leaned on a comparison many New Zealanders already understand. “We already prohibit adults from supplying minors with tobacco and alcohol,” Seymour said, arguing that a phone is no harder to point at than a bottle or a packet of cigarettes. “A smartphone is just as tangible,” he said, his point being that a ban on a clear physical object is easier to write, understand and enforce than a rule that tries to police what happens inside apps.
Under the approach he sketched out, Parliament would define what counts as a legal dumb phone, meaning a handset that can call and text but cannot run social media apps. The Government would then issue guidance to schools, youth organisations and parents, and could pass a law banning the sale of smartphones to under-16s. Seymour said young people should still be able to get online when it helped them learn, but questioned whether children really needed such a powerful attention-grabbing device with them at all times.
Notably, Seymour stopped well short of committing to the idea. “I don’t even know if the government trying to ban smartphones for under-16s is a good idea,” he said, framing the proposal as something worth debating rather than settled ACT policy. That hedge matters, because his party sits inside the governing coalition and has spent months resisting a different plan aimed at the very same problem.
That other plan is the Social Media (Age-Restricted Users) Bill, a member’s bill introduced by National MP Catherine Wedd in May 2025. It would require social media companies to verify the age of their users and block New Zealanders under 16 from holding accounts, an approach modelled on moves in Australia and the United Kingdom. The Government backed the goal, but ACT never came on board, so the measure proceeded as a member’s bill rather than government legislation.
Work on that bill was paused in the middle of May this year. After a parliamentary debate on 13 May, both ACT and the Greens argued the rules would be easy to get around and could cut vulnerable young people off from the support networks they rely on. Seymour has made the same case against age verification, warning it would force adults to prove their identity online and still fail to keep determined teenagers out. He has also pointed to the messy question of what even counts as social media, asking whether services like YouTube, WhatsApp and Discord would be caught by such a law.
The smartphone idea is his attempt to reframe the whole argument. Rather than asking platforms to guess how old their users are, he would put the restriction on the device itself at the point of sale, the same place tobacco and alcohol limits already bite. Supporters of that logic say it is cleaner and harder to dodge. Critics will point out that plenty of children already own phones, that hand-me-down devices and second-hand sales are common, and that a household sharing a single smartphone would sit in a legal grey area.
There are also practical questions Seymour did not fully answer. Enforcing a possession ban on a device that millions of families already own would be far harder than stopping new sales, and defining a dumb phone in law is trickier than it sounds now that even basic handsets can carry browsers and messaging apps. None of that was resolved in a single after-dinner speech, and Seymour himself was careful to present the idea as a thought experiment rather than a bill ready for the House.
What the intervention does show is that the debate over children and screens is far from settled heading into an election year. National, ACT, Labour and the Greens have all landed in different places on how to protect young people online without building a surveillance system for everyone else, and the pause on Wedd’s bill has left a gap that ideas like this one can fill. Whether a smartphone ban ever reaches Parliament or not, the underlying worry about young people’s mental health is one that cuts across party lines.
With the 2026 general election approaching, questions about how to keep children safe online are likely to feature in party manifestos and on the campaign trail. If you want to see where the parties stand on this and other issues, you can compare their positions using our voting tool.
What do you think, should New Zealand put age limits on smartphones the way it does on tobacco and alcohol, or is that a step too far? Share your view 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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