Labour says it has been shown the Government’s under-16 social media ban bill in the Education Minister’s office but has not been allowed to take a copy away, and that its caucus cannot decide whether to support the law until every MP has read it.
Reuben Davidson, Labour’s science, technology and innovation spokesperson, told RNZ he first saw the draft bill some time last month and has asked for a copy at follow-up meetings since, without getting one. He said that made it very difficult for Labour to reach a position.
“I think it’s unusual to ask someone to make a decision if they don’t have the thing they’re being asked to make a decision about in front of them,” Davidson said.
The issue, he said, was that the caucus that would ultimately make the decision had not been given the bill to consider.
He rejected the suggestion that Labour was dragging its feet. “It’s very hard to claim that someone is stalling or that a caucus is stalling on making a decision when they haven’t been able to see the bill that they’re being asked to make a decision about,” he said. “We’ve said the whole way through that this issue is too important to play politics.”
Davidson said Labour would settle on a position once the full caucus had seen the bill in its entirety. Asked about the detail of what he had read, he said those were questions for the minister. He did confirm one thing, which is that there is no ban on virtual private networks in the proposed legislation. VPN software lets a user route their internet traffic through another country, and it is the standard way teenagers in Australia have been reported to sidestep that country’s age limits.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said what was on offer was not a real negotiation. “She said that she’d consider changes through a select committee process, but there would be no negotiation up to that point, so it’s not really negotiation, is it? She’s basically asking us to write her a blank cheque,” Hipkins said.
Education Minister Erica Stanford did not respond to RNZ’s questions about the situation.
The stand-off matters because of parliamentary arithmetic rather than principle. National wants an age limit. So, on the face of it, does Labour. The party that does not want one is ACT, National’s own coalition partner, which has argued the approach is unworkable and raises privacy problems of its own. Because ACT will not sign up, the Government cannot simply run the policy through the House on coalition votes, and it has spent months looking across the aisle for the numbers instead. That makes Labour’s caucus the effective gatekeeper of a law the Prime Minister has said he is deeply supportive of, and it makes the question of who gets to read the draft a live political issue rather than a procedural one.
The policy has already had a long and stop-start life. National MP Catherine Wedd put a member’s bill in the ballot in 2025 modelled on Australia’s under-16 restrictions, which would have required social media companies to verify the ages of their users. A parliamentary inquiry into online harm backed an age limit, prompting a public disagreement with ACT. Then in May this year Wedd’s bill was put on hold while Stanford worked up a broader package of measures on online harm, with the Government signalling it would bring its own legislation rather than lean on a backbencher.
Stanford promised an update in June. What has emerged since is a draft written by the Parliamentary Counsel Office, which the Prime Minister has said will be introduced before voters go to the polls. That draft is the document Davidson has now seen twice without being able to hand it to anyone else.
The calendar is the pressure. Under the key dates published by the Electoral Commission, the House rises on 24 September, Parliament is dissolved on 1 October and the general election is held on 7 November. Anything that is going to become law this term has to be introduced, sent to a select committee, reported back and passed through its remaining stages inside about eight sitting weeks. A bill that has not yet been introduced in late July, and whose likely support party has not read it, is running out of road quickly. If it is not passed by the time the House rises, the whole thing starts again after the election with whatever government voters return.
The substance is not simple either, which is part of why Labour says it wants the text. An age limit only works if platforms can tell how old their users are, and that means some form of age assurance for everybody, not just for teenagers. Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster has warned that verification systems create privacy risks for all users, because proving your age online generally involves handing over something more sensitive than the thing you were trying to reach. There is also the question of what a ban does to young people who use these platforms to find support, and the practical one of enforcement across companies headquartered offshore.
None of those arguments are settled by a bill sitting in a minister’s office. But they are the arguments Labour MPs would be voting on, and at the moment only one of them has read the words. Whether the Government hands over a copy in the next few weeks will say a good deal about whether it expects to pass this law before November or simply campaign on it.
If you want to see where the parties stand on this and other issues ahead of the election, try our voting tool.
Should the Government give Labour a copy of the bill, and should under-16s be kept off social media at all? Have your say 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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