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Australia passes social media ban for kids under 16 sparking online surveillance concerns

Published

11 months ago

5 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

While the official goal of the bill is to protect the mental health of children and adolescents, critics have raised concerns that the bill would establish an online surveillance system for all Australians, similar to Communist China.

Australia has passed a social media ban for children under the age of 16, a seemingly prudent move but one that has raised serious concerns about online surveillance.

On Thursday, November 28, the Australian Senate passed the bill with a 34-19 vote, making it the world’s first social media ban for under-16-year-olds.

The “Online Safety Amendment Bill 2024” threatens social media companies with up to 50 million AUD (32 million USD) if they fail to comply with the requirement of verifying the age of their users.

While the official goal of the bill is to protect the mental health of children and adolescents, critics have raised concerns that the bill would establish an online surveillance system for all Australians, similar to Communist China.

“Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” Elon Musk wrote on X.

Journalist and free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger said that “this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in ‘Black Mirror,’ and already in place in China.”

The bill, which was rushed through parliament, does not give any details about how age verification will work and will not come into force until the end of next year. On November 26, the Australian Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee approved the bill under the condition that social media platforms must not force their users to give them their personal data, including information from government-issued IDs.

While this provision appears to rule out the use of Digital IDs for now, the question of how it will be enforced remains. The Guardian reports that supporters of the bill have said that platforms may use biometric methods, such as facial scans, to verify the age of its users. This would, of course, mean that social media companies would collect the biometric data of all its users in Australia.

The explanatory memorandum to the bill says that there will be “robust” privacy protections, “including prohibiting platforms from using information collected for age assurance purposes for any other purpose unless explicitly agreed to by the individual.”

However, the memorandum also explains that “compliance with the minimum age obligation” will likely require platforms “to implement systems and procedures to monitor and respond to age-restricted users circumventing age assurance.”

This suggests that social media companies could continually monitor a user while using the platform, for instance, by repeatedly doing face scans to ensure that the user is still the same and at least 16 years old.

The vaguely worded bill also does not specify which companies will be affected by the age restriction. Communications minister Michelle Rowland said that TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit, Facebook, and Snapchat will likely be included, while YouTube will be excluded due to its educational purposes.

In addition to the under-16 social media ban requiring age verification of users, the Australian government also sought to curb speech online via a draconian “Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.” However, the government had to abandon the controversial bill after facing significant cross-party opposition in the Senate. The bill would have forced social media companies to remove information that was “reasonably verifiable as false” or if “misinformation and disinformation” could cause serious harm. The vague definitions of these terms would have allowed social media companies or the government to arbitrarily censor content it deemed unwanted.

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Alberta

Alberta taxpayers should know how much their municipal governments spend

Published on October 16, 2025

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From the Fraser Institute

By Tegan Hill and Austin Thompson

Next week, voters across Alberta will go to the polls to elect their local governments. Of course, while the issues vary depending on the city, town or district, all municipal governments spend taxpayer money.

And according to a recent study, Grande Prairie County and Red Deer County were among Alberta’s highest-spending municipalities (on a per-person basis) in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data). Kara Westerlund, president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, said that’s no surprise—arguing that it’s expensive to serve a small number of residents spread over large areas.

That challenge is real. In rural areas, fewer people share the cost of roads, parks and emergency services. But high spending isn’t inevitable. Some rural municipalities managed to spend far less, demonstrating that local choices about what services to provide, and how to deliver them, matter.

Consider the contrast in spending levels among rural counties. In 2023, Grande Prairie County and Red Deer County spent $5,413 and $4,619 per person, respectively. Foothills County, by comparison, spent just $2,570 per person. All three counties have relatively low population densities (fewer than seven residents per square kilometre) yet their per-person spending varies widely. (In case you’re wondering, Calgary spent $3,144 and Edmonton spent $3,241.)

Some of that variation reflects differences in the cost of similar services. For example, all three counties provide fire protection but in 2023 this service cost $56.95 per person in Grande Prairie County, $38.51 in Red Deer County and $10.32 in Foothills County. Other spending differences reflect not just how much is spent, but whether a service is offered at all. For instance, in 2023 Grande Prairie County recorded $46,283 in daycare spending, while Red Deer County and Foothills County had none.

Put simply, population density alone simply doesn’t explain why some municipalities spend more than others. Much depends on the choices municipal governments make and how efficiently they deliver services.

Westerlund also dismissed comparisons showing that some counties spend more per person than nearby towns and cities, calling them “apples to oranges.” It’s true that rural municipalities and cities differ—but that doesn’t make comparisons meaningless. After all, whether apples are a good deal depends on the price of other fruit, and a savvy shopper might switch to oranges if they offer better value. In the same way, comparing municipal spending—across all types of communities—helps Albertans judge whether they get good value for their tax dollars.

Every municipality offers a different mix of services and those choices come with different price tags. Consider three nearby municipalities: in 2023, Rockyview County spent $3,419 per person, Calgary spent $3,144 and Airdrie spent $2,187. These differences reflect real trade-offs in the scope, quality and cost of local services. Albertans should decide for themselves which mix of local services best suits their needs—but they can’t do that without clear data on what those services actually cost.

A big municipal tax bill isn’t an inevitable consequence of rural living. How much gets spent in each Alberta municipality depends greatly on the choices made by the mayors, reeves and councillors Albertans will elect next week. And for Albertans to determine whether or not they get good value for their local tax dollars, they must know how much their municipality is spending.

Tegan Hill

Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute

Austin Thompson

Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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Business

Major Projects Office Another Case Of Liberal Political Theatre

Published on October 16, 2025

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Ottawa’s Major Projects Office is a fix for a mess the Liberals created—where approval now hinges on politics, not merit.

They are repeating their same old tricks, dressing up political favouritism as progress instead of cutting barriers for everyone

On Sept. 11, the Prime Minister’s Office announced five projects being examined by its Major Projects Office, all with the potential to be fast-tracked for approval and to get financial help. However, no one should get too excited. This is only a bad effort at fixing what government wrecked.

During the Trudeau years, and since, the Liberals have created a regulatory environment so daunting that companies need a trump card to get anything done. That’s why the Major Projects Office (MPO) exists.

“The MPO will work to fast-track nation-building projects by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing, in close partnership with provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples and private investors,” explains a government press release.

Canadians must not be fooled. A better solution would be to create a regulatory and tax environment where these projects can meet market demand through private investment. We don’t have that in Canada, which is why money has fled the country and our GDP growth per capita is near zero.

Instead of this less politicized and more even-handed approach, the Liberals have found a way to make their cabinet the only gatekeepers able to usher someone past the impossible process they created. Then, having done so, they can brag about what “they” got done.

The Fraser Institute has called out this system for its potential to incentivize bribes and kickbacks. The Liberals have such a track record of handing out projects and even judicial positions to their friends that such scenarios become easier to believe. Innumerable business groups will be kissing up to the Liberals just to get anything major done.

The government has created the need for more of itself, and it is following up in every way it can. Already, the federal government has set up offices across Canada for people to apply for such projects. Really? Anyone with enough dollars to pursue a major project can fly to Ottawa to make their pitch.

No, this is as much about the show as it is about results—and probably much more. It is all too reminiscent of another big-sounding, mostly ineffective program the Liberal government rolled out in 2017. They announced a $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative “designed to help strengthen Canada’s most promising clusters … while positioning Canadian firms for global leadership.”

That program allowed any company in the world to participate, with winners getting matching dollars from taxpayers for their proposals. (But all for the good of Canada, we were told.) More than 50 applications were made for these sweepstakes, which included more than 1,000 businesses and 350 other participants. In Trudeau Liberal fashion, every applicant had to articulate how their proposal would increase female jobs and leadership and encourage diversity in the long term.

The entire process was like one big Dragon’s Den series. The Liberals trotted out a list of contestants full of nice-sounding possibilities, with maximum hype and minimal reality. Late in the process, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains picked the nine finalists himself (all based in cities with a Liberal MP), from which five would be chosen.

The alleged premise was to leverage local and regional commercial clusters, but that soon proved ridiculous. The “Clean, Low-energy, Effective and Remediated Supercluster” purported to power clean growth in mining in Ontario, Quebec and Vancouver. Not to be outdone, the “Mobility Systems and Technologies for the 21st Century Supercluster” included all three of these locations, plus Atlantic Canada. They were only clustered by their tendency to vote Liberal.

Today, the MPO repeats this virtue-signalling, politicking, drawn-out, tax-dollar-spending drama. The Red Chris Mine expansion in northwest British Columbia is one of the proposals under consideration. It would be done in conjunction with the Indigenous Tahltan Nation and is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent. That’s right up the Liberal alley.

Meanwhile, the project is somehow part of a proposed Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor that would cordon off an area the size of Greece from development. Is this economic growth or economic prohibition? This approach is more like the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 than it is nation-building. And it is more like the World Economic Forum’s “stakeholder capitalism” approach than it is free enterprise.

At least there are two gems among the five proposals. One is to expand capacity at the Port of Montreal, and another is to expand the Canada LNG facility in Kitimat, B.C. Both have a market case and clear economic benefits.

Even here, Canadians must ask themselves, why must the government use a bulldozer to get past the red tape it created? Why not cut the tape for everyone? The Liberals deserve little credit for knocking down a door they barred themselves.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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