Australia’s regulator has been given the document powers it said it needed
Fines behind the under-16 ban are doubled to A$109.2 million, and the eSafety Commissioner can now demand documents from anyone who holds them: app stores and age-check firms included.
Australia’s parliament passed theOnline Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Billon 10 September 2026, doubling the maximum fine for platforms that fail to keep under-16s off their services and widening the evidence its regulator can demand. The Senate agreed the third reading and the House accepted its amendments the same day. It received royal assent on 11 September 2026 as Act No. 83 of 2026, and the new powers and penalties commenced the day after, on 12 September.
The reason for the bill is the gap the regulator described herself. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner cannot fine a platform directly: systemic non-compliance has to be proven in court. Asked at Senate estimates on 27 May why no fines had been issued nine months into the ban, she said, in evidencequoted by the Parliamentary Library, that "we don't have a fine-issuing button". She isinvestigating five platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube) on evidence the platforms supply about themselves.
The bill rewrites section 63G of the Online Safety Act so she can require information or documents from any person she reasonably believes holds material relevant to a platform’s compliance. The explanatory memorandum names age assurance providers and app-store operators as the examples. Ignoring one of those notices now costs a company up to A$1.8 million. The Law Council of Australia warned that a power drafted that broadly could also reach children and their parents.
Why this matters for a UK parent
Ofcom starts where Australia has just arrived. Undersection 139 of the Online Safety Act, Ofcom decides the amount itself and gives the company a penalty notice, up to£18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is larger. No court case first. So the open question here is not whether the regulator can act. It is whether the age checks find children at all. In Australia, parents reporting that their child had their own account fell from 49.7% to 31.3%, but of the parents whose child had an account before the ban, around seven in ten said the child still had one. The most common reason given, by 66.8% of them, was that the platform had not yet asked the child to verify their age.
None of this is UK law and none of it changes your child’s phone this week. It matters because the UK’s ban is due in spring 2027 and Australia is nine months ahead of us on the same design. The number to watch is in that last paragraph: a ban only reaches a child the platform has actually asked. In the meantime, the setup guides cover the controls you can switch on yourself.