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Failed in Australia. Now National wants a censor to enforce it. The Government today introduced legislation barring under-16s from social media. Neither coalition partner will vote for it. The Greens are opposed. Labour has not committed. National cannot pass this without borrowing Labour's votes. “When nobody else in the House will put their name to your child protection law, the problem is not that everyone else is soft on child safety. The problem is the legislation,” said Jillaine Heather, Executive Director of the Free Speech Union. Three months into Australia's ban, its own regulator found 81.5 percent of under-16s were still using an age-restricted platform, down from 85.9 percent. More than half said the platform never checked their age. Complaints about cyberbullying and image-based abuse did not fall. “The Government's own factsheet quotes Australian data, but it only quotes the parts that suit it,” Heather said. “When this fails here, and it will, the answer will not be repeal. It will be tighter checks, a wider definition of what counts as a platform, and the VPN restrictions ministers keep insisting are off the table.” The Bill puts an online safety regulator inside the Department of Internal Affairs and says it will monitor platforms independently. It will not. “You cannot put a regulator inside a government department and then claim it is independent. Departments answer to ministers. That is what a department is,” Heather said. “One department will decide which platforms are covered, investigate them, compel information under threat of prosecution, and fine them a share of their global revenue. That is not child protection. It is the machinery of state control over speech, built inside the department that already runs the country's content filtering,” Heather said. Budget 2026 gave Internal Affairs $30.7 million over four years before any law existed. In April the department advertised for a Programme Implementation Director. Internal emails obtained by the Free Speech Union describe the work as implementing restrictions, not scoping options. “We do not have to guess how this department behaves once it holds power. It has spent a year building this regime without Parliament's approval,” Heather said. “A department that would not wait for a democratic Parliamentary process will not restrain itself once Parliament has said yes.” Protecting children is a good aim, but you do not achieve it by building a censor with power over what every adult New Zealander says online, especially one without appropriate checks and balances. The Free Speech Union is reviewing the Bill and will submit.