The proposed amendments, introduced to Parliament this week, would expand the powers of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, enabling the online safety regulator to compel technology companies to hand over internal documents in addition to information about their efforts to prevent children from accessing restricted social media platforms.

The legislation seeks to reinforce a law that took effect in December prohibiting Australians younger than 16 from holding accounts on platforms including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

On Thursday, the opposition Liberal Party and the Australian Greens referred the amendments to an eight-week Senate inquiry. The governing Labor Party lacks a majority in the Senate, preventing immediate passage of the legislation.

Albanese said the delay would undermine the regulator’s ability to preserve evidence.

“It is outrageous the delay because what the eSafety Commissioner has said very clearly is that that will allow the platforms to go and just delete a whole lot of material,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

He said that if Parliament had approved the amendments immediately, the commissioner would have been able to issue document requests without delay, providing the basis for enforcement action and potential financial penalties.

The proposed changes would also authorize the commissioner to seek information from third parties, including providers of age-assurance technology, to verify claims by social media companies regarding measures taken to prevent underage users from creating or maintaining accounts.

The legislation would increase the maximum financial penalty for companies that fail to take reasonable steps to enforce the ban from its current level to A$99 million (US$68 million).

Greens Senator David Shoebridge questioned whether increasing penalties would improve online safety, noting that existing fines had not yet been imposed.

“Doubling penalties that they’ve never used doesn’t seem to me to be a meaningful measure,” Shoebridge told Sky News Australia.

The opposition Liberal Party said the proposed amendments did not go far enough. Opposition communications spokesperson Senator Sarah Henderson described the existing law as inadequately designed and poorly implemented, arguing that Parliament should consider stronger measures during the Senate inquiry.

Australia became the first country to enact a nationwide social media age restriction of its kind when Parliament overwhelmingly approved the legislation in 2024. Technology companies were given more than a year to implement systems designed to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts on designated platforms.

The government initially said more than five million children’s accounts had been removed, deactivated or restricted after the law came into force.

However, the eSafety Commissioner’s office reported in March that approximately seven in ten children who held accounts on restricted platforms when the ban began continued to use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

In April, Inman Grant said she was considering legal action against those platforms, along with YouTube, alleging they had failed to take reasonable steps to comply with the law. She indicated greater satisfaction with compliance efforts by X, Kick, Reddit, Threads and Twitch.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said she had received monthly compliance reports from the eSafety Commissioner since March and that authorities had not observed meaningful improvements in platform enforcement.

Australia’s legislation has attracted international attention, with several governments monitoring its implementation as they consider adopting similar measures to regulate children’s access to social media.

Lawyers representing X Corp. acknowledged in Federal Court that the company contravened Australia’s Online Safety Act after regulators found the platform had failed to adequately respond to a formal request seeking details on its child protection and anti-exploitation processes.

“The respondent admits that it contravened the Act,” Christopher Tran, counsel for the eSafety Commissioner, told the court, adding that the company remained in noncompliance for 38 days.

The case stemmed from a A$610,500 ($437,000) penalty issued in October 2023 against the company formerly known as Twitter after regulators said it provided insufficient responses to approximately 25 questions concerning its systems for detecting and preventing child exploitation material online.

X initially challenged the fine, arguing the company’s corporate identity had changed following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner later launched separate proceedings to recover the unpaid penalty.

Federal Court Judge Michael Wheelahan increased the amount payable to A$650,000 and ordered X to pay an additional A$100,000 toward the regulator’s legal costs.

The ruling marks another legal setback for Musk’s platform in Australia, where the billionaire entrepreneur and the eSafety Commissioner have repeatedly clashed over content moderation, online harms and regulatory oversight.

X lawyer Perry Herzfeld described the matter as relating to “historic issues” surrounding the timing of information supplied to authorities during what he characterized as a period of operational transition within the company.

“The contravening conduct took place during a period of change and transition for the company,” Herzfeld said during proceedings.Tran acknowledged the regulator had not identified direct harm resulting from the delayed disclosures but argued that failure to provide information impeded the regulator’s ability to carry out statutory responsibilities under the Online Safety Act.

The dispute also represented one of the remaining unresolved regulatory matters for X following its integration earlier this year into Musk’s broader technology conglomerate, SpaceX, ahead of a planned public offering.