Show Your Papers to Send Email

Australians were sold the promise of protecting children online. Now comes the warning that they could be asked to prove their age to use email, while private messages and stored files face intrusive monitoring. Canberra’s appetite for controlling the internet has reached the digital equivalent of your letterbox and filing cabinet.

At a Senate hearing on 9 November, Google warned that Labor’s proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation could force age checks and potentially block under-18s from everyday communication services, including Gmail. Rachel Lord, who heads Australian and New Zealand policy for Google-owned YouTube, warned of “potentially intrusive monitoring within private communications or file storage”. 

Consider what that means for an ordinary family. A teenager uses email to apply for an apprenticeship, contact a teacher or receive a payslip. Parents store school reports, family photographs and personal documents online. These are basic activities in modern life, and legislation promoted under the comforting banner of safety could turn access to them into another checkpoint.

The problem lies in the legislation’s reach. Reporting on the hearing⁠ explains that the disputed provisions cover services where children could reasonably encounter pornography or fetish material. There is no specific exemption for email or messaging, leaving Google warning about how it would comply across services carrying private material. 

Attach enormous penalties to that uncertainty and the incentive is obvious. Companies will protect themselves, and their customers will carry the consequences.

The government’s own explanation⁠ advertises penalties of up to $109.2 million for non-compliance. Faced with that exposure, companies have every reason to restrict access and impose additional checks wherever the legal boundaries are uncertain. Parliament can create censorship and surveillance incentives without ordering every individual act of censorship or surveillance. 

Nor does an age restriction concern children alone. A service enforcing an adults-only rule needs a way to distinguish adults from children. That brings adult users into the checking process too. Every Australian should therefore ask what information would be demanded, who would handle it, how long it would be retained and what happens to anyone who refuses.

Parents should be able to protect their children without surrendering the family’s privacy to an expanding compliance system. Making ordinary communication conditional on satisfying an age-checking apparatus gives governments and technology companies another point of control over everyday life.

The political trick is familiar: announce a sympathetic objective, give regulators sweeping authority, then leave ordinary people to discover how much freedom disappeared in the fine print. Once access depends on compliance, a service you previously used becomes something you must qualify to enter.

The Senate must confront these consequences now, while the legislation can still be stopped or rewritten. Senators should demand explicit protection for private communications, clear limits on age-checking obligations and safeguards against routine inspection of personal files. Without those protections, they should reject the bill.

Australians do not owe Canberra routine access to their private lives. Parents do not surrender their authority because a minister invokes children. And nobody should have to pass through a government-created checkpoint simply to send an email.

“Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.”
– Bruce Schneier