RAFAEL EPSTEIN: We are joined by the Communications Minister, whose job it is to implement this ban. Anika Wells is the Minister, part of Anthony Albanese’s Federal Labor Government. Minister, good morning.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS ANIKA WELLS: Good morning, Raf. Hope you’re well

EPSTEIN: I am. Parents don’t want to have the Roblox fight with their kids. Did you sort of buckle to that pressure?

WELLS: Absolutely not. And one of the main imperatives of the law is that the onus is not on parents. Parents are able to point now to the law, or to me, or they may be driving to school and listening to your program, Raf, and say this isn’t me, this isn’t my decision. This is the Australian law. This is the Minister saying that these social media platforms are now against the law until you turn 16.

With respect to Roblox, though, it’s an online game, so therefore it’s currently exempt from the new laws. But it doesn’t make it exempt from their responsibilities under the Online Safety Act, for example, their social responsibility that they do have already to young Australians. And they are, of course, as your listeners would know, subject to the National Classification Scheme. And since they have been under the laser beam of the eSafety Commissioner as part of this national discussion about the social media laws, Roblox has committed to new safety measures recently, making accounts for under-16s private by default and introducing some new tools to prevent adult users, for example, contacting under-16s without their parental consent. But we will absolutely keep an eye on them as well.

EPSTEIN: What’s the difference between a neo-Nazi targeting someone, a young kid on Roblox, and someone else toxic targeting someone on Instagram? Why are those two things different? Instagram’s banned and Roblox isn’t for under-16s.

WELLS: Because there are an exemption to the laws for gaming platforms, and Roblox is an online game. I know, Raf, you’ve had a long-held interest in this space. You might have seen the eSafety Commissioner talking about Roblox in particular over the past couple of months, because there have been these incidents that show that they are not safe. And I think we can all agree there’s always concerns with privacy online. And just because Roblox is currently exempt as a gaming platform doesn’t mean they’re exempt from their own responsibilities under the Online Safety Act. And if there’s breaches there, we will crack down on them.

EPSTEIN: Let’s look at how this might work. I got a text saying this: my child, who is 15 in two weeks, already has Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram through falsifying his date of birth. How will it be taken off his phone? Minister, how do you answer that question? How’s that stuff going to come off that kid’s phone?

WELLS: So, there’s lots of ways that we can assure ourselves of someone’s age online, and someone putting the wrong birth date in is a long-held, tried and tested technique of people that platforms are very well aware of. It is not sufficient to get through the system by putting in an incorrect date.

EPSTEIN: But what’s going to happen to those accounts on that phone, do you think? Are they just going to disappear?

WELLS: So Snapchat, for example, has said they will deactivate those accounts and they will stay dormant until that person has turned 16. I think that Meta and TikTok has said something similar. They’re not going to delete the account. They’re going to deactivate the account on 10 December. But the onus is for that parent who has texted in, they don’t have to do anything on 9 December. The platforms have to do something for 10 December, though it probably is in everyone’s interest for parents to be talking to their kids about what this is going to look like.

EPSTEIN: I’m just wondering what it looks like. That kid won’t be able to open Snapchat and won’t be able to open Instagram, but the app will still be on their phone. What’s it going to look like? How will that work?

WELLS: So, the eSafety Commissioner and I are currently working through compliance plans with each of the platforms. They’ve had to provide that to the eSafety Commission in the run-up to 10 December. Some of the regulatory guidance, which we published in September, talks about the fact that platforms must communicate openly and transparently with their users about what’s coming, about what age assurance systems they’re going to use to work out whether you are under 16 or over 16. They must communicate with their users about the fact they’ve been identified as an account, and they must do that in a kind way because we appreciate these are big changes for young people.

EPSTEIN: So, does that also mean, Minister- I’ve got a Facebook account, I don’t activate it very often. Are you saying I should receive a message from Facebook before 10 December and they will tell me how they’re going to verify my age? How’s that going to work?

WELLS: Well, I would guess, Raf, that your Facebook account has been in action or active for than three years. So, Facebook probably knows that you are over 16. So, for example, if you’ve had a Facebook account since 2015, they know you’re over 16 because of how long you’ve had an account. So, the majority of Australians who are over 16 shouldn’t actually hear anything or have to prove anything for 10 December.

EPSTEIN: Shouldn’t or won’t?

WELLS: It will look different for each platform, but I would say, common sense here, the amount of data and information that we have all voluntarily given to these platforms over the years of their use means that for the majority of us, they are well aware of what age we are. And the difficulty that some of the platforms have spoken to about age assurance is because young people between 13 and 16, as they’re going through puberty, et cetera, that’s a bit less clear.

EPSTEIN: Sure.

WELLS: So that’s what we’re in the weeds on ahead of 10 December. But if you’ve had an account since 2010, they know you’re over 16 and you shouldn’t hear from them. 

EPSTEIN: I do want to get to the Triple Zero issues with you because you’re the Communications Minister. But just a clarification. If adults have had Instagram or Facebook for some years, they will not have to share any extra data like their face?

WELLS: That’s exactly right, and we’ve put that in the law.

EPSTEIN: Minister, just on the Optus outage, your office received an email 24 hours before the news was made public. Why didn’t all the fire alarms go off as soon as your office got that email?

WELLS: That has been well canvassed in some of the 72 questions that I’ve taken in both the House of Representatives and in press conferences on this, plus now in the Senate inquiry. That email, ACMA the regulator, even said, was inaccurate and possibly misleading. It said that a Triple Zero outage which had now concluded affected 10 calls. It was not until more than 24 hours later that the full scale of that outage, more than 600 calls with possibly three deaths linked to a failure to get through to Triple Zero. was communicated to either the regulator or my office.

EPSTEIN: I appreciate what you’re saying, only 10 people, but there was an Optus outage two years ago. Telstra had Triple Zero problems 18 months ago. Shouldn’t all of the fire alarms have gone off as soon as you get an email from a phone company saying we’ve got even a small problem with Triple Zero? 

WELLS: Well, two things. Firstly, there are outages every single day in Australia. There’s significant local outages. Most of them, they happen a couple of times a day. They affect local areas. That is part and parcel of telecommunications in Australia. The difference here was that they were saying there was outages to 10 Triple Zero calls, which is why the advisor in my office called Optus and said: what is this? Has anyone been impacted? And they said, no, there have been no adverse impacts.

EPSTEIN: The reason I asked the question about the previous outages, when Telstra had their problems with Triple Zero, we had to ring your predecessor’s office to tell the last communications minister that it had happened. So, you have known for some time, your government has known for some time, that the companies are rubbish at Triple Zero outages. They just don’t tell you stuff. Isn’t it fair to ask why a better system didn’t come in a long time ago? 

WELLS: We as a government have been investing $1.1 billion to improve resilience and connectivity for all Australians. We were the ones that commissioned the Bean Review, which was the holistic systems-wide independent review into Triple Zero.

EPSTEIN: And that review told you 18 months ago, build a better system. It hasn’t been built yet.

WELLS: Well, we’ve actually delivered the vast majority of the Bean recommendations, and I’ve been fast tracking with the telcos. You’ll recall that I summoned everybody to parliament because some of those things that they were required to do for 1 November, I asked and they agreed to bring forward to do immediately. Let’s be honest here, none of those things would have changed what happened here, which was the epic failure on the part of Optus to comply with the law. We can make the best laws, we can work proactively, we have been doing that. But at the end of the day, a private company is obliged to comply with the Australian law and Optus has epically failed to do that and they will face serious consequences for it, and that is the right thing.

EPSTEIN: You think the government had a great system in place to handle Triple Zero failures when Optus went down? Do you think the government had a great system in place?

WELLS: Absolutely not what I am saying, Raf. I am saying that we were working steadily on the Bean recommendations that are designed to deliver a system. But you would see in that review, it is not the case that that we can guarantee Triple Zero will never fail. What we must do is make sure that when it fails, there are contingencies in place. And the failures here on the part of Optus was that when Triple Zero went down, they didn’t even notice for some time, let alone have contingencies in place that would assist people. So these are, as you heard the CEO of Optus say in the Senate inquiry yesterday, not shying away from the fact there are multiple, I think it was 10 off the top of my head, failures on the part of Optus in this outage. And that is for Optus to account for. And they will be facing significant penalties, but we all just need these two reviews that are currently in place to come back.

EPSTEIN: I appreciate your time this morning. Thanks a lot.

WELLS: Have a good morning.