Opposition leader Peter Dutton says a future Coalition government will raise the minimum age for social media to 16

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has pledged to raise the minimum age for social media to 16 and promised a future Coalition government would do so within 100 days of taking office. It follows this mastheads campaign on the issue.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has pledged to raise the minimum age for social media to 16 and promised a future Coalition government will introduce the “sensible” measure within 100 days of taking office.

Mr Dutton said he could not see any arguments against moving to protect young Australian kids from online harms and help parents enforce the rules.

“I would put it at the top of my list for the first 100 days in government, so within the first three months we would introduce it, and it reflects the community values and where the view is for the vast majority of Australians at the moment,” he told Nova on Wednesday.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that particularly for young children where you’ve got impressionable minds, and particularly when the evidence is so obvious that the self-harm and the pressure that comes on young people through sharing of images, that’s the reality of their life right now and we should be doing everything we can to support them.”

News Corp Australia’s Let Them Be Kids campaign has been calling for the minimum age for social media to be raised to 16 based on advice from medical, child and mental health experts.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has pledged to raise the minimum age for social media. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Mr Dutton said this would give concerned parents more “power in the equation” to enforce measures with their children.

“It’s the case that we need to have just a sensible, moderate approach, nobody’s saying ban the internet or any of that sort of nonsense, it is about allowing parents to have that conversation,” he said.

Australian children would not be able to use social media until they turned 16 under a future Coalition government. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“It’s tough for parents because every kid in the class has got it so why haven’t I, but if you introduce the law and you normalise that as being the accepted norm.”

Mr Dutton said he had formed the view intervention was required to protect younger children online, “not just as a dad” but also from his pre-political career as a police officer.

“I worked in the sex offender and other areas where, it was pre-internet, but it was an area where you saw people exposed to the worst element of society and how they coped with that,” he said.

“But now it’s on an industrial scale in terms of the content that young kids are subject to.

“We wouldn’t in the real world allow our kids to go into a park or into a shopping centre just to hangout with any adult that came by, would read anything put in front of them, without us knowing what it was.”

Parents and experts recently travelled to Canberra to campaign for greater protections for young Australians accessing social media. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Mr Dutton said social media was the way his family stayed connected, but when his children were younger he was “pretty strict” about what they had access to, particularly about their friendship groups online.

“It’s a tough conversation because it’s the way that kids communicate with their own friendship groups, they want privacy, you’re blind to any of that, so there’s a very different path that some kids can take as a result of being exposed to it,” he said.

It comes as a contingent of parents and experts travelled to Parliament House in Canberra last week to meet with politicians to discuss their concerns about social media.

The group from around Australia shared their experiences of losing children to suicide, struggling with eating disorders and suffering mental health harms they say can directly be traced to social media.

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