She once admitted her own Insta weakness. Now she’s banning social media for kids

Michelle Rowland once confessed she had a vice. It was “excessive online clothes shopping”, Rowland told this masthead in 2021, when she was Labor’s communications spokeswoman. “I blame Instagram.”

Now the communications minister with responsibility for regulating social media, Rowland is doing something to curb its influence. The politician known for having such a lawyerly, cautious approach that she reads from notes even in private meetings has taken the audacious step of banning under 16s from social media.

The move has outraged technology giants and generated headlines around the world. “We would like that something very similar could be put in place, enforced in Europe,” French Education Minister Anne Genetet said. “We absolutely urgently need something to be put in place.”

Michelle Rowland has strong backroom relationships. But they have not been enough to advance major parts of the government’s agenda that she is overseeing.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

That Australia is out ahead of any other country is all the more striking because two of Rowland’s other priorities – a bill to ban lies online and a crackdown on gambling ads – are dead or dying. Rowland’s critics blame the minister for that.

“Minister Rowland seems to operate under the belief that she doesn’t have to bring anyone along with her on her legislation and policies,” Greens communications spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young says. “For the communications minister, she’s not a great communicator.”

But the wooden exterior belies a different Rowland. Behind the closed doors of the Labor Party, colleagues know her as funny (the type of minister who leaves odd snacks on staff desks), sharp and influential.

Rowland, they say, is in her dream job. She is the first sitting MP since Paul Keating to serve as NSW party president, a role in which she has helped keep internal NSW Labor dramas off the front page as the state branch won an election after more than a decade in opposition.

The former communications and regulatory lawyer, who worked with star lawyer Danny Gilbert and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb, cares about her portfolio and knows it inside out.

Growing up in the western Sydney electorate of Greenway that she represents, Rowland rose through the ranks of Young Labor before marrying Michael Chaaya, a corporate lawyer who could not speak English when he started school in Mount Druitt. The pair regularly attend a Maronite church together, grounding her views in favour of religious freedom and against antisemitism.

In 2009, Rowland was a senior lawyer at Gilbert+Tobin when an electoral redistribution flipped Greenway from a safe Liberal seat to a winnable prospect for Labor. Rowland won it the next year and began a steady rise through the party that has won her fans in Labor’s most senior ranks.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers secured her a position on the powerful cabinet expenditure review committee that signs off on government spending – a rarity for a communications minister.

“She is very smart, very thorough and very tough,” one senior minister says. “She has a lawyer’s sense of the detail and a marginal member’s sense of the politics, and that makes her very influential.”

And she has personal bonds, too. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rates not only her political judgment as a voice from suburban Labor comfortable on Sky News, but also her health advice.

He followed Rowland’s diet (she lost about 40 kilograms – roughly half her body weight – on the strict meal-prepping plan in 2020 and still gets up at 4.30am for Pilates) to lose weight before the 2022 election, declaring it made him “match fit”.

Yet, those backroom relationships have not been enough to advance major parts of the government’s agenda that Rowland is overseeing in a portfolio that deals with politically influential organisations such as media companies and sporting codes.

On some other issues, such as modernising Australia Post, updating rules to preserve major sport on free-to-air TV, reshaping the National Broadband Network, and letting users find broadcast stations on smart TVs, Rowland has confronted issues that her Coalition predecessors left alone.

But rules to require more Australian content on streaming services such as Netflix, which sit both in Rowland’s patch and the arts portfolio, are nowhere to be seen.

Labor’s anti-misinformation bill, which would have let the media regulator pressure social media companies to take down falsehoods circulating online, attracted a chorus of critics, from human rights groups to religious institutions. Intended to prevent conspiracy theories about events such as terrorist attacks, it left experts baffled about who would determine what was true and how. Rowland abandoned her second attempt to pass the law late last month.

Gambling reform has fared scarcely better. More than a year after the late Labor MP Peta Murphy delivered bipartisan recommendations from a parliamentary committee for a blanket ban on gambling advertising, no laws have been introduced and a government commitment to respond by the end of this year has been all but abandoned. Anti-gambling advocates have accused the government of betraying Murphy’s memory.

That is despite Rowland privately briefing interested parties on a full digital ban on gambling ads online and a cap on those airing on television, less than the proposal Murphy backed, but further than the sports, gambling and media sectors wanted and beyond what any previous government has floated.

But Rowland has done little to convince the public of the significance of the reforms. In press conferences, Rowland is disciplined to the point of appearing stilted. Those who have spoken with her in private say her habit of referring to notes, which is unusual for a politician but more common in the law, has the same effect. It is, one former minister says, an “insult to the craft”.

Rowland’s allies admit her attitude towards the gambling sector changed after this masthead reported in February 2023 that she had received donations and a Rockpool dinner from Sportsbet before the 2022 federal election, leading to crossbench calls for her resignation.

Teal MPs and anti-gambling advocates portrayed Rowland as captured by corporate interests. That perception has meant her proposed set of policies, which would hurt media companies and sporting codes’ finances, won no friends.

“The reputational damage done by the Sportsbet stuff meant she was always on the back foot on the gambling issue,” one gambling industry source says. “People like [Alliance for Gambling Reform chief advocate] Tim Costello were always going to paint her as weak if she ended up anywhere other than a full blanket ban.”

With the prime minister publicly suggesting poker machines are a greater problem and privately convinced there is little electoral benefit in prosecuting the crackdown, Rowland’s problem is unlikely to go away unless she can muster the rhetoric to convince the public that a middle path works.

That more charismatic Rowland has peeked through before. Asked her favourite TV show in that 2021 Q&A with this masthead, Rowland named the Netflix show Vikings. It’s full of “heavily tattooed Nordic beefcakes in sweaty battle scenes”, she said. “I’m only human.”

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