Luke is joined by David Coleman, Shadow Minister for Communications / Federal Member for Banks, about child safety online, which he calls one of the defining issues of our era.

Mr Coleman points to an area of technology called age verification, also called age assurance, which is about doing just that: developing technology so that we can more accurately identify the age of users of websites and so that we can help to ensure that kids don’t access material that is bad for them.

He says, ‘Two years ago, the former government led a parliamentary inquiry called Protecting the age of innocence.  That was about the issue of verifying the age of kids online.  We asked the eSafety Commissioner to look into this issue, and she did.  She spent a lot of time, about two years, very carefully looking into this issue of age assurance or age verification online.’

The eSafety Commissioner gave her report to the government in March, but the government only released it last week. One of the key recommendations in that report was to trial age assurance technology, but the government has declined to move forward with it.

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