CMA’s President Elizabeth Handsley and Hon CEO Barbara Biggins argue that ‘The Online Safety Act needs to cover more to prevent harm’

Submissions to the review of the Online Safety Act (OSA) have now closed.

CMA has argued that there are a lot more areas that impinge on children’s safety which are not covered by the Act, and should be.

The OSA commenced in January 2022 and introduced a regulatory framework to improve and promote the safety of Australians online. The Act provides broad powers to the online safety regulator, the eSafety Commissioner. 

The review of the OSA is a broad-ranging examination of the effectiveness of the Act, and will consider whether additional protections are needed for harmful online material such as online hate and image-based abuse.

It will consider the need for further protections to address online harms stemming from new and emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (including deepfakes) and algorithms, and whether the existing penalty regime works as an effective deterrent to industry non-compliance.

In its submission, CMA set out its views on specific aspects of the Online Safety Act and the regime it sets up.

However, CMA saw it as important to draw attention to the unfortunately fragmented way in which current Australian law regulates matters which co-exist and are interdependent in the real lives of children and families. These include:

1. the matters that the OSA covers;
2. privacy and data protection;
3. content classification; and
4. public health issues such as overuse and addiction.

The specific aspects of the OSA that need change include:

• inclusion in the OSA of measures to restrict persuasive or addictive design, in view of children’s right to access online services and content, and to do so safely;
• extension of the online content scheme to address all content that could be harmful or disturbing to children – that is, content from PG (Parental Guidance) level up; and
• a stronger focus on the requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (both for its own reasons and as a way of cementing a best-interests principle).

CMA also supports the introduction of a general duty of care as a model which can future-proof the OSA scheme against the development of new risks and harms as technologies grow and change.

CMA’s full submission can be found here. The government OSA review website is here.