Transcript - 2CC Breakfast - 17 September 2025

Melissa McIntosh MP
Shadow Minister for Communications
Shadow Minister for Women
Federal Member for Lindsay

17 September 2025

EO&E …

Interview

2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo

Topics: Social media age minimum; digital ID; Communications sovereignty; data centres; satellites. 

Stephen Cenatiempo

 Melissa McIntosh is the Shadow Minister for Communication, joins us now. Melissa, good morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning.

Stephen Cenatiempo

There's a lot of this is, as you know, and you and I discussed this last time we spoke, that I think this is the wrong way to go about this and there are better ways to do it. But most experts looking at this in the wake of the comments by the eSafety Commissioner tomorrow now have even more concerns than they might have had before the legislation was first passed.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, I raised these concerns with the eSafety Commissioner. I was granted a meeting last week, and I used that opportunity to question her powers and I asked her specifically if, when this is legislation went through, we didn't agree to this. Certainly didn't. But yesterday in the report, it seems to be that if a platform, you know, uses certain measures, can't verify age of someone, they could get to a point down the track. Not first up, but down the track where digital ID may be used.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yeah.

Melissa McIntosh

And that is a big issue. And I asked the eSafety Commissioner and she said she did have those powers, but she doesn't intend to use them. Well, that’s not good enough.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Well, which, yeah, no exactly. But one of the things that I, and one expert has said that they're talking about the - yeah, everybody is going to have to be able to be age verified because to determine that you're under 16, well, you have to first determine that you're over 16 too, don't you? So, but there was one doctor at, well, a professor at a university. He had said this layered approach actually exponentially multiplies attack surfaces. So, whilst we think we're protecting kids online, we're opening them up to a broader lack of safety, for lack of a better way of putting it.

Melissa McIntosh

Well, there's various components to that and this is the hard bit because we do want to protect our kids. So, you don't want to be ever sounding like it doesn't matter because this is a really important issue.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yeah.

Melissa McIntosh

But it's when, like you said, when there might be unforeseen consequences. So, one of those as well is around YouTube. So, when you kids can't, you know, have an account anymore. They're freely watching YouTube without an account, which is actually more unsafe than having an account and having some of those protections in place, which I've never really understood. And I had big conversations with YouTube, my team did as well, and we were working towards perhaps having parental controls until year 16. So, it's in, it's a parent's responsibility.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yes.

Melissa McIntosh

But all that doesn't seem to matter that we've, you know, outside as well. We did take this to the election, as I've said to you, it was Peter Dutton policy, but the implementation of this leaves so as you said in your opening, there's so many more questions and answers right now, and December 10 isn't that far away.

Stephen Cenatiempo

But even.

Melissa McIntosh

I don’t want.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Sorry, go ahead.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, I was just saying I don't want it to get to a stage where adults are so fed up with being policed online, that the intent of protecting our kids just sort of gets pushed aside.

Stephen Cenatiempo

But it's interesting that you raise parental controls, because that's where I've gone with this, is let parents decide what their kids can and can't see online. And there are tools that the government could actually, you know, by changing a ACCC regulation, they could actually let parents do that today. But it's almost like - and this expert again has said that parental rights are being enforced through parental removal, though that doesn't make any sense at all.

Melissa McIntosh

There's risk in that as well, when people may think that everything is sorted because there's a ban in place. And also the, you know, the fact that many people don't - we might know it's happening because we are talking about it so much, but there's the parents that have lost their children, told me they've visiting schools as part of the work they do to prevent this from happening to other kids. And parents, kids, teachers, the majority of people out there don't know it's happening. So, you know, I think there is a real risk of things falling through. You know, maybe now that it looks like, you know, reasonable measures doesn't mean you need to check every kid. What does that mean? We go through the data of everyone, cycle through and sees under 16, like, are people going to get missed? I don't – it’s not clear.

Stephen Cenatiempo

But even the process - for mine was a problem. Even, let's for the sake of argument, say that this legislation is a hundred percent correct, but even the process of arriving at it was let's legislate first and then determine the feasibility of the legislation afterwards. I mean, that should have been a red flag, I would've thought.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, you are right. In some regards, I guess there was a bit of haste in us having that as a policy going into the election and the government sort of playing catch up and it became an election policy, but it was up to them to set the deadline for this. So, they’ve rushed through their age verification, they've rushed through the regulatory guidance and the rules and, you know, we want things to work for kids. But I don't know, there's big question marks.

Stephen Cenatiempo

But the - even the verifiability about some of the comments, like the, the eSafety Commissioner says that, yeah, this is going to be world leading technology, and the EU is going to be keeping an eye on us closely to maybe copy our legislation. Well, my understanding is that the EU has been working on this for over a year, but using Australian experts that we won't talk to to develop their policy. So, I don't know how nation - how world leading we are actually going be.

Melissa McIntosh

Well, we don't want to be world leading in messing it up and then not having any protections in place for our kids. And that's the concern right now. And my - I just want to flag, my other big concern is if we do go to digital ID. What happens to people's data? You know, the majority of personal data gets stored offshore right now.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yeah.

Melissa McIntosh

And this is another big issue I have around our sovereignty. If it's not being stored in Australia. What rights do Australians have over the information when it's been stored on foreign shores?

Stephen Cenatiempo

Which raises a broader issue because if we were to have our own storage capabilities here in Australia, we don't have the energy capacity for it.

Melissa McIntosh

That's right. And one data centre is - uses up as much energy as around 50,000 homes.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yeah.

Melissa McIntosh

It's a big sovereign risk that we have so much data offshore, but we do need power. And that comes into the whole debate. You can't just be reliant on renewables. Data centres use a mix, so they're into the local grid. They're even using diesel. And in some countries, they're now looking at small modular nuclear reactors. The big tech companies in are looking at investing in those. So, we do need to have a pragmatic energy policy in this country to be able to have the sovereignty to keep our data on shore. And it's not just about the data centres; it's about this new and emerging AI and keeping information here about Australians. We're currently giving our AI brain away to once again big foreign tech companies, and this is a very common theme across the board, including our satellites in our skies for our telecommunications and I just don't think we're even really talking about this enough right now, and Australians don't understand because we're not discussing it.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Particularly given that we have such a vibrant satellite industry here in Australia, particularly here in Canberra. You know, there is the opportunity for us to have that sovereign capability, but I just find it extraordinary that when you talk about the major tech companies using these small modular reactors to power their own facilities. I mean, what a novel approach, that you can actually have enough power on site to do what you need to do. And the jobs and the investment that that would generate here in Australia would be huge.

Melissa McIntosh

It would be, but we're getting tripped up around obviously nuclear and, you know, we'd need to lift the ban on nuclear power here, but we really have to have these you know, grown up debates now about where we want to go as a country and we are at a fork in the road. You know, our big international tech giants are ruling over our data. They have - they own the satellites in our skies. They're controlling the information we receive, and we need to start prioritising our nation. And we need to have a debate around how we're going to power those data centres. Pragmatic energy policy, and let's start prioritising Australians, citizens and our nation's future first.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Wouldn't that be a novel approach? Melissa, really good to talk to you. Thanks for your time this morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Thank you so much.