RODNEY HIDE: National's Online Safety Bill is a Trojan Horse

In 1990 I travelled the country warning landowners about the Resource Management Bill. It was sold as a simpler, more permissive system. Farmers welcomed it. The old regime of overlapping statutes would be replaced by a single, principles-based framework that would make life easier.

One night, in frustration, I told a meeting that the bill would eventually mean the government dictating the colour of your woolshed and requiring you to pay local Māori for the spirits to go away. The room went quiet. I left thinking I had overreached. The farmers clearly thought I was unhinged. None of us imagined those specific outcomes would arrive.

They did. And worse followed. What began as a liberating reform of planning law became a comprehensive shift in the philosophy of property rights. Discretion expanded. Principles replaced bright-line rules. New parties gained standing. The practical result was more control, more cost, and less certainty for the people who actually own and work the land.

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill follows the same pattern.

And it is the same National Party trying to pass this bill.

It is presented as a narrow, popular measure: keep under-16s off high-risk social media, force platforms to verify age, and require child-safety risk assessments. No one wants children exposed to grooming, relentless cyberbullying, or addictive design. The political packaging is careful. Parents are not penalised. The targets are large technology companies. The language is about protecting the vulnerable.

Yet the underlying change is philosophical. Responsibility for a cultural and parental problem is transferred to platforms and a new state regulator. “Harm” is left sufficiently elastic that it can expand. Risk assessments and compliance duties create ongoing leverage. Once the institutional machinery exists, the definition of safety rarely stays fixed at its original boundary.

In five years it is entirely realistic that the same regulator, or the platforms responding to its incentives, will treat certain political or religious advocacy as a child-safety risk. Disagreement with gender ideology is already routinely labelled harmful in other jurisdictions. An organisation such as Family First, which holds traditional views on sex and marriage, sits squarely in that contested zone. The regulator will not need an explicit power to “ban transphobia.” It will only need to signal that hosting particular content elevates a platform’s risk profile. Commercial compliance will do the rest.

The Charities Registration Board removed Family First from its register. It kept Greenpeace and the Waipareira Trust. When a government official holds the power to decide what counts as “public benefit,” “education,” “balance” and “respect,” there is ample room for political judgement. The same dynamic will apply to the new online safety regulator.

Family First has already been shut out of mainstream media; even its advertisements are declined. It has responded by building a substantial presence on social media. The online regulator will be able to address that with little more than an email to Meta. We have seen the pattern before. During the Covid years, high-profile Facebook accounts such as the New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out on Science / New Zealand Health Forum, which supported tens of thousands of New Zealanders, were shut down with an email from official channels.

The machinery being created now will make that process routine rather than exceptional.

This is how these shifts work. The initial proposal is limited and hard to oppose. The enforcement body is created. The concepts of harm and safety are applied more broadly over time. What was dismissed as alarmism in 1989 became ordinary administrative practice. The same dynamic is visible here.

The Resource Management Act did not deliver the simpler system that was promised. It delivered an enduring expansion of regulatory discretion over private property until the concdpt exists in namd only. The Online Safety Bill risks delivering an enduring expansion of regulatory and platform control over speech, anonymity, and the boundaries of acceptable opinion, all under the banner of child protection.

The farmers in that 1989 meeting thought the extreme examples were absurd. They were not. The question now is whether we recognise the same pattern while there is still time to constrain it.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader