This legislation left it entirely up to the service providers to determine implementation, and so far they don't seem particularly motivated to disrupt my usage by asking me to prove my age.

My suspicion is that fairly simple heuristics of age estimation, combined with social graph inspection, are probably enough to completely disrupt the network effects of "social media" for kids, and achieve the stated objectives well enough that I never have to.

Maybe it turns out that I'm wrong, but why even risk it? If the true policy goal is extending mass-surveillance, why waste so much political capital on such a round-about approach which might yield nothing, or even set back your existing capabilities.

MyID (myid.gov.au) already exists, and could easily have been mandated, or "recommended", or even offered as a means of age verification now. But it wasn't.