Australian governments have repeatedly ducked binding duties of care for children — both Morrison and Albanese administrations invoked duty-of-care rhetoric but declined to accept enforceable legal obligations, a stance that weakens legal incentives for platforms to invest in child-protective design and safety features.

Main Finding

Both the Morrison Coalition (2019–2022) and the Albanese Labor (2022– ) governments consistently resisted accepting binding legal duties of care to protect children from foreseeable harms—despite invoking the duty of care principle rhetorically. The Morrison government rejected a Federal Court finding that it owed a “novel duty of care” to children to prevent climate-change harms; the Labor government rejected a 2023 private members’ bill that would have imposed a duty of care to prevent harm to children; and, a year later, the same Labor government claimed it was applying the duty of care while introducing the Online Safety Amendment Bill 2024 (which bans children under 16 from social media) in a way that avoids creating open-ended, binding legal obligations. The article argues these actions reflect an overriding political commitment to avoiding enforceable legal duties to protect children from foreseeable harms.

Key Points

• The duty of care principle has become central in recent Australian litigation and policy debates about harms to children (including climate-related harms and online harms).
• A Federal Court ruling that recognized a novel governmental duty of care to children to prevent climate-change harms was rejected by the Morrison government.
• The Albanese government declined to support a 2023 private members’ bill that would have imposed a statutory duty of care to prevent child harms.
• In 2024 the Labor government presented the Online Safety Amendment Bill as applying a duty of care (and used it to justify a ban on under-16s using social media) while structuring the bill to limit exposure to binding legal obligations and open-ended liabilities.
• Despite different political brands and stated aims, both governments prioritized avoiding legal rules that would create binding, enforceable duties to prevent foreseeable harms to children.

Data & Methods

• Sources: publicly available materials (court judgments, government statements and explanatory memoranda, bills and parliamentary debate records, press releases), and relevant scholarly literature on duty of care, administrative law, and child-protection policy.
• Methods: doctrinal and policy analysis of litigation outcomes and legislative materials; chronological and comparative tracing of government responses across the Morrison and Albanese administrations; synthesis of legal text, political statements, and secondary academic commentary to assess the substantive and strategic effect of government actions.
• Analytical focus: (1) whether and how governments accepted or rejected judicially articulated duties of care; (2) how legislative proposals and bills framed and operationalized (or avoided) duties; (3) political and institutional rationales for resisting binding obligations.

Implications for AI Economics

• Regulatory credibility and investment incentives: Governments’ reluctance to accept binding duties of care reduces the legal liability risk for platform and AI firms. That can dampen private-sector incentives to invest in child-protective design changes or costly safety features (recommender system constraints, age-verification, content filtering), because the credible threat of ex post legal liability is weaker.
• Externalities and market failure persistence: Avoiding enforceable duties leaves negative externalities (harms to children from algorithmic amplification, targeted content, or data-driven grooming) largely uninternalized. Economic models that rely on liability or statutory duties to internalize harm costs will overestimate private incentives to mitigate harms under current political choices.
• Choice of regulatory instruments matters economically: Age-based bans and administrative rules (e.g., blanket platform restrictions or reporting requirements) shift costs and compliance strategies differently than enforceable duties. Age bans may reduce user base and ad revenues but be easier to administer; duties of care could impose continuous compliance costs and higher monitoring/investment in algorithmic safety. Firms will optimize around the chosen instrument, affecting innovation paths (safer-by-design investments vs gaming of non-binding standards).
• Policy uncertainty and strategic behavior: Frequent rhetorical invocation of duty-of-care language without corresponding legal obligations creates regulatory ambiguity. Firms face uncertain future liabilities, leading to precautionary hoarding of resources or defensive innovation (e.g., geo-blocking, migration to jurisdictions with clearer rules), and could incentivize lobbying to shape weak, industry-friendly “duty” standards.
• Enforcement and compliance economics: Non-binding or narrow statutory measures place more weight on administrative enforcement and political discretion, increasing compliance costs related to government procedures (notifications, audits) and raising the economic value of regulatory capture. Clear duties with judicial enforceability would reallocate enforcement effort toward civil litigation and private monitoring.
• International and competitive implications: Domestic avoidance of binding duties may make the Australian market more attractive for lower-cost, less-regulated AI deployments (platform features that would be costly under stringent duty regimes). Conversely, divergence from jurisdictions that adopt enforceable duties (EU, some U.S. proposals) creates cross-border compliance costs for multinational platforms and raises questions about regulatory arbitrage.
• Welfare trade-offs and distributional effects: Economically, the decision to avoid binding duties is a policy choice trading off short-term political/administrative convenience and lower costs for platforms against long-term welfare losses from unmitigated harms to children. Models of social welfare that incorporate child harm externalities will favor stronger, binding interventions to correct market failures.

Overall, for AI economics research and policy design, the article highlights that political choices about accepting or avoiding binding duties of care crucially shape firms’ incentives, the effectiveness of regulatory instruments, and the likely economic distribution of harms and compliance costs. Analysts should model not just the form of regulated obligations, but the political credibility of their enforcement and the empirical effects on firm behavior and societal welfare.