The government is being pretty coy about the details, so most of the article is necessarily conjecture.
How will your age be verified?
The government's legislation won't specify the technical method for proving a person's age.
Several options are on the table, including providing ID and biometrics such as face scanning.
The government's currently running an age assurance trial to assess all the methods, and it's scheduled to continue into 2025.
Based on the results of that trial, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant will make recommendations to platforms.
It's possible that Australians will be asked to provide their IDs or biometric data directly to social media companies in order to use their platforms, but that's not guaranteed.
Many of the big players, including Meta, have instead argued for the age verification onus to be placed on app stores, rather than individual platforms, as that would mean proving your age once — rather than every time you sign up to a platform.
It's also possible that a third-party company that specialises in ID verification will act as a go-between between users and social media platforms.
No matter which model is adopted, the prime minister has said privacy protections will be introduced to cover any data people end up providing.
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The article does not explain the primary design purpose of a VPN -- providing an encrypted tunnel into or between two private subnets.
For example, your home subnet is typically all 192.168.nnn.nnn addresses -- a class of addresses which the wider internet does not route, and which your router/modem does not allow the wider internet to access unless explicitly permitted.
Say you have a NAS on your home network, and you want to access it from your laptop while at a cafe; you could set up a VPN between your laptop and your home router, and it can make your home network appear as your local network to your laptop, giving you access to your NAS.
Or between two office locations of a business -- their database servers, accounting systems, printers, etc can all be freely accessible between offices without being exposed to the wider internet.