They predicted it and were trying to set expectations 6 months ago:

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said work to implement the laws was on track but people should not expect that all under-16s would be scrubbed from social media as soon as the ban was in place.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-24/esafety-commissioner-tempers-expectations-social-media-ban/105454838

"This legislation does not give us a mandate to cut the Coral Cable or deplatform social media apps on stores," she told the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.

"Nor should we create expectations that every child's social media account will magically disappear overnight."

In her address, she characterised the controversial laws as a social media "delay" rather than an outright ban, despite its blanket application for all Australians under the age of 16 — even if they already own an account or have parental consent.

Let’s ban something for the age group that has for generations shown that outlawing anything makes it more interesting for them.

I mean Aussies really generally good at digging shit out of the ground and making money off it. Electing progressive leaders or forming sensible policies that look further than the next 2 weeks? Not so much.

That’s actually much better than what they’re currently doing. If all you had to do was verify with your phone that you are >16 it would mean that each social media app and then every other site that the government demands do age verification doesn’t need to verify you. It means you only verify once, on your device.

Unfortunately that’s why they’ll never do it - the government wants to ram through a universal government digital ID, and they do it by making laws that make it increasingly hard for all the companies to meet the criteria, so the government can then swoop in and give their “solution”.

At the device level is a much better place to put it. It's a place that could actually work, and it's a place where it's much easier to do it in a privacy-preserving way.

The best solution would be to use parental controls. A lot of operating systems already have something along those lines, but they've tended to not be very good. If the law instead required that OSes supported parental controls where the parent can set the child's age, and then apps and websites have to respect that, via an operating system API (with websites accessing a browser API, with the browser calling the OS's API), that would remove any privacy concerns, because the only "verification" is the parent.

Or there's this option, which preserves privacy along with a more robust age verification. Somebody (preferably the government, rather than a private company) has to do official age verification, once, and that would then get stored by your device and could be reused in a way that can't be traced on different sites. The age verifier can't see which sites you use your verification on. The sites can't learn anything about you other than "yes, this person is old enough".

The government expected this, it's not a flat ban, if anything the law is entirely reasonable

It’s only age-restricted social media platforms that face penalties if they fail to take reasonable steps to stop under-16s creating or having accounts.