Sexting Laws in Australia: The Age Thresholds, Offences and Defences State by State

Sexting laws in Australia run through child exploitation material offences that use three different age thresholds across the states and territories, and only three of the eight, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, give a young person any statutory defence for sharing a sexual image of themselves or a similarly aged partner.

Why the age threshold is not the same everywhere

Every Australian state and territory, and the Commonwealth, makes it an offence to produce, possess or share sexual material depicting a child. What counts as a "child" for that offence is not one number.

The Commonwealth Criminal Code, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT all set the threshold at under 18. Queensland and Western Australia set it at under 16. South Australia sets it at under 17, the only jurisdiction that does.

South Australia's under-17 figure is not an isolated choice: the state's own age of consent for lawful sexual intercourse is also 17, the only Australian jurisdiction where it is not 16, and a neighbouring provision in the same part of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act sets the same age for a related offence. That internal consistency is offered as context, not as a confirmed statement of the drafters' intent.

Queensland's threshold carries an extra feature worth flagging: the offence turns on a person who is, or apparently is, under 16, so an apparent-age finding is independently enough. The prosecution does not have to prove the depicted person's real age.

The Northern Territory mostly uses under 18, chained through the Criminal Code's general definitions of "adult" (18 or over) and "child" (not an adult), but one narrower offence in the same part of the Code, publishing an indecent article, has a sub-limb that separately uses 16. Treating "the NT uses 18" as true for every offence in that part of the Code would be wrong about that one sub-limb.

Western Australia's Criminal Code sets the child exploitation material threshold at under 16, but a different Act, the one that governs sex offender registration, defines "child" (meaning the offender, not the depicted person) as under 18 for deciding who gets access to the more protective juvenile reporting process. The two numbers serve two different roles and are easy to conflate.

The Commonwealth layer: Criminal Code offences and the consent gate

Independently of any state offence, the Commonwealth Criminal Code reaches conduct carried out using a carriage service, in practice any conduct involving a phone or the internet.

Section 474.22 makes it an offence to access, transmit, make available, publish, distribute, advertise, promote or solicit child abuse material using a carriage service, punishable by up to 15 years' imprisonment. Sections 474.22A (possession) and 474.23 (possession or production with intent) carry the same 15-year maximum. Section 474.23A, aimed at anyone who creates, maintains or moderates an online service intending it be used to commit those offences, carries the highest base penalty in the group: up to 20 years. Section 474.24A, an aggravated offence for repeat conduct across three or more separate occasions involving two or more people, carries up to 30 years.

The material has to meet the "child abuse material" definition in section 473.1, which anchors every limb to a person who is, or appears to be, under 18, alongside a "reasonable persons... offensive" community-standards test in section 473.4. That test asks whether the material itself has redeeming literary, artistic, educational, medical, legal or scientific character. It is not a relationship or consent test, and it gives no foothold for a consensual, same-age sexting scenario.

Section 474.24 sets out the complete list of defences to these offences: a public-benefit purpose connected to law enforcement or the administration of justice, acting as a law enforcement or intelligence officer, or good-faith assistance to the eSafety Commissioner or content-filtering work. None of the three has an age, relationship or consent element, and none realistically covers two teenagers exchanging a photo they both agreed to.

The one Commonwealth-level provision that does turn on a young person's age is section 474.24C, and it is not a defence. It requires the Attorney-General's consent before proceedings for any of these offences can be commenced against a defendant who was under 18 at the time of the alleged conduct. A person can still be arrested, charged or remanded before that consent is obtained; the provision blocks the case from proceeding to prosecution without a specific ministerial-level check, it does not make the underlying conduct lawful.

eSafety Commissioner: four schemes, and the one that actually applies

The Online Safety Act 2021 gives the eSafety Commissioner four separate complaint and removal schemes, not the two, a child cyberbullying scheme and an adult scheme, that are sometimes assumed. A cyberbullying scheme covers material targeted at an Australian child; a separate adult cyber-abuse scheme covers material targeted at an Australian adult; an online content scheme covers illegal or Refused Classification content generally, which is the route that leads toward an AFP referral for outright child abuse material; and a fourth scheme, for non-consensual sharing of intimate images, carries no age restriction in its own statutory definitions at all.

For a sexting image involving a young person, the operative pathway is usually that fourth scheme, image-based abuse, because the harm being reported is a specific intimate image shared without consent, and the scheme covers that regardless of the depicted person's age. eSafety's own Report image-based abuse page states a parent or guardian can report on behalf of a child under 16; a 16 or 17 year old is expected to report themselves.

eSafety's own consumer guidance is blunt about the underlying legal risk. Its Sexting and sending nudes page tells young readers: that young people may be at risk of criminal charges even where both are young and both agreed That is eSafety's own plain-language acknowledgement that consent and a shared age do not neutralise the exposure described above.

For removal help, eSafety points people 18 or older to StopNCII.org, and people who were under 18 in the image to NCMEC's Take It Down tool, both hash-matching prevention services separate from eSafety's own statutory removal-notice power.

Adult sexting is lawful. Sharing it without consent is a different offence.

Everything above concerns material depicting a person under the relevant state's or the Commonwealth's child age threshold. Sexting between consenting adults, sending and keeping a sexual image with the other person's agreement, is lawful.

Sharing an adult's intimate image without consent is a distinct set of offences. The Commonwealth Criminal Code addresses it separately at sections 474.17A (up to 6 years, and expressly covering deepfakes) and 474.17AA (an aggravated version, up to 7 years), and every state and territory has its own non-consensual intimate-image law. The full state-by-state position, including which states also criminalise creating a non-consensual image and not just sharing it, is covered on the deepfake and intimate image laws page, which this page defers to rather than repeating.

Age threshold, offence, defence and registration, jurisdiction by jurisdiction

The table below summarises the position confirmed by primary sources for each jurisdiction. "Unverified" means the underlying government source could not be reached in this research, not that the answer is known to be no.

What each state and territory covers, in more depth

New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania each have real, if differently shaped, statutory protection for a young person's own image, and each is genuinely more complicated than a one-line summary. The other five states and territories have no statutory defence at all, so their pages focus on the offence, the penalty, and the registration position where it could be verified.

• New South Wales: a self-image defence and a peer-possession exception, with a real gap on forwarding a peer's own image to someone else.
• Victoria: the richest set of exceptions in the country, six separate provisions with different scope and different distribution limits.
• Tasmania: a narrow defence that covers production, possession and access, never distribution, and that also depends on the underlying activity independently qualifying for Tasmania's own close-in-age rule.
• Queensland: the lowest age threshold in the country and no statutory defence.
• Western Australia: the same low age threshold as Queensland and no statutory defence, but a genuinely protective juvenile registration process.
• South Australia: the outlier age threshold, and a peer defence that exists in the Criminal Law Consolidation Act but does not reach the child exploitation material offences.
• Northern Territory: under 18 for the core offence, with a separate under-16 sub-limb for a different offence that is easy to conflate with it.
• ACT: no statutory defence, but the most detailed statutory path off the register of any jurisdiction surveyed here.

Each of the eight pages also names the state's own non-consensual intimate-image offence and links back to the deepfake and intimate image laws page for the adult non-consent position, and covers doxxing and the social media minimum age rules only where relevant to how an image ends up circulating in the first place.

If police contact you or your child

What this page can say is what the sources above establish: a young person's own image can fall within a criminal offence in every jurisdiction covered here, a statutory defence exists in only three of the eight, and even where no defence applies, prosecutorial discretion and, where verified, a court's registration discretion still sit between an offence on the books and an actual conviction or a lifelong consequence.

If police want to speak to a young person about a sexting matter, the same rights that apply to any police contact in Australia apply here: the right to ask why they are being spoken to, the right to have a parent, guardian or support person present, and the right to get legal advice before answering questions. Our guide to police rights and cautions in Australia covers what those rights actually are, state by state, and is the page to read before, not after, a young person speaks to police about an image.