This is simply a way for petty little wowsers to feel important by destroying whatever remnant of a porn industry Australia has managed to build. It can never be about 'keeping children safe', and they know it, because it can only apply to content hosted on Australian servers. It's a way for amateur authoritarians to get their power fix at someone else's expense.

If you are too young to remember the time before the newly burgeoning internet you can be forgiven for mistaking Australia for a country where 'liberalism' is taken seriously, and where this sort of nonsense would be laughed down. Historically, you'd be wrong. Conservative wowsers have held great sway here for more than a century. People exist in our community, some in positions created specifically for them to flex their morality muscles, whose only purpose in life seems to be to tell other people what is good and decent and proper. This wowserism is supported by a good many voters and politicians across the political spectrum. A tsunami of unstoppable internet filth forced these people to pretend that pornography wasn't that big a deal, simply because they could no longer bludgeon others with their worldview. Not that they didn't try mightily, until the futility of the new order hit home. The people in this story are a resurgence of this sort of idiocy.

If you're of a certain age you remember how difficult it was to get even the tamest of porn. The raciest plastic-wrapped Penthouses at newsagents were less explicit than some of the banner ads you see on gambling websites today. The paper-wrapped under-the-counter stuff that wasn't supposed to exist because it exceeded the highest censorship rating was less explicit than just about any NSFW subreddit. Porn wasn't a 'natural', mainstream thing that people consumed. It was what perverts did, and anyone who wanted spank bank material had to run a gauntlet of newsagent judgement.

That's what these people want again. Their lives are not complete unless they're smothering other people with their version of wholesomeness, and punishing those who transgress. It's the punishment that matters to them: seeing people suffer and damaging the psyches of whole generations of people is all par for the course.