Keeping kids safe in Albanese’s Australia
Labors proposed social ban for under-16’s may not be the most urgent policy in a nation where one-in-six youth live in poverty.
On the verge of an election season, the first term Albanese government isn’t where it thought it would be nearing the end of three years at the reins. The day after Kamala Harris lost convincingly to Donald Trump, and not too far from an election season himself, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called a press conference to announce a policy that might change the fortunes of his party. With one in six children in poverty, record amounts of homeless and marginalised families living rough across the nation, the PM announced his bipartisan approved keystone policy: his government would ban social media access for children under the age of 16.
There are many ways to keep kids safe. Parents generally start with nutrition, clothing and a roof to provide as a minimum, if they can. Education comes next, and if the financial conditions are right, as in generations before in Australia, parents may look to enrol their children in extracurricular activities, or even go on a holiday. But these factors are not absolute in human organised society, nor are they absolute in today’s modern Australia anymore as they were once before. And this announcement from the Prime Minister was going to do nothing to change that.
The social media ban has been a topic of public debate, and is currently being vigorously queried at Senate Committee hearings, where it appears that every social media user will have to go through age verification process no matter what their age. And as the translucent and nebulous nature of this policy starts to form, now a recognisable policy trademark of this Labor iteration in Canberra, an open letter signed by over 140 Australian academics, experts and civil organisations has been lodged expressing concern that a ban is “is too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively”, echoing anxieties in the wider Australian community.
This blanket ban doesn’t remove any of the harmful content the government is talking about – it just appears to mean that all Australians will need some form of ID to use social media. It kicks the can down the road in terms of when teens see this content, while looking to stop Year 10 students from even using YouTube. - Leonardo Puglisi, Channel 6 News
The Morrison government was pushing for social media laws that would ID users and silence anonymous whistleblowers, and this version presented by Albanese couched in ‘protecting the children’ is a method of doing the same thing. Government tenders are already up for age recognition technology shadows under Labor, the party that helped to devise Robodebt, and this Digital ID back door is all part of a bipartisan push to corral the population through authoritarian digital bottle necks, denying them of sources to independent streams of information that reveal the extent of their inadequacies, rather than governing in our best interest.
As the backfooted government goes about the herculean task of figuring out how it can even implement a digital social media ban on the nations youth, Australians are left wondering why they didn’t put that kind of effort in to implementing a policy that tangibly helps the one in six youth in poverty IRL. While it rearranges the firmament and squares a cosmic circle to justify half-a-trillion dollars for submarines that we aren’t even getting anymore, and glosses over the reality children much younger than the age of the ban can now be locked in prison, ordinary people are wondering why a Labor government can’t raise the rate to protect marginalised families, or why it stomps it feet at the suggestion of a few extra billion dollars to house some of the kids living in cars and tents with parents who want nothing more than to keep their kids safe.
In the meanwhile, a feature or a bug of this policy means a government who broke bread with Lachlan Murdoch in a secret meeting weeks into taking government, can reinforce the fraying legacy narratives of foreign owned media interests at the expense of wider access to independent information. A fraying legacy major party system is unravelling under societal pressures it has not been willing to address, and is attempting to manufacture consent in the youth population by denying access to anything other than the spoon-fed mainstream media diet that currently includes; allowing the economic, environmental, and societal status quo, support for a genocide, and getting ready for an unnecessary war with our largest trading partner.
Are the children who live in poverty, deprived of opportunity, facing discrimination and violence, safe? In the order of priorities that a self-proclaimed noble government applies to the children of the poor and marginalised, where does a social media ban fall on the list? As the Labor party loses lifetime voters faster than it is losing its essence, is a nebulous and reactive social media ban targeted at the nation’s youth really what the country needs right now? Albanese talks of online child safety, but as unprecedented generational issues manifest as the new norm, and an entire new cohort of Australians that have fall below the Henderson poverty line, there are real world issues that re being ignored, and a draconian and proto-authoritarian essence hangs on every word of this disingenuous, disorganised and disjointed policy.
A country full of people that have felt the claustrophobia of lockdowns, the squeeze of interest rate hikes, and the choking of unmitigated price gouging and profit driven inflation, have felt the walls cave in around them. For three years the Australian people has seen a Labor government cram half a trillion dollars of defence spending into their eyeballs, and watched it grant tax dodging foreign multinationals free passage to loot our real ‘commonwealth’, all the while chucking tantrums at anyone who thought their paltry private partnership on a handful of build-to-rent-housing was anything more than a neoliberal band-aid.
Labor had to think smarter and bigger than it has. But new treasurers revealed budgets with no reforms, new environmental ministers delivered new coal and gas mines with no exceptions, and as seen with this awkwardly timed, disproportionately valued and falsely intentioned new policy announcement, we see a government appear to be doing the work of its predecessor to almost a carbon copy, at the expense of everything they claim they stand for, despite everything they were elected to do.
Ultimately, we don’t know if social media companies will end up holding the ID’s of every Australian citizen who is on social media. We don’t know if the Government, who gets is sieve-like cyber systems regularly breached by sophisticated civilian hackers as often as it does by foreign state actors, will be able to fathom the risk of mass identity theft, or if it can even enforce this legislation at all. We don’t know if half of the Channel 6 News team are going to have to hand in their lanyards because they don’t meet the new criteria as young journalists, we don’t even know if the government has listened to the experts, but we do know that regardless of this legislation, one-in six children will still be living in poverty, poorly housed, and poorly considered by this Labor Government.
With an election looming, this announcement could have been about a public housing program, tax reform, or the redistribution of AUKUS funding, but it’s about preparing the digital groundwork for proto-authoritarianism by implementing a nationwide digital ID under the cover of child safety. Those in power cannot afford to have the youth detached from their vapid agenda, and require our kids to be more aligned with a foreign inspired narrative that needs them to be accepting of their impinging neo-Dickensianism, and ready for someone else’s war. An entire generation of youth already distrusting authority in unprecedented ways, will feel marginalised by a government that seems more interested in turning them into obedient machines, rather than helping them out of a generational mess that they have helped to cause.
Good essay. It must be apparent to anyone under forty that australian politics is not a contest between two sides. They are the same side and they are a class. And that class has to be destroyed if young people , other than offspring of the existing rich, are to have a viable future, other than as cannon fodder in an American sacrificial peripheral army. The lnp promotes straight up fascists, we know that. The alp leadership and its flunkey lickspittle apparatus are somewhat worse in that they knowingly smooth the way for the coming dystopia while preventing the possibility of any effective opposition to it.
In the future these traitors can do time picking fruit and living in basic huts with basic facilities. They have no intellectual abilities other than a talent for elaborate deceit and personal opportunistic advancement. Their class is entirely useless. They truly are history’s deadweight and their treachery must be fully exposed.
Great work Joel. The government doesn’t care about the kids being torn apart in Palestine so I take his current idea with a grain of salt. Far more inclined to think it’s about collecting information about who uses social media and limiting information .