Australian Social Media Ban for Under 16s and State Intervention in Norms

 I want to keep this brief because the emotion that motivates me is annoyance. 

Australia passed a world first piece of legislation that banned people under 16 from having social media accounts. 

The question as to what will happen if kids get around the enforcement of this ban has been asked and answered, and then, here comes the annoying part - asked again.

Growing up in Ballarat I never touched a cigarette, even though the first photo of me ever tagged on facebook is one in which I have a cigarette in each nostril and earhole, an act of drunken disrespect where I destroyed about $5 of a friend's property. But I knew of Poony the milkbar/newsagent owner who was known to sell cigarettes to children. 

I knew smokers who were 13, and my education that had us role play "peer-pressure" scenarios where I would be offered cigarettes and we had to learn how to say "no" pathetic as they were, were also overkill because it isn't easy to get a 13 year old to share cigarettes, probably because they are neither cheap nor easy to obtain.

Other realities were acknowledged, probably unsanctioned by our education system, but it was useful for me at least, and perhaps an introduction into socioeconomic realities when in a moment of candour Mr. Martin on a hunch asked Erin, an 11 or 12 year old classmate of mine, if her parents had given her cigarettes and Erin said yes.

The fact that kids were able to obtain cigarettes in the mid 90s up until present day is no argument for scrapping a prohibition against underage smoking. 

I had a similar annoyance around the "debate" regarding Melbourne's harsh lockdowns albeit from the opposite direction when they attempted to lock down specific Melbourne postcodes between lockdowns 1 and 2. Locking down postcodes was unworkable, unenforceable and plebs immediately reached for their individual exceptionalism sooner than their sense of social responsibility.

After I don't know, one or two days the Andrews government locked down Melbourne. While it is pure speculation, I suspect the odds are favorable that some meathead planning to flee their fingered postcode to go stay with a relative found a phone call going one of two ways - mostly it would have been "Sure Sheryl it's bloody ridiculous, come on down and we can take the kids to laser tag and other super-spreader activities" OR less often "Don't you fucken dare come here bringing covid and lockdown down on us!" those poor hypothetical Cassandras.

But, entirely predictably, the attempt to surgically lockdown postcodes failed quickly and all of Melbourne went into lockdown 2 which lasted months while the murdoch press raged, and conspiracy theories boomed and dickheads succeeded in nothing but making a bad situation worse. The government that locked us down then won a free and fair election in a landslide.

What is missed, is that in terms of physics and statistics, the City of Melbourne cannot be locked down. Melbourne has more people than island nation of New Zealand, in 2025 the entire state of Victoria has about 15k Police staff, about 12k excluding public servants so administrators. The police are less than 1% of the population, technically as bound by the laws of physics, the police are incapable of administering breathalyser blood-alcohol tests, let alone locking down an entire metropolitan population.

But it is possible, because of human behaviour - most people obey most of the laws of the land. If everyone drove drunk, and ignored the police officer guiding them toward the "booze bus" and just sped off, we just don't have the resources as a society, the police presence to track them down, let alone high-speed pursuits. 

I heard somewhere, in some news report TLDR or something, that 30% of adults surveyed said they would help their children get around the social media ban. I don't know what's up with those parents, I don't know what relationship they have with their child that makes them want to take positive action to keep them on tik-tok. The best argument I heard from youtuber struthless was that for queer kids and disabled kids social media allows them to find communities they simple can't get in RL, but 30% seems way high for the population of kids that fall into those margins. 

What I am prone to imagine, is something like a dance mum, a showbiz mum and weaker, and of course dad's too whether through omission or commission I hold accountable for what likely transpires to be a large personality cohort of morons who think it is important that their kids be internet famous or some shit, as well as drowning time-impoverished parents who need a distraction machine to take away parental attention in order to survive.

But I easily imagine back in the late 80s early 90s when our government like many others around the world began to denormalise smoking based on the adverse impacts on health (that are less obvious than social media's impact on the modal person) that a survey would have shown on the advent of the first ban on cigarette vending machines in public spaces that some 30% of parents said they would buy cigarettes for their children. It's easy to imagine because I met parents well into the smoking ban that not only would give their kids smokes, but offer their kids friends (me) a rip of a bong.

The beauty of a blunt instrument like a citywide lockdown, is that it is easy to enforce when police don't have to go "if we stop this person we have a 116 point checklist of reasonable exceptions for them to be out and about." In Melbourne's lockdown there were just 5 reasons you could be outside your home - shopping trip, exercise, doctor's appointment, essential worker, carer or something. 

Delightfully, most people got it, hence the volume got to a point where our limited law enforcement resources could largely successfully uphold the lockdown. But the percentage of people who do not get the concept of "others" could have been as high as 30%. One thing to throw out from the Covid years in Melbourne, and likely can be generalised to the world, is that if children are too sheltered and spoiled "these days" it is because adults are too sheltered and spoiled too. 

I mean, and I'm working myself into a tizzy, I can recall at the daily press briefings which were so fucking simple literally if the case numbers were going up, the lockdown was continuing for the short-term forseeable future, and if the numbers were going down, the lockdown was continuuing for the short-term but tracking toward ending. I remember journalists people paid to hold power to account asking if a fucking highly contagious virus would make an exception for Easter lunch so fucking authoritarian families could gather at super-spreader events.

Just as a child may throw a tantrum because a parent says they can't have their screen time because they didn't eat their vegetables, we saw plain as day journalists advocating on behalf of adults throwing a tantrum because they couldn't go to the pub for after work drinks because they hadn't gone two weeks without being a disease vector.

It was the same thing with masks, whether they worked or not, mandating masks created a new norm that let everyone know that things were not normal. They are a simple and effective way to put the population on "pandemic alert" mode. When masks are normalised, your boss is unambiguously the arsehole for demanding workers come into the office.

Bringing us back to the beautiful simplicity of Australia's social media ban - for like almost a week now Australia has this new state imposed norm - kids should not be on fucking social media. Maybe 30% of parents hate this, because their tedious unlikeable kids just do shitty viral dances for tiktok so pedophiles can rub one out to them, but there will be 30% maybe more of parents who are fucking whistling and skipping now because they had to get their kids a phone and let them use social media because if they didn't they would be excluded. 

Now it is unambiguous, if you as a parent are putting your 12 year old on social media, you are arsehole parents. And you'll be fine, all you've lost is the ability to gain status and esteem by talking about how your kid is an "influencer" or whatever because very quickly it will not be socially acceptable to do so, but you will absolutely get away with giving your kid social media just like parents in the 90s got away with giving their kids cigarettes and alcohol.