Pearls and Irritations

The New York Times published an article last week by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and pollster Will Johnson. Haidt has spent many years researching how smartphones and social media affect the lives and mental health of the generation which has been using them since the cradle; i.e. American Gen Z-ers.

The authors report that 45% of Gen Z-ers “would not or will not allow my child to have a smartphone before reaching high school age”. Forty-seven percent say that they wished TikTok had never been invented and 50% say the same about X/Twitter. Sixty percent say social media has “a negative impact” on society with “29 percent saying it has hurt them personally.”

Despite those numbers, as evidence that all is not doom and gloom “52% of the sample say social media has benefitted their lives”. That number has little appeal to parents and politicians who are keen to demonise the technologies, as parents and populist leaders tend to do when trying to cope with new technologies that disrupt old habits.

Understandably, most parents tend to react badly when they see their children experiencing cyberbullying on social media at school. Being helpless themselves to do anything to protect them, distressed parents have great difficulty seeing social media as a net positive that enables their children to remain in immediate touch with their peers in real time.

The solution that jumps out for them is to restrict access to their young offspring, if only the politicians would do something about it. A sizeable proportion of Gen Z-ers (born between 1997-2012) are below voting age, but their long-suffering parents are fully-fledged voters.

Enter Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese. Setting aside the matter of how age restrictions might work, Albanese made an announcement last week about banning social media access to unspecified tender age groups.

He touched on the hot-button issues about exposure to hazards that might be suitable for mature adults to navigate, but not for immature children and teenagers. And because children spend an inordinate amount of time on their devices, he empathised with the parental angst about their children not doing what kids apparently should be doing. Accordingly, in Albanese’s estimation, parents are “worried sick” about the malaise, and want “their kids off their phones and on the footy field”.

Much like Dutton, Albanese is conscious that about 60% of Australian parents would like age limits imposed on social media access, and so Albanese’s September announcement put on display his keenness to pander to Dutton’s earlier call on the same matter. In comments made in June, Dutton tried to make it sound simple: It was just like getting a driver’s licence. But both leaders know the problem of age verification for social media has not been solved anywhere else, so on the critical question of “how”, they are both in unchartered waters.

Dutton has put his hopes in a yet-to be-discovered technology, while Albanese is saying he will be relying on trials to be undertaken by the end of the year before he makes a commitment on how it will be done or what the cut-off age will be, with 13 and 16 prominent in the mix. What the respective policy announcements mean is that both leaders can go to an election in eight months having put the matter to bed. But instead of dealing honestly with the complexity of the issue, Albanese would have matched Dutton’s initial call and validated it, which is Albanese’s default practice, even though for practical purposes nothing is likely to happen.

It’s not as though either leader is in unfamiliar territory on the question of adopting policy positions that are to all intents and purposes insurmountable.

Dutton’s nuclear power policy (remember that?) was touched on as a small modular reactor thought bubble in 2022, but then announced with great fanfare in 2024 as a stock-standard large reactor policy when the realisation hit that SMRs were at the extreme end of fantasy. His policy announcement in 2024 offered a nod to reducing carbon emissions, but essentially was characterised as a means of reducing energy prices during a present-day cost-of-living crisis.

The Australian Financial Review’s energy writer, Matthew Warren, put it this way:

“The Coalition’s cunning plan to announce seven nuclear reactors by 2050 has nothing to do with building them. Not a bag of cement will be lifted. No steel will be girded. Not one blade of grass will be disturbed. This is a short-term political strategy dressed up as a long-term radical vision.”

In short, nuclear power in Australia will not happen and Dutton knows it will not happen in his lifetime, if ever.

As for Albanese, his embrace of Scott Morrison’s $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine plan is, likewise, a policy position that is likely to remain unrealised, at least in the sense that no nuclear-powered submarines will be built in Australia using Australian technology or Australian workers, though colossal amounts of money will be spent on courting American and British consultants, as well as self-important Australian defence freeloaders. An occasional state dinner on the White House lawns might remind its Australian political backers that they are genuine dignitaries and that Australia is the next best thing to the 51st American state.

Australia will not push for representation or voting rights to match that de facto status and its political and military leaders will be content to do whatever they are told, including participation in a forward defence posture that looks very much like the US spooking China in the vicinity of the South China Sea. The small group of dissenting AUKUS critics will be cast as outliers as their sniping diminishes or they die off.

The crowning domestic achievement to come out of the arrangement will be a continuing bipartisan acknowledgement of the unspoken primacy of national security. Because of its bipartisan character, “national security” will no longer need to be mentioned during election campaigns, while any utterance touching on “national sovereignty” will be swiftly dismissed as un-Australian by patriots who fly flags which prominently display deference to Britian’s Union Jack.

The legacy media will cheer on AUKUS as it has consistently done since Morrison sprang it on the nation in September 2021. Its critics using independent media outlets and social media platforms will stand as compelling evidence of the inherent evil of the platforms and of the unpatriotic intent of the critics.

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