Australia’s political elite use a subtle trick to remain relevant in these disastrous times. They carefully refer only to impending catastrophes, not existing ones. Bad ideas are dangerous for the effect they will have in the future, not now.
The media leavens this with reassuring stories about how rosy things are. Oh look, the Prime Minister married his fiancee in the Lodge. Isn’t that sweet! It all creates the illusion that, despite appearances, things are and will continue to be fine, as long as you keep voting for the same politicians and consuming the same comforting media.
It’s just a hunch, but I don’t think punters fall for that crap any more. The catastrophe is already here, as I explained in a piece last week (which shot to fourth most popular piece I’ve published on Substack, beneath three others with a similar theme).
Photos of the all-white guests at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s wedding don’t fool people who know that there are parts of Australia where white people are a minority, English is a second language and marriages are often between cousins.
Likewise, warnings from the Opposition and the media about an impending energy crisis can’t obscure the fact that for many people energy is already unaffordable and all our manufacturing industries have already shifted offshore.
The best example, though, regards children.
In nine days, Australians will wake up to the implementation of the Online Safety Act, a new regime designed to, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describes it, “let kids be kids” by restricting them from social media.
You don’t need to spend much time researching the topic to learn that kids stopped being kids decades ago, thanks mostly to government policies. Worse, the Online Safety Act was conceived by people who are either ignorant of the most serious dangers online for children or are deliberately and sinisterly giving those dangers even greater opportunity to proliferate in Australia.
The collaboration by successive governments and the banks to drive women into the workforce, which started in earnest 40 years ago, has sent kids, in the absence of mothers, into the hands of child carers who, we now know, are determined to indoctrinate them with stupid ideas about white colonialism and the imminent climate catastrophe. While kids have suffered by growing up with neurotic fears and loneliness, banks have benefited by driving up mortgage values and governments have benefited by making parents addicted to ever-increasing and desperately needed childcare subsidies.
If Albanese really cared about kids, he would introduce policies that made it easier for mothers to stay at home. That he hasn’t reveals his true intentions.
Ryan Montgomery, who is often described as the world’s best “ethical hacker” described in a marathon podcast with Shawn Ryan in the United States last week (which has been watched by 2.4 million people on YouTube alone in 10 days) where the real dangers lie online for children.
They are Discord (a platform for community groups), and two gaming sites, Roblox and Minecraft. Even listening to what Montgomery has found on these sites is sickening enough without watching the videos he has uncovered.
In short, these sites and games attract vulnerable kids, almost always from broken homes. Entrapping such kids to performing sickening and deadly acts for exclusive live audiences has become routine and easy for the tens of thousands of Satanic (there is no other word for it) sickos who prey on them.
Kids desperately in need of love are lured in with false promises of understanding and affection, and then convinced to share nude photos. Once these are received, the predator’s real intentions are revealed. The child is blackmailed into performing sickening acts, including serious self-harm, pet killing and in some cases committing suicide live online for a paying audience.
I advise every parent of a young child, especially one who spends long hours online, to listen to the podcast. (And if you think pedophile rings are not operating in Australia, think again — four men were arrested for allegedly using online platforms to share such material just this morning.)
If you thought the Online Safety Act would protect Australian kids from these sickos, you were wrong. Discord, Roblox and Minecraft are all currently exempt from the legislation. In effect, the banning of kids from TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other more mainstream social media sites will drive more kids to these dark places, not fewer. And there isn’t a nerdy bureaucrat in Canberra who could possibly keep abreast of which sites kids turn to as their favourite ones get blocked.
In a feature story about this in The Weekend Australian, Paul Kelly described the new legislation as a “a large-scale social and technological revolution where Australia is leading the way across the world” that is “giving young people back their childhoods”. But of course he would say that. The mainstream media never passes up an opportunity to advocate for restrictions to social media, its most serious collective commercial rival.
What is revealing is that nobody in Australia is envisaging that, as of 10 December, kids will put down their phones, jump on their bikes and meet each other down at the playground. It just won’t happen. The real reasons behind the destruction of childhood are so old and deeply embedded that no legislation could in itself reverse them. Rather, it would take a fundamental shift in policy, and not even the “conservative” Opposition has the cojones for that.
In truth, this new regime will be so counterproductive that it’s difficult to imagine it’s not a deliberate continuation of the same old process.
Put that depressing speculation aside, though, and contemplate the other effect of the Online Safety Act: forcing adults to provide ID before they too are allowed to log onto a social media site and share their thoughts online. Here, the intention is undeniable: to normalise government control over what until recently was considered none of the government’s damn business.
This is just another manifestation of Big Government, whose era began with Covid, when the same people who now want “kids to be kids” were locking them up to save them from a harmless virus.
The danger of “online safety” was created when governments decided to encourage mothers to not raise their own children. Now that this danger is real, the government is responding not by solving the problem, but by making it worse while also seizing an opportunity to increase its power over everyone else.
However much you hate this government, it’s not enough.
