In writing this, I am probably burning my political bridges and dis-inviting myself from future politics. And yet I do not care. It must said. It must written. These objections need to be in print so that we may refer to them in the future when good intentions about child safety have decomposed into a living hell for citizens.

If you elect a policeman, you get a police state. Before it was a cheeky guess, now it is an irrefutable truth.

A few days ago I wrote a warning about Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s praise for the widely ridiculed eSafety Commissioner, missing his opportunity to call out recent abuses of government-backed censorial power. ‘Oh, he’s just protecting the Liberal Party because they created her position…’ said some. Others thought it was an offhand comment. Even our Double-Shot editor was uneasy.

In my opinion, Dutton’s words were not delivered with such flippancy. He has probably read the digital framework headed our way, bound by glorious promises of safety with a stomach full of government interference that no one voted for.

Allow me to take you back to May 13 – exactly one month ago. A story hit the press about one state banning children under 14 from using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It came shortly after Labor pushed through a re-drafted version of the Coalition’s Digital ID bill and seemed to be suspiciously connected.

My first question was, ‘And how will these age restrictions be enforced? They will need to force all of us – including children – to use Digital ID. That’s how they get you. No Digital ID? No social media because you cannot validate your age.’

It has been (correctly) pointed out that for Australia to enforce age restrictions on social media, they will need to force all of us – including children – to use a Digital ID.

That's how the get you. No Digital ID? No social media because you cannot validate your age. https://t.co/9gURXdvWGx

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) May 13, 2024

Instead of parents controlling what devices their children have access to, the government has decided that they will step up and ‘protect children’. Let me be clear. Parents pay the phone contracts. Parents buy the smartphones. Parents are in control of their children. Not all families have a problem with social media. If the government wants to intervene, why not start by banning phones in school, as was standard in the early 2000s, to give kids a mandatory break? That seems more reasonable than creating a digital dystopia, unless that is the purpose.

As for trusting the government with the minds of our children, this is the same government that flooded our schools with age-inappropriate gender ideology which is rapidly building into one of the biggest child safety scandals in Western history.

Even if you believe Dutton and accept that this is about ‘child safety’ – which I don’t – it will still de facto mandate the brand new Digital ID function which we were told was ‘voluntary’.

To validate your age to the satisfaction of government interference means validating your identity with the government before petty bureaucrats grant you access to a private service you were previously using.

What if you want to use social media without joining up to Digital ID?

You can’t.

You’ve lost that right because Dutton has lost the plot.

Promising to implement these authoritarian measures within the first hundred days of a victory he’ll never see, Dutton said:

‘Facial recognition to determine somebody’s age is appropriate. You can talk to the providers as well as Apple … I think there are a number of ways in which we can do it. Is it perfect? No. Is there an option to do nothing? I don’t think that’s a responsible course of action.’

No, it is not a responsible course of action. This is not verification with a private company, it is verification to comply with the State. It is a massive government intervention into a largely adult market that has extremely serious slippery-slope consequences when it comes to government oversight in the social sphere. Besides, who wants to bet that parents will validate their age and then hand the phone over to their screaming kids… Or is Dutton proposing the phone constantly monitor who is looking at the screen?

Dutton’s argument is that social media is causing harm to children’s health, but what he doesn’t say is that these harms did not originate from social media – social media is a reflection of the political ideology coming out of the halls of Parliament, festering inside the curriculum – written by politicians – and ignored by parents. Kids learn this toxic behaviour at government-run schools.

Unlike Dutton, I grew up with the evolution of social media. I used it from the age of 13 – anonymously. It was my escape from a rather cruel school environment and a place where I learned to write and entertain a different group of friends. Social media was a relief – but it was also balanced by strict parenting and a non-Woke school system. We did not have a single trans flag flying in our school. No one took us out to global boiling protests or told us to apologise for being born a colonial. And our teachers were former experts in their field. We competed on merit and worked hard. Social media was a sport – something you did in addition to your studies. Anyone who abused or bullied people found themselves expelled and facing the considerable wrath of their parents. It wasn’t the device, it was the discipline.

Today, children are indoctrinated not educated. Teachers are raising fellow activists sympathetic to fringe left-wing causes whose ideology imparts serious mental health consequences, and yet we allow it happen in broad daylight. Even in the few remaining real subjects, children are not graded or tested with the same strictness in case it hurts their feelings. Good students are not rewarded because it is seen as unfair on the others. Kids have nothing to do except pick on each other and rank themselves via identity instead of talent. In Asian countries, children use social media to share their achievements. Here, we share our problems.

Social media is a cry for help about the failure of society and without it, children will suffer in silence and politicians will get their police state.

The disaster of our school system and declining mental health of our children is thanks to politicians and their identity politics.

Ask yourself, why do children fake mental health disorders to get attention from their peers on TikTok? We certainly did not do that sort of thing. Could it be that this generation have watched mental health being monestised and granted social benefits by the government? That it is romaticised in their entertainment? In a society governed by classes of competing identities, it gives struggling children access to the attention they cannot get from their teachers and parents and a classification that forces others to treat them as special. The menagerie of fictional pronouns is a lesser symptom of the same problem where kids make themselves feel special by adopting a fictional pronoun persona. That is why they switch them like fashion accessories once the novelty wears off.

Considering the most damaging ideas for children – such as telling them they will die in 10 years unless they vote green – are coming out of Parliament, Parliament is the last place that should start interfering in social media.

As for the rest of us, adults are going to cop the brunt of Dutton’s misguided virtue and it infuriates me that he is not smart enough to realise the repercussions of his safety vendetta. We are being asked to give up our rights and our privacy to solve a problem we didn’t create – and in doing so, we will be propping up the government’s hated and dangerous Digital ID legislation.

How are you supposed to protest online against Digital ID when the government forces you to join it in order to speak?

Dutton’s child protection scheme is a form of political interference that gives future power to a dictator.

$6.5 million has been put aside by Albanese’s government to develop ‘age assurance technologies’, but Dutton is cross that social media companies were not part of the plan.

‘I support the investment they’ve made [but] they excluded social media companies from the trial, that’s bizarre. That’s the target that we’ve got in mind.’

I’d much prefer an allegedly conservative leader not talk about the only remaining platform for free speech as ‘a target’ as if it were something to shoot at.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.