Ban the Culture While You’re at It

Tom Valcanis
Tom Valcanis is a life-long politics tragic, studying politics in high school and at university. A freelance journalist, his articles have appeared in Nine papers (Age/SMH), the Big Issue, the Spectator, and he was editor of alternative lifestyle magazine Hysteria from 2016–2020.

Imagine a country that purports to be a liberal democracy but, in the face of a crisis partly real and mostly imagined, enacts a blanket policy of isolation and censorship. People are stewing in their homes, angry about the policy. Even so, they’re banned from gathering with others even to discuss it, let alone oppose it. If they try, they’re arrested, beaten, and fired upon.

Sound familiar? It’s the Daniel Andrews Victorian Labor approach to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now let’s port this over to the digital realm. If you’re under the age of 16 – an age where you can work part-time and have the government lighten your pockets through taxation – you are effectively barred from the digital public square until your 16^th birthday. By that time, as a consequence, you’re naïve to this sprawling free-for-all marketplace of ideas – both great and heinous.

Just like the lemonade stands and cake stalls of old, kids often become entrepreneurs and broadcasters using social media.

The implementation will be a dumpster fire. Naturally, kids will get around this. As a 13-year-old I installed keylogging software on my parent’s 486 computer to harvest the secret password that connected me to the information superhighway at a blazing 28.8kbps, empowering important school research (read: download postage stamp-sized South Park clips of Cartman farting fire.) If I could do that in a non-indexed, pre-Google age, a kid even younger could flout the ban in half the time.

The point is, if you scratch the surface of a Labor supporter you find an authoritarian waiting to pounce. Just give them the means, motive, and opportunity, and they’ll take it. 

Bob Hawke tried to introduce the Australia Card in 1985. It was a plastic precursor to the digital ID that Albanese and his cronies are trying to foist upon us today. It too targeted businesses which failed to comply with the legislation. Thanks to some brave Labor members and the electorate at large rejecting it, we’re not asked for ihre papieren, bitte wherever we might freely go. Well, apart from that insane period between 2020 and 2021 in Victoria. 

Imagine if an ALP backbencher today had the stones to call the digital ID a “virtual Hitlercard or Stalincard” like Lewis Kent did in the ’80s.

Albo and Labor want this because it is social engineering on a grand scale. Albanese and his complaint of e-Karens think that social media is a mere superfluous add on to the teenage experience. It’s not: it’s an integral part of our culture, as much as milk bars and blue light discos were to Albanese when he was growing up. It’s not simply depriving kids of some memes and banter – it’s where kids exchange ideas, form opinions, and engage in civic and economic life. Yes, there are nefarious actors on social media. Even – gasp! – people spreading deliberate misinformation. (You know, like the Greens and pretty much everything they say.) But kids need to experiment and figure this out for themselves, hopefully with some measure of parental guidance. Their actual parents, not Daddy Government. 

People are stewing in their homes, angry about the policy.

Even the government’s reasoning is shoddy. Labor trotted out American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation to state their case; but didn’t read his entire oeuvre of work, which also posits that helicopter parenting and constant risk aversion stunts the social and psychological development of kids, who are naturally “antifragile.” 

Just like the lemonade stands and cake stalls of old, kids often become entrepreneurs and broadcasters using social media. The popular 6News is run by teenagers, for example. Albo wants to effectively knock the growing legs of teenagers from under them, forever playing catch up in a digital world that has long eclipsed them by the time they’re ‘legally’ allowed to use social media. 

The New Albanese Teenager will know nothing apart from what their schoolmasters tell them and what legacy media spews from its decaying lips. They will never form a national, broad coalition of like-minded individuals to figure Albo is high-key Ohio cringe and his policies give them the ick. (That’s Gen Alpha slang. It doesn’t mean anything flattering.)

Owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk is correct when he says the ban “seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians” (sic). Just like Dictator Dan banning toddlers from climbing play equipment during the pandemic despite knowing the risk was minimal, Labor shamelessly sacrifices our children at flaming digital altars to gain ever more control over us all. 

Albanese wants to reshape culture in his own stuttering, bespectacled, round-shouldered image. If only the spineless Liberals and Nationals could see it – and the electorate at large whenever he decides to call the election. Australia can ill afford yet another lost, indentured, sensitive-to-everything generation. We can only hope this entire debacle sheds light on how brazen Labor and their lust for power really is – so we can stop it.

This article was originally published by Liberty Itch.