Hostbusters: Australia’s Latest Exercise in Looking Busy While Achieving Nothing. The Albanese Government has now announced one of the most baffling policy pivots in recent memory: a nationwide ban on social media for under-16s. On paper it sounds bold. In reality it’s a confused, performative, selectively authoritarian stunt that collapses the moment you apply even basic logic.
Because here’s the first and most absurd comparison:
In Australia, minors under 16 can legally obtain a firearms licence, use rifles under supervision, and participate in shooting sports. A teenager can safely handle a real weapon designed for lethal force, yet according to the Albanese Government they must not — under any circumstances — handle TikTok.
Fifteen-year-olds can operate firearms.
But apparently the real public safety emergency is a 13-year-old posting a dance video.
If this policy had a spine, it would snap under the weight of its own contradictions.
And the contradictions just keep coming.
This is the same government that mandates laptops in classrooms, builds the national curriculum around compulsory device use, and forces children into endless hours of screen-based learning. Schools now resemble low-budget tech hubs. Kids spend more time staring into approved screens than speaking to actual humans — and literacy levels are falling accordingly.
NAPLAN scores aren’t “slipping” — they’re cratering. Teachers have been warning for years that screen dependency is destroying reading and writing skills. But instead of addressing the digital overload in the school system, Labor has instead chosen a softer target: teenagers in their own homes.
The government that flooded education with screens now blames families for the consequences of its own policies.
And then, instead of improving media literacy, boosting parental controls, or regulating the tech giants, the government’s solution is to ban children from using social media entirely, enforced through a nationwide ID-verification scheme that experts have already warned is:
- technologically unworkable
- privacy-invasive
- easily bypassed
- and wildly expensive
Which raises the real question:
Why push a policy that won’t work?
Because for all the moral language, this scheme is not about protection. It is about infrastructure — specifically, the creation of a profitable, government-approved digital ID industry.
Verification fees.
Compliance systems.
Age-check contracts.
Penalties.
New data streams.
New databases.
It is a revenue model disguised as child safeguarding.
Even the eSafety Commissioner admitted last year that meaningful age verification online is still a “high-risk, poorly tested” frontier — yet suddenly we’re sprinting toward it as if it’s a moral necessity.
And while Canberra celebrates itself, every cybersecurity expert, educator and technology researcher is pointing out the same obvious truth: children will circumvent this ban in under 48 hours. They always do. They always have. A borrowed phone, a fake birthdate, a VPN — teenagers treat these obstacles like warm-up puzzles.
So we’re building a giant bureaucratic machine to stop something that won’t stop.
Meanwhile, the real problems — the ones affecting youth mental health — remain untouched: algorithmic manipulation, data harvesting, cyberbullying, predatory design by tech giants, declining school engagement, collapsing literacy, and the fact that children are being raised in an economic environment so bleak their futures look like a budget forecast.
But instead of governing, the Albanese administration has chosen optics: a dramatic-looking policy that promises safety while delivering nothing measurable.
It is not bold.
It is not practical.
It is not protective.
It is a very familiar pattern for this government:
Overreach wrapped in soft language, technology they do not understand outsourced to companies they will not name, and a convenient expansion of the state’s surveillance apparatus — all sold to the public under the banner of “caring.”
We’ve now entered the Hostbusters era: a government hunting imaginary threats so it doesn’t have to face real ones.
A teenager can hold a gun.
But apparently they cannot hold a phone.
The problem isn’t social media.
The problem is a government addicted to symbolic gestures, allergic to substance, and far too comfortable tightening control while pretending it is offering protection.
– By The Hollow Centre
