The social media ban is a bad (and dangerous) idea.

It's not for Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton to tell parents how to raise their children.

One of the best responses I've seen to the ALP/Coalition social media ban for under 16s was from my friend, Peter Phelps, a former Liberal MP in the New South Wales state parliament.

Things you can do in NSW if you are under 16:

Learn to fly an aeroplane; Possess and use a firearm; Drive at 80kph in a Go-Kart; Captain any non-commercial boat up to 20kts; Own a speargun for recreational fishing; Abseiling; Scuba diving; Join the Australian Army Cadet corps; Drag racing; Change your sex.

Things that you now can't do:

Twitter/X; Facebook; Instagram; TikTok.

There's so much wrong with the ban it is hard to know where to begin. There are no answers to even basic questions, not just about how the ban will work, but about some of its basic features. So, for example, it's a complete mystery how the government picked sixteen as the cut-off age. Jurisdictions in other countries have limited social media access, but usually, that's for children under fourteen. As far as I can discover, no government anywhere else in the world bans fifteen-year-olds from social media (not counting, of course, those countries that ban the internet and social media full stop, like North Korea and Iran). It's outrageous that I, as a parent, am now told by the government that I don't have the right to decide whether my fifteen-year-old child can use a messaging service.

It's disappointing to see Peter Dutton and the Coalition rush to endorse Labor's plans to undermine the role of parents, shut down alternative sources of information for young people, and create what will become a de facto national identification regime. It's not clear Coalition MPs have thought through what they've done.

Last week the media reported that despite the misgivings of many Coalition MPs about the ban, they nevertheless felt they had to agree to it because Peter Dutton was personally committed to it. They felt they had to 'support their leader'. I'm not sure that saying Yes to whatever the leader wants is the best support MPs can provide. Too many Liberal MPs said yes to Scott Morrison, and he led them to their worst election loss in 70 years. What the Coalition did last week probably won't swing the election. But as has been expressed to me in recent days, many Liberal Party members and voters feel they've been let down (again) by the Liberals.

Of the 85 Coalition MPs and senators, only three (Bridget Archer in the lower house and Alex Antic and Matt Canavan in the Senate) voted against the ban. In the House of Representatives, the vote in favour of the ban was 102 to 13, and in the Senate, 34-19.

In years to come, when we look back to the staging posts marking the loss of our freedoms, our privacy, and our ability to make to make our own decisions for ourselves and we contemplate the role of the Coalition in what happened, November 2024 will stand next to what Coalition MPs did in August 2014, when they rejected Tony Abbott's attempted reform of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act; Scott Morrison’s statement in March 2017 that freedom of speech 'doesn't create one job'; and the decision of the Coalition in March 2022 to legislate for government censorship of 'misinformation'. And let’s not start on what the Coalition did during COVID.

On the pro-freedom/pro-freedom of speech/anti-government control of people's lives side of the ledger, there's not much from the Coalition. Admittedly, eventually, the Coalition reversed its position on the misinformation laws, but only after a sustained two-and-a-half-year campaign waged by groups like the Institute of Public Affairs. But it was a struggle.

My column in the Australian Financial Review on Friday was about the ban. This is some of what I said:

Maybe the Greens are right after all. Maybe the voting age should be lowered to 16. Maybe that's the only way to stop Baby Boomer politicians like Anthony Albanese (born in 1963) from treating young Australians with contempt.

The Labor government's ban on anyone under the age of 16 using social media, including applications such as TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, X, and Reddit, is arbitrary, draconian, and entirely out of proportion to the problems some children suffer on some social media.

The school principals and teachers barracking for the ban because they claim to care for young people are the same people who said almost nothing about the years of lost learning and missed experiences students suffered when schools were shut during COVID-19. That learning and those experiences will never be made up.

Similarly, those media outlets currently campaigning for the ban were silent as children were shut in their rooms for months on end. 'Experts', 'educators', the media, and the country's politicians all utterly failed young Australians during the COVID-19 years. Yet somehow they still feel entitled to tell parents how to raise their children.

There's not a parent of a teenager who doesn't wish their child spent less time on their phone. However, there are better ways to fix the problem than a government-imposed ban that leaves no role for parents whatsoever. The Coalition enthusiastically supports the ban. In fact, it was the Coalition that first floated the idea…

The Greens opposed the ban, as did eight teals and independents. At the last federal election, 39% of voters aged 18-24 voted Greens, compared with 22% for the ALP, and 25% for the Coalition. When the Greens start telling young Australians what the major parties have done to them, the Greens' vote will only grow further…

All those Coalition MPs cheering the ban should consider the situation of a curious, possibly Christian-leaning or conservative-inclined, 15-year-old. In the absence of social media, that 15-year-old has nowhere to go for an alternative to the woke/left/nihilistic ideology they're fed at school and that pervades their world. That 15-year-old will never discover Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin.

A law-making process like this is beyond parody. Media-manufactured moral panics come and go. That so many Labor and Coalition politicians have succumbed to this latest one so unthinkingly is frightening.

It has yet to dawn on Australians that it won't just be under 16s affected by the ban. Every Australian on social media must be registered and identified by either the social media companies themselves or the federal government because, under the legislation, every Australian will need to prove their age. Peter Dutton has suggested that technology companies might use facial recognition to verify the age of social media users.

Anyone who isn't concerned by the potential misuse of the information to be collected by the companies and the government hasn't been watching anything that's happened over the last decade. You'll remember (or maybe you won't because you've shut out the trauma) the 'COVID tracing' apps created by the federal and state governments. The 'SafeWA' app of the Western Government was downloaded more than 200,000 times in the days after its release in November 2020. The then premier Mark McGowan said, 'Data will be encrypted at the point of capture, stored securely and only be accessible by authorised Department of Health contact tracing personnel, should COVID-19 contact tracing be necessary.' Whether that was a lie or simply an example of the flexibility with the truth that governments exercised during COVID is a question for another day.

What we do know is that within months of the 'SafeWA' being installed on hundreds of thousands of West Australians' phones, it was being accessed by WA police without a warrant to investigate crimes that had nothing to do with COVID. The same thing happened in Queensland. When the McGowan government tried to stop the police using the COVID app, the police refused. The Police Commissioner said, 'I accept that people don't always read the fine print on insurance policies or whatever, and this is a very important principle, but the police have only got information twice out of 240 million transactions, and they were exceptional circumstances… the police have a duty to collect the best possible evidence and put that before a court… This is not for police purposes. This is for the community of Western Australia.' After a public outcry, the McGowan government was forced to enact new laws to keep information from the SafeWA confidential.

When governments and government authorities break, twist, or evade the law, it is always because of 'exceptional circumstances'.

In today's Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt was brilliant. These are the highlights of his piece.

Our federal politicians have been monstrously stupid in passing the world's first ban on children under 16 using social media.

They've treated Australians – especially children – with contempt. They've fooled them with their 'democracy.. They've insulted them. They've proved they have no interest in their opinions.

Let's be kind. Let's assume these Labor, Liberal and Nationals politicians really were just worried that social media hurts our young, exposing them to bullies and predators. How can that justify this farcical process and farcical law that puts us all in danger?

On Thursday a week ago, the government revealed its proposed law to ban children under 16 from using interactive social media sites such as X, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok. The fix was in. The fraud began.

The government, acting with absurd urgency, allowed only one day for public comment. Even so, 15,000 submissions poured in that Friday, including from social media platforms, psychologists, children's services, technology experts and children.

The next Monday, the government allowed just four hours of hearings from experts, many warning it was going too far.

Yet on Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted for the ban. Last Friday it was law. What a con. Not one politician voting for this ban would have read even a quarter of the 1500 submissions. Even as of this Sunday, parliament had published just 107 of them…

And the Opposition went along with this hoax so Labor couldn’t go to the election boasting it was protecting children and the nasty Coalition wasn’t.

I agree, children can indeed be hurt on social media. We should do more to protect them, including perhaps by forcing changes to algorithms. But spare children the sentimentality of the prime minister, who explained his ban with some good-old-days memories in soft-focus: 'I want young Australians to grow up happy, active and safe, playing outside with their friends – off their phones'. Politicians shouldn’t force their childhoods yesterday onto other people’s children today.

More importantly, many of the submissions our politicians didn’t read said social media is actually a great good for many children.

For instance, Bravehearts said 'children who struggle with social anxiety can forge positive online connections', and Children and Young People with Disability Australia said seven in 10 of the kind of children it helped 'feel it easier to be themselves online'.

No surprise. A lesbian girl in a small town told one newspaper that without social media she’d feel even more isolated.

[Anthony Albanese was asked about this same issue at a press conference last week. The exchange went like this:

Journalist: 'Prime Minister, you repeatedly said that parents can have discussions with their kids to mitigate online harms, but unfortunately, a lot of kids, especially from the LGBTQ community or other maginalised communities, simply can't talk to their parents about this kind of stuff. The only place to find solace and community is on the internet, using social media sites like Reddit and Tumblr. And now banning them from these sites effectively bans them from these communities. What do you say to these kids?'

Prime Minister: 'What I say is that one of the things that I want to see is young Australians, wouldn't mind older Australians as well, having more conversations with each other.'

Who those children should be 'having more conversations' with, Anthony Albanese didn’t say.]

The Lidcombe Community Soccer Club, in yet another unread submission, said social media let its children post and chat about their games, and 'is vital in terms of building a community, encouraging children and teenagers to engage in a healthy physical activity'.

But our politicians read none of that and just passed a law they couldn’t explain, but believed made them look caring. Millions of young Australians will disagree, and remember in anger this farce of ‘democracy' in action.

I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about the social media ban in the months ahead.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John