SOCIAL MEDIA BAN
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce today that the government plans to introduce legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media, AAP reports. The legislation will be introduced before the next election and will draw on the report by former High Court chief justice Robert French (see yesterday’s Worm). AAP highlights the report, released by the South Australian government at the weekend, includes a draft bill with the legislative framework to ban children under 14 from using social media. It also requires social media companies to get parental consent for 14 and 15-year-olds to use their platforms.
However, the ABC says the federal government won’t commit to an age limit for social media until a trial of age-verification technology is complete. Guardian Australia notes the trial is set to begin its final phase this week. The site also says it understands the federally legislated age could be higher than what is being pursued in SA.
AAP quotes Albanese as saying in remarks released before the announcement: “Parents are worried sick about this. The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount. We are taking this action because enough is enough.”
The Australian highlights SA Premier Peter Malinauskas’ push to set the age limit at 14 in the state, having commissioned French’s report in May. The paper said Malinauskas led the discussion on a social media crackdown in a national cabinet meeting on Friday. AAP quotes the premier as saying: “The evidence shows early access to addictive social media is causing our kids harm. This is no different to cigarettes or alcohol. When a product or service hurts children, governments must act.” Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen has said her government will also restrict children’s access to social media, Guardian Australia notes.
The site recalls Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has previously backed a social media ban for those under 16 and pledged to implement it within 100 days of being in office if he won the next election.
Talking of said election (does a day go by when it isn’t talked about?), the latest Guardian Essential poll shows more voters are blaming the Albanese government for interest rate rises, echoing the polling in the Nine newspapers we flagged yesterday. The latest polling did bring some good news for the government, with the majority of respondents backing the recently announced plan to cap international student enrolments in tertiary education.
HOUSING BLAME GAME
As predicted, the economy remains very much front and centre of political debate, with Housing Minister Clare O’Neil acknowledging on ABC’s Q&A program last night the “total despair” of Australians trying to secure affordable housing. “The thing that scares me most is when I look at how the housing prospects for young people in our country have changed since the 1980s,” she said. O’Neil, who has only been in the job six weeks following Albanese’s reshuffle, said housing affordability “deeply concerns” her and she was worried that “the bank of mum and dad has become almost a normalised part of the experience of buying a home”.
Shadow Housing minister Michael Sukkar, who was also on the show, claimed the government had to take responsibility for the housing crisis and tried to call out what he called an “unedifying display” regarding the back and forth with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) over high interest rates, the ABC said. “It’s very clear that the government’s mismanagement of the economy, they’re now trying to find a scapegoat for. The truth is that interest rates are going to be higher for longer because of a suite of policies this government has put in place,” he said. O’Neil obviously disagreed and said in a “difficult environment” it was important for the government to be able to “balance things”.
The AFR and The Australian are also keen to highlight problematic themes for the government this morning. The former says analysis from the RBA and market economists shows inflation and higher taxes are eroding household incomes by three times as much as higher interest rates. The paper claims the reported stats undermine Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ previous suggestion high interest rates are “smashing” the economy.
Meanwhile, The Australian highlights Minerals Council chief executive Tania Constable suggesting the government’s industrial relations laws will bring conflict “to every workplace, in every industry”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
The father of an autistic boy has tattooed the alphabet on his arm so he can always communicate with his non-speaking son, the BBC reports.
Dan Harris said his son Joshie, 10, relies on technology every day and uses software on an iPad, referred to as a “talker”, to communicate. However, the ever-present fear of the battery running out or an unreliable signal prompted Dan’s decision to get the tattoo so Joshie could always speak to him.
“Joshie doesn’t communicate in a traditional way. He has an iPad that can identify pictures and words and has images of his favourite people and things,” the BBC quoted Dan, from Peterborough in England, as saying.
“We have been in [the] middle of a forest and on a beach where there is no battery in talker and you can imagine the fear when we can’t communicate with him.
“As parents, we go through sadness as we can see he is desperate to communicate something. And now I have this tattoo on my left arm where alphabets are arranged in a way around a square box to help Joshie communicate.”
Dan is the founder of the charity Neurodiversity in Business and has been campaigning around the world on the issue of autism awareness, City A.M. reports. He and Joshie previously secured funding to install 100 communication image boards around Peterborough, the BBC said.
Say What?
Parents want their kids off their phones and on the footy field.
Anthony Albanese
The prime minister said social media was taking children away from real-life experiences, the ABC reports ahead of the government’s social media age restriction announcement.
CRIKEY RECAP
Crikey’s series explores Dutton’s history of racism as well as the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.
Race and racism have long played a role in Australian politics. Malcolm Fraser was attacked by Labor for extending humanitarian migration to South Vietnamese refugees. John Howard sought to weaponise Asian migration in the 1980s. In the wake of 9/11 and Tampa, the Howard government made a virtue of its tough line on asylum seekers and Australians of Muslim background, while Howard’s refusal to engage with Indigenous peoples came to characterise his prime ministership. The rise of the Islamic State once again saw Australia’s Muslim community targeted by Coalition politicians. The Gillard government made a virtue of its crackdown on temporary migrants.
But Peter Dutton stands out as the most plainly racist Australian political leader since the White Australia policy. Here’s the proof.
Macron’s merry political gamble to try to reset Parliament to see if it came out more to his liking has left him with a prime minister who looks like many of those who came before him — though at 73 he is just shy of 40 years older than outgoing PM Gabriel Attal. It has also left France with a record 126 National Rally deputies in Parliament, which is what allows them to play kingmaker in the first place.
This summer, the far right came the closest it ever has to real political power in France, and once again, voters banded together to deny them that opportunity. The largest proportion of them supported the left. After an election campaign that was genuinely terrifying for a great number of people in this country and several months of political horse-trading, we have ended up with a prime minister whose party holds the smallest number of seats in Parliament, who wants to stop immigration and who serves at the pleasure of Marine Le Pen.
Since 2017, Macron has defined his presidency as representing the sensible alternative to the existential threat posed by the far right. History may remember him as its handmaiden.
Earlier this year, Australian billionaire James Packer had dinner with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. At some point the subject turned to Lachlan Murdoch, the heir to the Murdoch media empire. Trump apparently brightened and said something to the effect of, “Oh yeah, I’d like to get to know Lachlan better.”
This is one of investigative journalist Paddy Manning’s favourite revelations from Making Lachlan Murdoch, the three-part Australian Story exploration of one of Australia’s most powerful people. The exchange also goes some way to explaining why the ABC is dedicating a rare three-episode arc to him: for all his power, and all the publicity that has followed him for most of his life, Lachlan Murdoch remains something of an enigma.
“[Packer’s anecdote] tells you something about the difference between Lachlan and [his father] Rupert,” Manning told Crikey. “Trump has known Rupert for 40 years or more. But Trump didn’t meet Lachlan until 2019, when there was a state dinner for Scott Morrison at the White House. So even Donald Trump wants to understand Lachlan better. To me that said a lot.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
At least 59 dead in Vietnam as Typhoon Yagi triggers landslides, floods (al-Jazeera)
Princess Kate says she has finished cancer chemo treatment (The Washington Post)
Harris and Trump tied in latest US election polls, as Tuesday’s debate nears (The Guardian)
After Georgia shooting, a grief-stricken city seeks solace, and answers (The New York Times) ($)
‘Someone is going to die’: Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s warning on Elle Macpherson’s breast cancer message (The Australian) ($)
Apple debuts iPhone 16 designed for AI (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The major parties could disappear if pollies and journos don’t tell the truth — Niki Savva (The Sydney Morning Herald): There is no way of knowing exactly what will happen next, only that something will. The aftershocks will continue. There is no law that says political parties must survive. All badly run or led enterprises inevitably collapse. Sometimes it’s desirable. That organisation needs time out to consider its reason for being, to re-examine its values, to reflect on who it is meant to serve.
Realignments have already rendered parties unrecognisable to their creators. The Coalition looks more and more like One Nation, Labor more and more like the Liberals used to, the Greens have morphed into Labor’s old guard left. The teals waft and weave between them all.
[Labor staffer Lachlan] Harris says it’s unrealistic to think Labor or the Liberals can broaden sufficiently to reverse the trend so that they can govern on their own. He predicts minority governments could become the new normal, with majority government still possible, although more as the exception than the rule.
Get a VPN and delete your cookies, Australia’s privacy laws are still lagging behind — Paul Karp (Guardian Australia): The Albanese government has decided to do privacy reform in two tranches. The first bill, likely to go to caucus on Tuesday and be introduced to Parliament on Thursday, would create a right to sue for serious breaches of privacy and implement Labor’s promise to crack down on doxing.
But stakeholders involved in confidential consultations believe that more consumer-friendly measures will be delayed until a second tranche, which is unlikely to be introduced before the next election, due by May 2025.
A children’s online privacy code that recognises the best interests of the child when handling their personal information is believed to be in the first tranche, which would help the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, defend against the charge of a do-nothing bill. But advocates fear ending the small business exemption has been pushed on to the backburner of the second tranche after an avalanche of industry lobbying about how expensive and difficult this would be.
