A Different Take On The First One Hundred Days Of "The Ban"

Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Law. What Big Tech hijacked, what it cost us, and what actually matters now

I grew up in Byron Bay. I was born in 1970, the same year Victoria became the first jurisdiction on earth to make seatbelts mandatory, and I remember 1977 the way most people remember yesterday. I have a mild form of hyperthymesia — I rarely talk about it — which means my autobiographical memory functions like a recording. Dates, conversations, the exact words someone used in a room forty years ago, the good the bad and everything in between. I remember 1977 because it was the year seatbelt wearing in Australia finally reached ninety per cent, seven years after the law passed. I also remember it as the year I went to my first rock concert — Richard Clapton at my grandparents property in Byron Bay, promoted by people who when I turned 19yrs became my now long-time friends Karin and Kevin Oxford, who went on to found Bluesfest. That festival, built from nothing by people who genuinely loved music and community, collapsed just this week, under management that came much later. Some things built with integrity do not survive what comes after when ego gets involved. I have been thinking about that a great deal.

What I remember most about 1977 is the grumbling. Personal freedom. Government overreach. Our white Kingswood with blue vinyl bench seats did not have seatbelts. I remember the first car our family had that came fitted with them, the strangeness of it, the resistance of adults who had driven their entire lives without being told what to do.

The road toll had dropped thirteen per cent in the first year alone. The evidence was not contested. It took seven years to reach ninety per cent compliance not because the law was wrong, but because public health reform does not move at the speed of outrage. It moves through regulatory frameworks, education campaigns, and the slow grinding work of making a new behaviour feel normal, then obvious, then unthinkable to abandon. It moves through the resistance of people who followed the loudest voices rather than the smartest ones.

Sound familiar.

One hundred days was never going to be the story but it has been this past week. It is a convenient clock that lets everyone rush in with verdicts before the machinery of government regulation has even warmed up. True reality does not move in media headlines. It moves in cases that cannot yet be named, by regulators who cannot speak because the second they do, the work collapses under the weight of its own exposure.

And still, here we are.

We are all watching a digital public square fill with voices that sound like authority but exist only to be seen. Watching people claw for ownership of a law that was never theirs. Watching grief, the kind that arrives in the middle of the night and never fully leaves be lifted from the families it belongs to and repurposed in a fight that has drifted so far from its original purpose that it barely recognises itself in the mirror.

I have been in this sector for thirty-five years. I was raising concerns about digital safety with the arrival of Myspace and Facebook at Queensland state premier level in 2008, before most of the people now declaring themselves its champions had considered it a worthy cause. I know how slowly and carefully this work must be built, because if you move too fast in the wrong direction, you do not just fail. You make things worse. And the people who pay are not the advocates. They are the children.

What we are seeing in the wake of what Big Tech hijacked and rebranded as “the ban” to make the government look bad and shift their own accountability ….again…. is not a failure of intent. It is a collision between two very different worlds. One that understands the architecture of change, and one that believes change is a performance. But there is a third force in this collision that nobody is talking about loudly enough, and it is the one benefiting most from every moment of noise, every ownership dispute, every personalised attack on the people tasked with doing the actual work.

Big Tech did not get to where it is by losing fights. It got there by not needing to win them outright. The playbook is older than social media. It is the same one the tobacco industry ran for decades while evidence of harm mounted. The same one fossil fuel companies refined into an art form. The same one deployed throughout the Cold War. You do not defeat your opponents. You divide them. You flood the space with emotion. You let people who should be standing together exhaust themselves fighting each other. You let grievance curdle into accusation, accusation into spectacle, and spectacle into sustained chaos in which no regulator can build a case, no enforcement action can land cleanly, and no law can be implemented with the focus it requires. You make people on the same side forget they are on the same side. You make them forget their purpose entirely.

And then you wait.

Because while advocates fight over ownership, media commentators file their hundred-day verdicts, and the Commissioner is forced to defend herself under the weight of public attack instead of advancing her cases, the platforms are doing what they have always done. Quietly. Expensively. With armies of lawyers and lobbyists whose entire job is to ensure the moment never arrives when the full weight of accountability lands.

This is not conspiracy. It is commerce. And it works not because people on the right side are weak, but because they are human. Grief is real. Rage is real. The need to be seen fighting is real. All of it can be weaponised by people who feel none of it and are simply watching the clock.

Every personalised attack on the Commissioner is a gift to the platforms. Every ownership dispute is a distraction they are profiting from. Every hundred-day verdict that redirects focus from enforcement to conflict is a day they do not have to answer for what they have built and what it has cost.

The naysayers who are loudest right now are not following the evidence. They are not following the science. Some of them are proudly declaring their collaborations with the very platforms that have the most to lose from this law being enforced wearing those relationships as credentials while standing in judgment of the regulator tasked with holding those same platforms to account. They are not leading this conversation. They are being led by it, steered by interests far more sophisticated than they appear to recognise, amplifying exactly the noise that Big Tech needs amplified. Let me say directly what needs to be said. Instead of walking into a Year 8 session and asking who is still on Instagram to prove to yourself and the waiting media that the ban is failing, try explaining to those students how public health actually works. Have the honest conversation. Tell them that the platforms they are using are being required by law to verify their age, and that if those platforms do not comply, they face fines of nearly fifty million dollars. Tell them that the reason they were warned before December 10th — that they may lose access, that accounts may be deactivated — was not bureaucratic noise. It was exactly what good governance and responsible risk management looks like in the real world. You prepare people. You give notice. You explain what is coming and why. You build the framework before you enforce it, because that is how laws that actually change behaviour are implemented, as opposed to laws that simply exist on paper. Tell them that the Australian did not ban children from social media, that they banned social media from accessing children and why it needed to happen. Tell them that the platforms are still being assessed, that compliance is being measured, and that access could still change for them — possibly as soon as tomorrow — because the work is ongoing and the pressure is real. That conversation, the one that treats young people as intelligent enough to understand how systems work and why they matter, is infinitely more useful than a show of hands designed to generate a headline. A room full of fourteen-year-olds who found a workaround is not evidence that the law has failed. It is evidence that we are at the beginning of a culture change that will take years, not days, and that the adults in that room have a choice about whether to help young people understand what is happening or simply use them to make a point.

Julie Inman Grant has spent thirty-five years doing work that made powerful enemies and produced real outcomes. She and her family have been personally threatened. She has been labelled a censorship commissar by Elon Musk, summoned before a US Congressional committee by Jim Jordan for the crime of doing her job too effectively, and held up as a villain by some of the most powerful technology companies on earth not because she was weak, but because she was effective enough to make them feel it.

She had professional reservations about this legislation before it passed as did I, and we have both been attacked over that by advocacy groups. A regulator having reservations about implementation is not opposition. It is rigour. And when the law passed anyway, she set those reservations aside, got on with the work, and then went further than required by recommending YouTube one of the most powerful platforms on earth be added to scope. That is not someone undermining a law. That is someone taking it seriously enough to expand it. When you attack the regulator instead of the platforms, Big Tech wins. Every hour Julie Inman Grant and her team spend defending themselves publicly is an hour they are not spending building cases against the companies that have spent billions avoiding accountability.

While this argument plays out loudly, something else is happening. Quietly and relentlessly.

Children are still dying. Not in theory. In real schools, in real communities, where the aftermath is not a post but a funeral, and the question is not who was right but why no one got there in time.

Safer outcomes do not come from noise. They come from discipline, collaboration, and an uncomfortable commitment to doing the work properly, even when that means moving slower than the crowd demands. Enforcement is not a headline. It is a process. Evidence is not a slogan. It is a standard. Real change is not announced. It is built.

Nobody stood at the end of 1971 and declared the seatbelt law a failure because Queensland drivers were still not buckling up. They understood that a law is not the destination. It is the beginning of the work. Australia led the world in 1970 and it took until 1977 to make it real. Not a failure. A process. The most important kind.

I remember the Kingswood. I remember the first car with seatbelts. I remember the grumbling, and exactly how long it took for the grumbling to stop and the buckling up to become automatic, invisible, obvious. We are at the beginning of that same arc.

The people doing their loudest work right now to criticise and derail it are not the smartest voices in the room.

They are just the ones Big Tech is most grateful for.

The Public Service Medal and TIME's Global Health 100 recognition Julie Inman Grant received are a record of long, difficult, and unglamorous work that predates any single law and will outlast any single news cycle. The kind of recognition that arrives after decades of work that does not trend, does not fit inside a post, and does not allow for heroes.

The next hundred days will not be determined by who shouted loudest in the first. They will be determined by whether the people who claim to care about child safety are prepared to do something far less glamorous and far more necessary.

Shut up about ownership. Support the enforcement infrastructure. Direct your energy outward — toward the companies that have spent years and billions avoiding accountability — instead of inward at the regulator standing in their way.

The work has started. The cases are being built in rooms without cameras, at the pace the law permits and the complexity of the targets demands.

Get out of the way. Or better yet........help.

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