Too young for TikTok, old enough for jail: How a meaner Australia treats its kids

At the end of year 4, I said goodbye to my classmates and my teacher. I was a little sad, a little excited: the next year, I was to change schools. The new year began, and I entered a new world. Lunchtime was handball against the wall or cricket, the wickets metal bins. I didn’t get on with my new teacher. Two kids made my life difficult: they’d be nice to me and then they wouldn’t. And I made a new best friend.

I summon this because I have been trying to remember what it was like to be 10. In much of Australia, that is the age at which you may be judged criminally responsible for your actions. New laws in Queensland, introduced last week under a slogan chilling in its childishness – “adult crime, adult time” – mean 10-year-olds will now be sentenced as adults if they commit certain offences.

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Because youth detention centres are crowded, children are sometimes held in “watch houses” alongside adults. In 2019, the ABC’s Four Corners reported on some of the children held in these horrible places. A boy who had “the cognitive function of someone younger than six years old”. A boy who said he had been held, alone, for 23 days was “worried about his birthday being forgotten”. A girl “placed in a pod with two alleged male sex offenders”.

Last week, Queensland’s government released a legally required statement on the laws’ impacts. Because it has to be, the statement is shockingly honest. The laws mean more children could be held in watchhouses for “extended periods of time” despite the fact “watchhouses are not appropriate or humane places in which to detain children”. And there will be a greater impact on Indigenous children.

“I accept” – this is the Attorney-General Deb Frecklington – “that the amendments are in conflict with international standards regarding the best interests of the child with respect to children in the justice system, and are therefore incompatible with human rights.”

There is horrible irony in the fact this legislation was introduced in the same week as Anthony Albanese’s government passed laws banning kids under 16 from social media. This leads to a point widely made on platforms such as X, but not discussed nearly enough in national media. If you are between 10 and 16, this is the way our country now treats you: you are not old enough to use TikTok, but you are old enough to be convicted as an adult.

These contradictory laws do have one thing in common: a disturbing lack of evidence behind their introduction. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli campaigned on the basis of a “youth crime epidemic”. In fact, as the ABC has documented, youth crime is around historic lows; and experts say these new laws won’t help and that they may make things worse.

The social media laws are more arguable; some researchers claim there are links between youth mental health problems and social media use. But others point to problems with this claimed evidence, including countries where youth suicides have fallen dramatically.

In both cases, governments seem to be responding more to a vibe than to facts. Vibes are by their nature vague, so forgive me for speculating as to how that vibe might be described. Is it a sense of low-key, spreading threat? A quietly simmering grumpiness?

Which perhaps is the background against which to understand the two phrases that arose in recent days. In federal parliament, the opposition said the government was taking Australia in the “wrong direction”. Meanwhile, Albanese told voters “we have your back”. In one sense, this is just a variation on the line Albanese used at the last election: that Labor is “on your side”. The new line – which originated in the government’s pitch for its social media ban – has a more paternalistic sense to it: the feeling of protection being offered.

It is also more concrete than the government’s other recent effort, “building Australia’s future”. In this, it matched the government’s achievements in the parliament last week. Albanese seemed to be right at the centre of proceedings: as he told the ABC on Sunday, “I was negotiating across the parliament”. There was a clear recognition, one that has not always been apparent, that a government has enormous power and can use it. Albanese held out against the Greens, demanding that various bills be passed, and they were.

On Reserve Bank reforms, where before the government had seemed too nervous to pass them without the Coalition’s stamp of approval, the government now declared the Coalition had dealt itself out and so it worked with the Greens. In a crazy week, the government got quite a bit done – a fact evident in the prime minister’s newly assertive public manner.

At the same time, the various bills abandoned by the government seemed to speak to that background hum of discontent and how easily it could tip into political danger. Nature laws that might offend voters in Western Australia were gone (well, postponed – we’ll see); gambling ad laws were deemed too difficult; the impossibility of passing superannuation changes was accepted, at least for now.

The final thing worth noting is the harsh set of migration laws that were passed. When Liberal shadow ministers claimed they were “basically running the immigration system for the government”, they were exaggerating – but still, it had the ring of truth.

Politically, you can understand Labor ducking trouble. Inflation has constrained the government this term and continues to do so. But the greater concern for us all should be the way in which inflation is creating a dark undercurrent of irritability in the electorate that is leading to changes in our laws. As our governments move to harshly penalise children and those who arrive from other countries, the real danger is that a temporary political situation leads to a permanently meaner Australia.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.