The past is no longer a foreign country, as English novelist LP Hartley once asserted.

If you want to see a country where “they do things differently”, as Hartley put it, look around you. The foreign country is here and now, and the familiar country is the one we left behind.

GHETTOES

It’s not just in the sprawling, alien ghettoes that have colonised parts of our cities under the imposed policy of multiculturalism where you will find they “do things differently”.

Nor is it only in the mahogany corridors of corporate giants, where crony capitalists form ruthless oligarchies that stomp on small businesses while purporting to defend “free enterprise”.

Now they even “do things differently” in our federal parliament, where the daily machinations are as detached from the nation’s founding liberal and democratic values as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is from the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

You may, of course, have already noticed that our federal politicians had strayed from the principles they were supposed to uphold.

It was, after all, on vivid display last week when the government bulldozed through legislation that, on the pretence of “protecting children”, armed the government with new powers to stealthily introduce a digital ID system, control social media companies and limit the speech of citizens like you and I who use them daily.

But if you thought that that unedifying display of pseudo-democracy accurately illustrated how out-of-control the government had become, I’m afraid to say you are wrong. It’s worse than that.

The government’s contempt for parliament goes beyond treating it as an inconvenient technicality in the democratic process.

Instead, it’s a smoke screen behind which the real decisions are made. To paraphrase John Lennon, politics is what happens when you’re pretending to debate it in parliament.

Three weeks before a handful of senators rose in parliament to announce deep concerns about the dangers of the Online Safety Amendment Bill, a British company was awarded a $3.8m contract to begin implementing it.

VAIN

So when Alex Antic stood up in the chamber on November 28 and said that the proposed legislation was “another brick in the wall of a social credit system” in Australia, and Victorian Ralph Babet said the Bill was merely a form of “authoritarian digital tyranny”, and Queenslander Matt Canavan said the speed with which the Bill was being rammed through was “not the finest hour” for the Australian parliament, it was all in vain because the government had already started implementing its policy anyway.

In May this year, “National Cabinet” (the secretive forum invented during COVID to legitimise Australia’s creeping authoritarianism) approved $1b of funding to fight “gender-based violence”, which is a euphemism for the popular misconception that all men are potential rapists and wife beaters.

(The truth is, ahem, the sort of thing that is difficult to mention in polite woke company, and easier to solve than Canberra would have us believe.)

Be that as it may, the fight against “gender-based violence” apparently also requires conducting an “age assurance trial” to investigate ways to prevent young men accessing online porn – and thereby later becoming one of the above-mentioned rapists and wife beaters.

On September 10, tenders were invited for companies to conduct a $3.8m “age assurance trial”, and on November 8 the Government announced British company Age Check Certification Services (ACCS) had won the tender.

By then, however, the government had expanded the “age-restricted content” in the trial’s remit to include not just porn but also gambling and “social media”.

RAPISTS

So the government’s plan to protect women from rapists inexplicably expanded to also protect teenagers from Facebook. Weird, wouldn’t you say?

Why the bait and switch, unless there’s something to hide?

ACCS and associated lobbyists are making routine assurances to us conspiracy theorists that they can verify a social media user’s age without resorting to a digital ID.

These include facial recognition that may or may not be circumvented by a $2.59 mask, uploading a photo of a possibly fake driver’s licence, and confirming the internet user is older than 16 by whether their browser history includes visits to baby-boomer nostalgia sites and incontinence-pad suppliers.

Whether you find the industry’s assurances convincing is beside the point. It’s the government’s job, not the industry’s, to persuade us that locking kids out of social media is both workable and not a Trojan horse for tyranny.