[budududuroiu]

If Australia genuinely wanted to improve the lives of its children, it would first tackle the loopholes in its child support scheme [1].

But then again, as with Chat Control and other such schemes, “save the children” is used to usher in breaking of all citizens’ privacy. I bet Aus is insanely jealous of China’s mandatory ID checks on their superapps

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/08/single-paren...

[BLKNSLVR]

I was having a similar conversation yesterday, and my stance is that the political grand-standing like this is worse than doing nothing because it gives the populace the sense that something is being done, although very little is likely to change. Resources are being applied far from optimally. Funding that could be useful is being spent on the useless. As such, it's taking things in the wrong direction whilst still costing more than what previously existed and also impinging on other areas of literally everyone else's lives.

I believe that acting locally, funding child protection services, providing more boots on the ground, is actual progress (I mean, these organisations are literally called "child protection services", who else better, then?)

I've mentioned this a number of times before: my wife is a teacher and therefore has 'mandatory reporting' responsibilities. The frustration is that, with the resources currently available, they're only able to intervene where a child's life is in immediate danger.

I'm not sure if the bar could be any lower.

I should also make the disclaimer that what I know is second-hand information from my wife, and may be out of date and / or biased due to frustrations due to the misalignment between 'mandatory reporting' and 'what can actually be done'.

[BrenBarn]

> my stance is that the political grand-standing like this is worse than doing nothing because it gives the populace the sense that something is being done, although very little is likely to change.

I mostly agree with this. Unfortunately I think it is also true of a lot of activist tactics (e.g., big protests), which seem to be more about making their participants feel good than about producing genuine results. It's human nature to lose interest in things when there is no crisis, and to be vulnerable to misdirection.

It's like the old joke about how there's no good time to fix the roof, because when it's raining you can't fix it, and when it's not raining you don't need to fix it. Of course, you have to fix it when it's not raining. Likewise the only real way to avoid this "sense of something being done" is to push sizable changes at a moment when no one thinks they are urgent, and that's often difficult to accomplish.

[chii]

Whenever a measure is instroduced in law to austensibly "protect the children", it's just merely an appeal to emotion and in fact, is not meant to do what is being advertised.

It certainly is meant to increase the power of law enforcement, gov't overreach, and intrusion. It is used to add a chilling effect on any sort of dissent.

The same could be said for any measures to protect you from "the terrorists".

[johnisgood]

Yeah, it has never been about saving the children, or fight terrorism. It has been about control and power. People should read more about Austrian economics / Mises, because despite what their preconceived thoughts may suggest, everyone who thinks this is a bad idea, will like what they will read on Mises' website.

Books like "Anatomy of the State" by Rothbard, "Basic Economics" by Sowell, "The Left, The Right, & The State" by L. H. Rockwell, Jr. or "Lessons for the Young Economist" by Bob Murphy are quite nice. Heck, I would even suggest "The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat.

You do not have to read books however, you can check blog posts.

Website can be found here: https://mises.org. You are looking for "Wire" and "Beginners". Make sure to use the search functionality though, there are a lot of very specific subjects that are "irrelevant" to this case.

[SXX]

Well, childcare is easy to measure. It's easy to see whatever it sufficient or not so it's a bad topic for politicians.

But you can “save the children” as many times as you want and there will always be another thing to save them from. And it's impossible to measure because obviously you can't go and ask children what they do on internet or what inappropriate content they found intentionally or not.

So perfect topic to work with even without conspiracy to invade grown ups privacy.