Was a little too young to have paid much attention at the time but I remember the cultural vibe thanks to Yothu Yindi etc. Lesson in politics came with the way his call for recognition was framed as a call for “white guilt”, which Keating explicitly rejected, but is still used today in order to polarise and poison the debate.

Getting a 404 on the link, at least in Firefox. Seems to need the number at the end:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/anz-nab-and-bigger-for-you-bendigos-ever-bigger-greed,20151

Just watched it and yeah, that’s an even more depressing picture of how it was covered. The headlines I’d seen were:

“Social media age verification possible but laden with risks, landmark study warns” (ABC)

“Trial of tech that could be used to keep Australian under-16s off social media finds some errors ‘inevitable’” (Guardian)

Those stories at least didn’t just parrot the government’s spin - trouble is they made the study sound more sceptical/balanced than it is and didn’t question its credibility.

Haven’t seen much scrutiny over the “landmark” report released by the government a couple of weeks ago which forms the basis for the practical implementation of this system.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/age-assurance-technology-trial-final-report

It’s not an academic study from a trusted institution or even just an established think tank, but from an organisation that sort of popped up out of nowhere some years ago which appears to provide paid certification services for age assurance companies, while also evidently offering “research” for governments on the viability of implementing these schemes. They’d previously done a similar report for the UK government, which makes me rather cynical about our government’s motivations in choosing them. The news reporting on its release was a bit strange as it made it sound like the report was quite sceptical, but you don’t need to spend much time looking at it to see it’s very much telling the government what it wanted to hear (given they’d already committed to implementing such a scheme).

The companies people will be required to provide their documents/biometrics to also kind of popped up out of nowhere, and these are the sorts of folks behind them: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/07/31/the-online-safety-act-is-forcing-brits-to-hand-over-personal-data-to-unregulated-overseas-corporations-with-questionable-privacy-records/

https://www.ethical.org.au/ has info on company ownership.

Wouldn’t be surprised to hear about Australian officials having profound misgivings around AUKUS behind closed doors, but our defence policy in recent years threw so many more eggs into the US alliance basket that it’s become “too big to fail” and “too late to change”, while our politics are stuck in such a narrow comfort zone (e.g. tax increases being taboo) that the changing conditions are likely to be met with a state of denial or crossing of fingers rather than bold adaptation.