The bill is emblematic of a political habit spreading faster than any viral video: “the quick fix”.
Wedd’s proposal would force companies to verify users’ ages. On paper, it sounds firm and decisive: Government finally standing up to Big Tech, backing up anxious parents.
But in practice, this supposed solution to parental anxiety is deeply flawed. Age-verification systems either rely on intrusive data collection or are easily gamed.
Dr Eric Crampton from the New Zealand Initiative submitted to Parliament’s Inquiry into the Harm Young New Zealanders Encounter Online claiming any workable system unavoidably faces a tri-lemma:
“Practicable ways of implementing a social-media age limit would result in at least one of three undesirable outcomes: under-age users will evade the system; over-age users will face burdensome verification; or privacy and pseudonymity will be compromised.”
Pick your poison: failure, friction, or surveillance.
And even if the technology worked – experience overseas suggests it won’t – the principle doesn’t. Banning access mistakes absence for safety.
Young people find connection, creativity, and community online. Driving them off mainstream platforms won’t make them safer; it threatens to make them feel invisible.
Other submissions to the inquiry made similar points.
Pillar NZ, a new civil-liberties group, warned that blanket bans “won’t protect children and will erode freedom and privacy”, creating more problems than they solve.
Internet NZ (where I serve on the board) argued that simply driving young people off social media is a blunt response to a complex issue. When the goal is child safety, the means can’t be digital exile.
The deeper problem, though, isn’t this bill itself but the reflex it represents. We now legislate anxiety.
Confronted with complex social problems, our first instinct is to reach for a law that makes us feel better, not one that works better. Our political attention span barely allows us to name the problem accurately, let alone check whether the cure has done any good.
False simplicity isn’t confined to social media policy. Housing? Another tax. Youth crime? Lock ’em up. Climate change? Blame cows or cars, depending on your audience. And obviously, ban gas, the “transition fuel”.
The pattern is the same: declare the crisis, announce the cure, move on before the results come in. We legislate like we’re tweeting: short, emotive, and desperate to be shared. In reaching for a simplistic emotional fix, we’re modelling the very impulses we claim to fear for our children online.
Children learn well but imitate excellently: they grow by copying us. Is this bill the ultimate example of “do as I say, not as I do”? Are politicians, of all people, really the ones we should be taking advice from about how to engage online?
This is the politics of reassurance, not responsibility. It substitutes symbolic action for substantive change and, worse, keeps shifting responsibility upwards: from citizens to the state, from parents to Parliament.
That’s where subsidiarity matters, a crucial feature of any healthy democracy.
The concept of subsidiarity means decisions should be made by the smallest, most local, most competent unit possible: families first, communities next, local government after that, and only then the central state.
Each level exists to support, not replace, the one beneath it. It’s how a free society stays both ordered and alive.
We’re losing that. When the first instinct is to ask Wellington to decide whether your 15-year-old can have a TikTok account, the concept of subsidiarity is on life support, and the implications for democracy are grim.
A politics of responsibility would look different. It would expect each level of society to do what it can before turning to the one above it.
Parents would set rules and talk to their kids. Schools would teach digital literacy. Communities would share wisdom and support. Platforms would be held to fair standards of design. Government would step in only when those layers fail.
That’s not naive; it’s how society functions when it’s working well. It’s also the balance the Inquiry into Online Harm is at least trying to strike: understand the problem before declaring it solved.
Its call for shared responsibility, between Government, business, and society, deserves to be taken seriously.
Catherine Wedd’s bill, like so many others, short-circuits that structure. It asks the state to do what families can do better, and in doing so, weakens both.
If parents are no longer trusted to decide whether their child is ready for social media, we’ve already surrendered the principle that keeps Government limited and citizenship strong.
You can’t bubble-wrap your way to maturity. What our children need online is not isolation from risk but the resilience to navigate it wisely. That doesn’t emerge from a blunt ban. It begins at home – and that’s where politics, properly ordered, should begin too.
Good policy and good parenting share the same virtue: they set boundaries without pretending risk can be eliminated. This approach is slower, more patient, and far less glamorous than a ban.
Whether governing a society or raising a child, we have to accept that there are no absolute protections, only better preparations.
When we lose faith in the capacity of those we’re responsible for to make good decisions, authoritarianism fills the gap; in politics as in parenting.
If we can’t retain subsidiarity in something as basic as parents deciding whether their own children can be on social media, then the concept itself is dead. And when that happens, a society capable of self-government dies a little with it.
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