When Wokeness Comes Home to Roost

I have written several times about specific moments that we have been encouraged, by government and media, to accept authoritarian over-reach by the use of unsympathetic targets. For instance, we were invited to celebrate Strike Force Raptor interfering with a group of Neo-Nazis on Australia Day 2024: and since nobody sympathises with Neo-Nazis, this sounds like a good thing until you realise that these same police use these same powers to harass young Samoan musicians in Mt Druitt, and their families, even when said musicians are interstate or in New Zealand. Not exactly protecting the local community.

I also pointed out that in South Australia, laws designed to keep people behind bars automatically even after they had finished their sentences were being backed by both sides of parliament because they were aimed at another unsympathetic group, pedophiles. Except it didn’t stop with pedophiles, with the ABC - not some trumpeter of ideological extremism on the left or right, but the ABC - immediately pushing for similar treatment of an accomplice to the “bodies in barrels” killers. Not the killers themselves, but an accomplice - because once authoritarians have a taste of power, they always want more.

And all this only months after the High Court struck down 20 years of precedent for keeping stateless unlawful non-citizens in detention indefinitely, a problem the media had forgotten about.

Nazis, pedophiles, boat-people who committed crimes on arrival. You might think, quite legitimately, “one of those groups is not like the others”. The point is, many people who will look at any or all of those groups - and many others - and think, “I don’t care what happens to people like that. Serves them right”.

As long as the people targeted for having their rights violated are our most unsympathetic there are always governments of both persuasions ready to violate their rights. And rights, once lost by one group, are lost by everybody - the courts will not distinguish.

In that same article I traced the way that children’s rights were being endlessly eroded in Queensland, to the extent of having the Human Rights Act suspended to allow it, and made a joke about how they should be tried as adults anyway. I then had to swallow my humour a year later when the current Queensland government ran, and won, on exactly this platform - “Adult Crime, Adult Time” - again supported by the other side of politics.

Today’s “give us these powers and we’ll only use them on Nazis and pedophiles!” is tomorrow’s laws used against children. These are merely the examples I’ve personally written about, there are so many others (spit hoods designed for terrorists being used on children in Don Dale also comes to mind).

The example I am looking at today is an even more insidious one, because it is something that has initially arisen from the margins rather than being imposed by the usual suspects of politicians / police / media. Otherwise, it follows the established pattern - teenagers targeted, the Queensland government passing the laws.

The ABC reported last week that Queensland were proposing laws to allow police to move along “troublemakers” from “designated public spaces”, again under the “Adult Crime, Adult Time” policy. Public hearings are ongoing.

I put not only “troublemakers” in inverted commas - a group of teens would be regarded as troublemakers, a group of politicians and journalists colluding to erode our rights wouldn’t - but also, “designated public spaces” because this is a new designation that the law will create: “business and community precincts” where the police can just move people along not because you have done anything wrong, but because you just don’t look like you should be there. Like you might be a troublemaker.

Now you might think, again legitimately, that this has been going on for years, and again you would be right. For decades, “business precincts” have overtaken things like the village green or town square as places where people congregate. More particularly, in many modern suburbs, the shopping centre or its equivalent is specifically designed to be the centre of the community through town planning. The thinking behind this has many names - Mixed-Use Urbanism, or Activity Centre Planning, or Transit Oriented Development (think Macarthur Square, Castle Towers or Parramatta Westfield, all with train station access integrated into the shopping complex). The result is the same - a community where the housing radiates out from the shopping precinct at the centre.

A precinct that is designed to draw people in, to be the centre of the community.

And so the local youth go and hang out there - such suburbs often have little else to do - and the teens make noise or generally act like “troublemakers”, and the police respond to a problem that was, essentially, designed to occur. There is a whole literature on the subject of these “quasi-public spaces”; how to achieve them (here), what effect they have on crime (here) and the impact on the kids themselves (here).

There is also “hostile architecture” - those park benches designed to stop the homeless sleeping on them - but we don’t need to revisit all that now. Today’s issue is the pretexts being used to target these supposed troublemakers.

And these include that the person targeted - I can’t even say they are the “alleged perpetrator”, because they haven’t been accused of a crime - are causing anxiety.

To whom? Well, the article identifies, “Shoppers, staff and security guards”.

And the change to existing laws (which already allow police to maintain public order by moving people along in specific situations) is that they don’t need any approval from a senior officer when they are inside one of these zones. Moreover, refusing to comply will now be a fine of “over $6600”. The police are said to be embracing the laws as it will allow them to deescalate problems before they spiral out of control.

Of course the ABC ain’t fer it, they’re agin it, and quickly trot out some experts to complain. We are told that this will target Aborigines. Youths. The homeless. Homeless youths. Youths sleeping rough - victims of the housing crisis.

And they are right. But the objections ring hollow.

Youth Advocacy Centre chief executive Katherine Hayes said making somebody uncomfortable should not be a sufficient reason for police enforcement.

“We are concerned about the low threshold for the move-on laws, that is the threshold of ‘causing anxiety,’” Ms Hayes said.

And the problem here is that the main reason that anyone would regard “causing anxiety” as an actionable issue is that this position has been deliberately and systematically pushed for the past decade, by those whom we colloquially refer to as ‘woke’.

It appears in online safety legislation. Anti‑bullying frameworks. Hate‑speech laws. School discipline policies. Workplace safety standards.

A concrete example of this is the contentious Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, designed to restrict under‑16s from social media: in part due to claims that online content contributes to anxiety and mental‑health harms. The Australian Human Rights Commission explicitly noted that the primary reason for introducing the ban was protection from harm: “Restricting access will help to safeguard [under-16s’] psychological and emotional well-being.”

Again, these are legitimate concerns. But when we pass laws to protect some people’s emotional well-being, then we should not be surprised when laws to protect other people’s emotional well-being from us are also passed.

And of course, if someone’s emotional well-being needs to be legally protected, then the issue becomes, from whom, and what do we do to curtail their actions. Protecting a ‘victim’ means identifying and pursuing an ‘offender’.

The core problem is the use of anxiety and discomfit as a regulatory trigger, as Ms Hayes identified above. It is subjective, and it takes an internal experience - an emotional reaction - and externalises it into an act of criminal culpability by an outside agent.

On this particular issue, the more we explore, the worse the contradictions get. An article looking at the media ban, analysing it through the lens of a moral panic, said the following:

The relationship between social media use and youth mental health is complex and contested. Some studies have identified correlations between heavy use and increased risks of anxiety, depression, and poor sleep quality (Twenge et al., 2018; Keles et al., 2020). However, meta-analyses and longitudinal studies have found these claims to be minimal and highly variable between individual young people (Heffer et al., 2018; Orben, 2020). Crucially, harm is not evenly distributed, with factors such as socio-economic status, gender, sexuality, disability, and geographic isolation mediating both the risks and benefits of online engagement (Livingstone & Third, 2017).

So the identified issue of anxiety - a concern for every parent with children on the net - applies mostly to specific groups including people (teens in this case) who feel ‘different’ because of poverty, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

And while those groups of teens themselves are blameless, they have been advocated for by others with political agendas, who have actively promoted the claim that their specific group’s anxiety is the result of other people’s criminal behaviour.

Not alleviating the wealth gap by aggressive seizure and redistribution.

Not using certain pronouns.

Not respecting an invented-5-minutes-ago gender or sexual orientation.

Perpetrating ‘ableism’ (a term that, in 31 years in the disability field, I have NEVER heard a person with a disability use, but which defines the left-leaning discourse around disabilities).

And this language has gone on for years - to the extent that to make protected groups uncomfortable with your speech is, in too many jurisdictions (such as the UK), a hate crime.

Most places such as Ireland, Canada and New Zealand (who have enacted such laws) maintain a higher bar than just anxiety - alarm or distress, for instance - which puts Queensland down the very bottom, alongside the shameful behaviour of the United Kingdom.

Yet where is the outcry? There is none, because the target was not a famous comedian, internet personality or even an autistic child who would invoke our sympathies and outrage.

It’s a bunch of teens, possibly Aboriginal, possibly homeless. The sort of people we may not want to see when we are out shopping. The sort of people that might make us a little uncomfortable with swearing or hooligan behaviour, or simply by their presence because of crime statistics or our own vulnerability.

This may have begun with woke nonsense, and we may feel schadenfreude to see their own tactics used against a group they would otherwise want to protect, but rights are for everyone, and when anyone’s rights are transgressed, we should not stay silent

Everywhere we see people’s rights being eroded. Parents losing the right to raise their children as they see fit, due to government overreach. Children losing the right to know their father, the right to agency, the right to life. Everyone having their freedom of speech constantly attacked. And men’s rights under threat pretty much across the board.

Even the most basic fundamental rights of the justice system, like the presumption of innocence, the right to remain silent, the right to face your accuser, and the right to provide character references, are all under attack.

So when we see people’s rights being attacked, we need to at least recognise it, even if the group - such as a bunch of teenagers - seem to have nothing to do with us. On the contrary, we might be next.

No matter who ‘we’ is!