Zoe McKenzie

Do we play music now or what do we do?

Hello.

It's so exciting to join you from 16,000 odd kilometres away.

Well, as I think I said, I've been listening to you for years now, like since you were a Brexit cast, right, because Brexit was so interesting for us.

I'd also been working in global trade for a long time.

So, of course, it meant, you know, a new potential free trade agreement that ultimately was signed.

And so what Brexit meant in terms of global trading partner, in terms of, you know, reconnecting some of our bonds, I think, with the United Kingdom was really interesting here for Australia.

And so I listened to you all through the Brexit cast years and now back to newscast.

It sometimes feels two steps forward, one step back, insofar as it was a long time coming.

I mentioned to you in my email that I had first raised this as an issue in September of 2022.

We'd just come off the back of COVID.

My hometown of Melbourne had had particularly strict lockdowns over a period of two and three years, and I could see

in my own stepkids, in my friends' kids, the impact that too much screening, and in particular, too much social media was having on kids.

I think it started a long conversation in the Australian Parliament, which then I think in a similar kind of weird political twist,

Our leader of our conservative party, so the Liberal Party, came out and said, right, we're going to do something on this, which then forced the government to have a good hard look at it.

They eventually did an inquiry and an investigation into what was going on and then said we will move to ban and then gave the platforms 12 months'

to actually implement a system to ensure 16-year-olds would be not entirely de-platformed, but de-accounted.

They couldn't have accounts anymore.

You can still be on the platforms through a web browser portal if you want to go onto TikTok and things like that.

But we figured it was the account that drove the algorithmic push