Last week I was in Adelaide. Someone put me up at a hotel – I’ve been promoting my Quarterly Essay, you might recall me mentioning it – and it was sufficiently old-school that they offered the luxury of newspapers with breakfast. The front page of Adelaide’s tabloid was about the government’s social media ban. A 14-year-old had been recognised, by Snapchat, as a 24-year-old.

My breakfast companion asked me if the story would have worried me when I was a political staffer. Yes, I said, because that’s politics: the media points out problems, you do your best either to fix them or explain why it’s not really a problem.

Illustration by Jozsef BenkeCredit:

But, I added, I shouldn’t have been worried. I recalled one of my favourite Paul Keating quotes, that in politics you want to be like the roadrunner: announcing policies, burning up the road behind you. This particular front page, technically negative, was actually a pointer to something useful for the government. Its policy was being discussed. People would have no doubt the government was actually doing something.

You could say the same, in a different way, about the government’s environmental reforms. I’m not convinced most Australians noticed; and it is unclear yet how important they will be. But the laws dominated political discussion for........

© The Sydney Morning Herald