Also worth noting: (some of) those outside Australia seem largely to be responsible for the rise in One Nation popularity, by automated bot farms spreading racist lies on social media.

They are polling uncomfortably high, which puts them way too close to power. Worth taking seriously in order to effectively combat them.

Stop penalising teens for wanting to socialise.

Stop demanding we identify ourselves to unaccountable private actors, merely to socialise.

Instead: Penalise the platform corporations that make an environment friendly to predators, abusers, scammers, and extractionists.

Keep penalising those corporations, until they learn to stop. Or go out of business because their business model is incompatible with our wellbeing.

For one thing, I want our society to welcome children, not dehumanise them as “semen demon”.

We don’t have enough people now that want to help. Go to any nursing home and see that we need to import the help.

Don’t want to help? At the pay rates and job conditions on offer, that’s right.

An obvious solution is to raise the offered pay (by whatever means; the government can certainly afford to subsidise this) and improve the job conditions (by regulation enforcing proper treatment of workers).

There are plenty of people already here willing to work, if the work is properly remunerated and stable and dignified. If the job is worth doing – as we both agree it is – then let’s show that, by making it feasible for plenty of people to have a dignified life doing that work.

Because we all need help as we get older.

Yes, we do. Why do we need more births for that?

There are still plenty of people being born, and growing up and entering the work force as adults. We (i.e. society, i.e. whoever holds the purse strings) can offer better pay and better job conditions for those workers, so that it’s a more appealing career for the people who will already be looking for jobs.

Better help for the people who will be born anyway. Not pushing for more births.

GDP merely measures the sum of economic transactions (“activity”) during a period.

It is blind to the distinction between socially beneficial activity (preventing illness, educating children) versus socially harmful activity (selling tobacco, mining cryptocurrency); all of that counts as positive GDP.

It is blind to anything (e.g. doing your own housework, raising your own children, growing your own food, reducing your consumption of stuff generally) which can’t be measured in financial transactions.

GDP is always a useless measure if we’re interested in what’s good for a society.

But it’s pretty good for measuring how wealthy stock market gamblers are feeling. So, for as long as our political leaders represent those interests and not ours, GDP persists.