Luxon is not leading. He is floundering to achieve ‘something’ that might resemble leadership. But what he’s delivering is symbolic action dressed up as governance – hollow in conception and dangerous in its implications.
The bill itself is textbook enforcement-first governance. It criminalises youth, empowers criminal actors and externalises harm under the guise of protection. It assumes that technical enforcement – via age verification and platform compliance – will suppress demand: it won’t; it will redirect it. And gangs, scammers and exploiters will fill the vacuum. Frankly, it won’t work.
Luxon’s promise to pass the bill before Christmas is not a sign of leadership – it is desperation. It reveals a midwit’s grasp of infrastructure and is shallow, reactive and brought about by herd moral panic. VPNs will bypass it with consummate ease.
VPNs – Virtual Private Networks – are not fringe tools. They are a foundational infrastructure that encrypts internet traffic and masks the user’s location. Originally developed for secure enterprise access, VPNs now underpin remote work, academic research, civic participation and personal privacy. In the context of Luxon’s bill, they are the obvious workaround: youth will use them to bypass age gates and geographic restrictions. But, more critically, any attempt to restrict VPNs will criminalise privacy itself. That’s not protection: it’s infrastructural authoritarianism.
But here’s the deeper problem: when this bill fails in implementation – even if it passes and they spend millions trying to make it work, as will inevitably happen under legacy management – the logic of enforcement doesn’t collapse. It escalates. Luxon’s Government will not admit the legislation was flawed in conception. Instead, it will claim the failure was one of compliance, loopholes or technical evasion. And from that claim will emerge the next desperate round of legislation: more invasive, more dangerous and more censorious. It is a fool’s cascade.
We already have a directional lead. In several jurisdictions overseas, including parts of Europe and Asia, governments have begun floating or enacting laws that restrict encrypted services, mandate platforms to provide backdoors or criminalise circumvention tools. And these are increasingly common responses to the same kind of moral panic Luxon is now indulging.
This is a legislative cancer and typical of how, from small things, more legislation grows. First, you criminalise access. Then you criminalise the tools that bypass access. Then you criminalise the knowledge of those tools. And, finally, you criminalise the refusal to comply. It’s not a slippery slope, but a treadmill. And Sisyphus Luxon has already taken the first step.
The irony is that the bill’s failure is visible in its design. As previously described, it offers no restorative pathways, no educational alternatives and no trust systems – just control. And that control is brittle. It relies on the assumption that adolescents will comply, that platforms will self-police and that criminal actors will be deterred by regulation. None of these assumptions hold. In reality, enforcement will be patchy, circumvention will be rampant and the most vulnerable users – those already at risk of social isolation or exploitation – will be pushed further into informal, unsafe or alternative digital spaces.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen in other domains – climate, housing, even the pandemic response: a failure to understand the system, followed by a rush to legislate and then a cascade of unintended consequences. You would think he’d think but Luxon’s approach to digital governance follows the same arc. He does not interrogate the frameworks he inherits. He does not understand the infrastructure he seeks to regulate. And he does not appear to grasp the long-tail consequences of symbolic legislation.
This is cosplay politics. It is the simulation of leadership without the substance. It is the performance of decisiveness without the burden of understanding. And it is precisely the kind of governance that New Zealand cannot afford.
There is a better way. I repeat that platforms could adopt ambient automation – non-invasive, behaviour-based moderation that guides youth engagement without ID mandates. Civic-first digital ecosystems could be designed to support federated moderation, restorative justice and contextual nuance. Gosh – Chris – we could even map in the role of parents. But that requires imagination. And imagination is precisely what this bill lacks.
Luxon has an opportunity to lead – not by copying other countries’ punitive models, but by rejecting them; by recognising that enforcement-first governance is not just ineffective, but actively harmful; by designing infrastructure that protects without criminalising, moderates without surveilling and engages without coercing.
The current bill does none of that. Unless it is radically rethought – or preferably abandoned – it will create more problems than it solves and set the stage for even worse legislation to follow.
Dr Michael John Schmidt left NZ after completing postgraduate studies at Otago University (BSc, MSc) in molecular biology, virology, and immunology to work in research on human genetics in Australia. Returning to NZ has worked in business development for biotech and pharmacy retail companies and became a member of the NZ Institute of Directors. This article was first published HERE
Luxon’s promise to pass the bill before Christmas is not a sign of leadership – it is desperation. It reveals a midwit’s grasp of infrastructure and is shallow, reactive and brought about by herd moral panic. VPNs will bypass it with consummate ease.
VPNs – Virtual Private Networks – are not fringe tools. They are a foundational infrastructure that encrypts internet traffic and masks the user’s location. Originally developed for secure enterprise access, VPNs now underpin remote work, academic research, civic participation and personal privacy. In the context of Luxon’s bill, they are the obvious workaround: youth will use them to bypass age gates and geographic restrictions. But, more critically, any attempt to restrict VPNs will criminalise privacy itself. That’s not protection: it’s infrastructural authoritarianism.
But here’s the deeper problem: when this bill fails in implementation – even if it passes and they spend millions trying to make it work, as will inevitably happen under legacy management – the logic of enforcement doesn’t collapse. It escalates. Luxon’s Government will not admit the legislation was flawed in conception. Instead, it will claim the failure was one of compliance, loopholes or technical evasion. And from that claim will emerge the next desperate round of legislation: more invasive, more dangerous and more censorious. It is a fool’s cascade.
We already have a directional lead. In several jurisdictions overseas, including parts of Europe and Asia, governments have begun floating or enacting laws that restrict encrypted services, mandate platforms to provide backdoors or criminalise circumvention tools. And these are increasingly common responses to the same kind of moral panic Luxon is now indulging.
This is a legislative cancer and typical of how, from small things, more legislation grows. First, you criminalise access. Then you criminalise the tools that bypass access. Then you criminalise the knowledge of those tools. And, finally, you criminalise the refusal to comply. It’s not a slippery slope, but a treadmill. And Sisyphus Luxon has already taken the first step.
The irony is that the bill’s failure is visible in its design. As previously described, it offers no restorative pathways, no educational alternatives and no trust systems – just control. And that control is brittle. It relies on the assumption that adolescents will comply, that platforms will self-police and that criminal actors will be deterred by regulation. None of these assumptions hold. In reality, enforcement will be patchy, circumvention will be rampant and the most vulnerable users – those already at risk of social isolation or exploitation – will be pushed further into informal, unsafe or alternative digital spaces.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen in other domains – climate, housing, even the pandemic response: a failure to understand the system, followed by a rush to legislate and then a cascade of unintended consequences. You would think he’d think but Luxon’s approach to digital governance follows the same arc. He does not interrogate the frameworks he inherits. He does not understand the infrastructure he seeks to regulate. And he does not appear to grasp the long-tail consequences of symbolic legislation.
This is cosplay politics. It is the simulation of leadership without the substance. It is the performance of decisiveness without the burden of understanding. And it is precisely the kind of governance that New Zealand cannot afford.
There is a better way. I repeat that platforms could adopt ambient automation – non-invasive, behaviour-based moderation that guides youth engagement without ID mandates. Civic-first digital ecosystems could be designed to support federated moderation, restorative justice and contextual nuance. Gosh – Chris – we could even map in the role of parents. But that requires imagination. And imagination is precisely what this bill lacks.
Luxon has an opportunity to lead – not by copying other countries’ punitive models, but by rejecting them; by recognising that enforcement-first governance is not just ineffective, but actively harmful; by designing infrastructure that protects without criminalising, moderates without surveilling and engages without coercing.
The current bill does none of that. Unless it is radically rethought – or preferably abandoned – it will create more problems than it solves and set the stage for even worse legislation to follow.
Dr Michael John Schmidt left NZ after completing postgraduate studies at Otago University (BSc, MSc) in molecular biology, virology, and immunology to work in research on human genetics in Australia. Returning to NZ has worked in business development for biotech and pharmacy retail companies and became a member of the NZ Institute of Directors. This article was first published HERE
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