Perspective with Ryan Bridge: We're not solving the big problems, and we don't want to

I’ve had it with people running around pretending we’re going to solve big global problems.

Australia’s banning kids from social media on Wednesday. They’re going to lead the world.

Sounds very appealing. Stop the brain rot, etc.

Except kids will be kids and will get around it.

They’ll do this the same way I was able to use Facebook in China—despite the big firewall—by using a VPN. You just log in to an app and piggyback off another country’s internet.

Or they might get a fake ID, or set up a fake account in another jurisdiction.

Good luck with this actually working.

Same goes for climate change. Remember when we were once world-leading?

Well, the problem with being world-leading is that you actually need others to follow. Otherwise, you’re not world-leading—you’re just an anomaly.

What’s the point in stopping your cows from burping if the Aussies keep mining, the Chinese keep burning coal, and the Saudis keep drilling for oil?

Climate change and the internet pose similar problems because they are global in nature. And because they are global in nature, you need kumbaya from all corners of the globe to address them.

Look how that’s working out for the UN. It doesn’t.

The truth is this: if we really wanted to solve these problems, the quickest, most effective way would be individual action.

We could, each and every one of us, tomorrow, take phones off children and put them in the bin.

We could walk to work and stop driving our cars.

But we won’t.

A poll out of Australia says 70% of parents support the ban. Guess how many said, in the very same poll, they would actually enforce it on their own children?

Less than a third.

It’s that same logic that has seen the Ford Ranger ute—a gas guzzler, big macho bull of an A-to-B—be the top-selling vehicle in this country for the past ten years running.

And that’s the real problem with these global issues: governments make a big song and dance, but fundamentally, individually, we don’t actually see them as real problems, do we?

Ryan Bridge is a New Zealand broadcaster who has worked on many current affairs television and radio shows. He currently hosts Newstalk ZB's Early Edition - where this article was sourced.