A month ago, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said her proposed changes to social media laws would help parents decide what they should allow their kids to do. The new rules would “help signal a set of normative values that supports parents”.

Last week, making the case for those laws, Anthony Albanese conceded they wouldn’t work every time. “It’s like the ban on buying alcohol for under-18s – this weekend chances are there’ll be someone under-18 … who will get access to alcohol. That doesn’t mean that society doesn’t show its values by having that law in place.”

Illustration: Joe Benke Credit:

This echoed something the prime minister had said the week before: “What this will do is send a social message about what society thinks is appropriate”.

Social message. Normative values. Society’s values. You could, cynically, frame all this as pre-empting the fact the laws are unlikely to work – which is an argument being made strongly in some quarters.

But what is at least as interesting is the way in which Albanese is correct: in his assertion that governments can play an enormous role in shaping how the rest of us believe our lives should be lived.

Until perhaps quite recently, we have been living through a technocratic age. Experts have been given primacy, politicians say they are “pragmatic” rather than “ideological”, laws are evaluated, at least in part, by whether they will do what leaders claim they will. And so it is interesting to hear this government........

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