With its social media ban, parliament delivers a performance piece ...

With a monumental sense of occasion, Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year committee this week announced its 2024 inductee.

Loosely defined as the creeping feeling that everything on the Internet is getting progressively more awful, and the rest of the world is following suit, "enshittification" was agreed by Macquarie's expert jury to be the word most powerfully evocative of this eventful year.

"Enshittification" (its nested scatological root somehow elegantly confirming that even Australia's dictionary has given up the fight to keep things nice) won out over a couple of close-run competitors. Like "rawdogging", a verb meaning "to embark upon a routine activity without any of the equipment or precautions that activity usually demands, in the hope of going viral online". And "skibidi", a word deriving from an online meme in which a man's head sticks up from a toilet; the word doesn't have a meaning at all, but the meme has a profitable product line and its creator is presently "in talks" for a TV and movie adaptation.

Now, you'd struggle to find a person who'd accuse the Australian parliament of being good at capturing the Zeitgeist. But this week, it rose majestically — almost artistically — to the occasion, with a performance piece of legislative enshittification so acutely rendered it's hard to believe it wasn't planned in collaboration with the Macquarie Dictionary's rawdogging unit.

Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties would come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act was introduced on Thursday and sent off on Friday for thorough scrutiny by the basilisk eye of the Senate's Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, which gave interested parties just 24 hours to get their written submissions in ("Due to the short timeframe of this inquiry, the committee would appreciate submissions being limited to 1-2 pages," advised the committee's secretariat, employing parliament's rare ScreamingForHelpica font).

The public hearing took a couple of hours on Monday. Senators on the committee had until 9am on Tuesday to compile a considered report, which was tabled late that afternoon. But by then, the Coalition had already announced it would back the bill, so it's a done deal.

It'll now become law, even though certain tiny practical details remain sweetly unresolved: Which platforms will be in or out? How do we stop teenagers who are, of course, much better at all of this than anyone with a Senate vote, just finding ways around a ban? Also, who is going to be in charge of extracting $50 million from Elon Musk when some 14-year-old is busted for a series of #MeghanIsTheProblem tweets?

Literalists can rightly point out that this law raises more questions than it answers. Or wonder aloud whether a government that has so luxuriantly bungled the much more straightforward and widely supported proposal to ban online gambling ads quite has the form required to pull off a world-leading legislative manoeuvre of this kind.

We live, however, in a post-detail world.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a few weeks ago that he was "calling time" on the harms social media causes to young people. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The primary use of this legislation — let's not pretend otherwise — is to make it look like our parliament is taking a stand. In an enshittened world of confusion, fear, noise and overwhelm, in which parents of teenagers wake up every day in the sick knowledge that their kids' devices offer a 24-hour portal to enticing, dark and crepuscular places where Mum or Dad can't always follow, the idea of having the government just pass laws to make it all stop is incredibly attractive.

And to be absolutely fair, just having a law that says, "You can't be on social media until you're 16," is something for parents to have in the old back pocket.

In the slippery world of parenting, documentary evidence of police backup is never without value. While we're at it, perhaps we could pass laws decreeing that a pause of 30 minutes after Christmas lunch is mandatory before children are allowed to get in the pool? Or confirming that Mum will absolutely get arrested if you keep switching those internal car lights on and off while she's trying to drive at night?

As an actual piece of legislation that works smoothly to do what it says on the tin, it's … well. It's not that. Even the retired High Court chief justice Robert French, retained to write a legislative social media ban model for South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas (who at least has been thinking about this for longer than five minutes), laced his report with lawyerly caution, noting that there were many complex issues around deciding which platforms would be exempt and how exactly penalties would be enforced.

Doesn't mean it's a bad law! Just means it's possibly not a great one to rush through in the final week of the federal parliament, otherwise known as the week in which everyone loses their minds. Or wakes up next to someone truly alarming, as occurred yesterday when the parliament's objectors to the social media ban lined up to be counted.

Matt Canavan, left, pictured here with Ralph Babet. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

It's not often, in the Senate, that the Greens find themselves in furious agreement with the United Australia Party's Ralph Babet, Pauline Hanson's One Nation, and Coalition right-flankers Matt Canavan and Alex Antic. They all oppose the bill for differing reasons, of course; the Greens don't like the use of young people as performative campaign ballast, while the latter chaps are more worried that the bill opens a side door to online digital IDs, the widely feared horsemen of the Deep State Doompocalypse.

These must be confusing times, incidentally, for Senator Antic, another of whose major fears is children being exposed to sex education in the public system. "If a stranger approached your child in the street to tell them about safe sex, abortion, and pornography, you would call the police," he told the Senate in 2022. "Yet the neo-Marxists in our school systems are determined to proffer these adult concepts and impose their world view onto our children!"

Senator Antic would vote in a second to ban that stuff.

But social media — where 60 per cent of young people encounter actual porn, according to the eSafety Commission, the majority by age 13 … now that's complicated. The senator will cross the floor to oppose the ban.

The last fortnight of the parliament is frequently a time for shifting tides. And this one is shiftier than usual as various political parties get their stories straight for campaign season.

The Greens have moodily dropped their opposition to the government's Build To Rent scheme, and are now reduced to griping about how they got this close to convincing the treasurer to abolish negative gearing.

The government and the opposition are of course difficult to reconcile on many of the thorny problems that confront us as a nation.

Sometimes, however, they are surprisingly capable of smooth collaboration. Especially in the presence of a common enemy or a problem whose persistence serves no-one's political purpose.

This week, for example, the warring sides teamed up to rein in the ballooning costs of aged care. Nobody wants that budgetary nightmare in their in-tray, so they found a way to agree. They also found an unexpected degree of common interest in legislating a new choke-leash on wealthy donors funding independent candidates. Amazing!

But on the question of legislative caps on the numbers of international students, it turns out consensus is unavailable. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has described international students as "the new boat arrivals", but has nonetheless refused to support the government's attempt to cap numbers.

Some problems are too useful to solve.