it’s way too obvious that this law ain’t gonna achieve its stated aim

Absolutely. See my much longer comment elsewhere in the thread for all the real problems with this bill. We don’t need conspiracy theories. Hanlon’s razor very much applies here. It’s incompetence, not malice.

However, I think we can look at the worst part of this Bill—the nature of its passage through Parliament—for a clue as to its underlying purpose. It passed in just a week, right before Christmas last year, but didn’t actually come into effect until yesterday. The goal was good PR. I suspect not rattling cages with the big social media companies was part of it too. They wanted to look like they were doing something to protect kids, and hopefully win the election off the back of it (not that they needed much help with that, with how incompetent the LNP were), but they didn’t want to put up the fight that would be necessary to force the social media companies into actually making their algorithms less harmful…to children and adults. It’s lazy, it’s cowardly, it won’t work. But it’s not a secret ploy to spy on you.