By Mitch Gaynor
WHEN one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, you get something like what happened in Maleny last Wednesday.
Energex and TMR bookended a complete debacle for residents and retailers trying to navigate the normally busy but managable Maple Street route.
Deliveries were delayed or abandoned, cafes were vacant and traders weren’t selling as motorists, fed up with kilometre-long queues, 45-minute delays and confusing detours eventually just gave up.
How that happened with no warning is best left to the geniuses at Energex who seemingly forgot to tell anyone they needed to replace a power pole.
Deliberate or not it was exquisite, Utopian-style timing right in the thick of Christmas trading.
More disturbingly for traders is the potential impact of months of infrastructure works when – fingers crossed – Maleny’s Streetscaping project actually starts.
If replacing a pole and cleaning some drains clogs up Maple Street for a day, it’s fair enough to wonder out loud what months of capital works on the main street will do?
Watch this space.
Brain fades
I SUPPOSE our little household sits right in the sweet spot for the rollout of the under-16 social media ban, which kicks in this week.
Personally I wish the government had taken it further and banned adults, but it seems like it’s always the kids that need saving.
With two young teens in our household I asked them both what they thought of it. Both were livid and of course had been devising workarounds that I didn’t want to know about.
For us, the horse has bolted.
They’re both in the thick of social media and for us as parents it’s about managing this modern-day reality and making sure they can and do talk to us about whatever on earth they talk about on socials.
Every generation of teenagers has rallied against adults; social media is just a new way of keeping us at distance.
Ironically I’ve always thought schools and the education system should shoulder some of the blame.
We tried desperately to keep devices out of our kids’ hands until high school, but the schools chipped away at that idea until it became virtually impossible to do schooling without a screen.
These are the same institutions that rightly rail against shrinking attention spans and the creeping presence of AI, yet they’ve helped normalise the device as essential from a very young age.
Back in the day, your teenage daughter might lie on the hallway floor on the telephone for hours.
This feels worse. Maybe it isn’t. But the difference now is the phone used to be a thing you did. Social media and devices are a place they’re living.
So sure, ban it. But good luck undoing a generation-plus of building a world where a small screen is both the classroom and the reward at the end of it.