In response to calls for consent education in Australian schools after, y’know everything that’s unfolded in politics over the last few months, the federal government have unveiled an almost Four million dollar campaign, ‘The Good Society’.
To list the issues with the program would take up far too much of both of our days and there are plenty of great articles doing so, but what underlies almost all of them is the complete lack of understanding of young people.
The disconnect is clear, when young people are demanding real and meaningful change, they are instead presented with a lacklustre program that doesn’t measure up by any standard.
Videos using food metaphors (some of which have now been removed) as if young people couldn’t comprehend conversations around consent, respect and assault without what can only be described as fluff is trivialising and infantilising.
Not only is it a condescending comment on the maturity and understanding of young people by watering down the seriousness of the issue but quite a lot of the site’s content is just confusing.
Some of this is because it is overproduced and avoiding talking directly to a point where you’re guessing at what they meant, but a lot of the content just feels like a worse reproduction of existing material.
The milkshake video is being referred to as a worse and ineffective version of the popular tea consent video, seeming like the purpose of this campaign was to just create something the government could put their name on- rather than something that could be actually useful and beneficial.
