Just when you thought our love affair with red tape and rules had reached its infuriating peak, Australia has turned its collective attention to a powerful-yet-adorable new enemy: babies.
For the longest time, babies were one of the few groups that everyone agreed was beyond reproach. We marvelled at how tiny they were and celebrated their milestones as if they weren’t things that regular people do daily. Little Charlotte sat up! All on her own? Tell me you took 1000 photos!
Cute, cuddly, dressed in funny outfits, babies were a rare unifier in a world defined by constant conflict, and that was that. But then a baby cried during Arj Barker’s comedy set, setting into motion a chain of events that has led to one of the worst weeks for babies on record.
Australia’s war on babies is worse than we first thought.Credit: Michael Howard
What followed was an avalanche of debate that examined the rights of mothers, performers, and babies, forcing us all to grapple with a single question: is being defenceless a good enough defence?
This brings me to an even larger battle facing the nation’s babies: communal play areas in apartment buildings. While the jury is still out on whether babies even like comedy, one thing they famously love is grass and being outside.
Earlier this week, my child was minding his own business, crawling around the front lawn of our apartment building, and trying for the thousandth time to eat his own shoe. You’ve got to admire his persistence. No amount of previous failures would deter my son from the misguided belief that if he could get a proper hold of it, the shoe might be consumed.
The Gentle Parent in me knew I should probably step in and offer some new-age communication: “Archie, we don’t eat our shoes.” But the Permissive Parent was curious to see how it might play out. If the Arj Barker kid can do the breakfast TV circuit, imagine the potential for a baby downing an entire Nike. The TikTok views alone would be in the millions.
Sadly, we will never know because the experiment was cut short by the booming voice of a neighbour who informed me that, “per a recent email from our strata management,” kids couldn’t play on the communal lawn.
If there are worse words in the English language than “per a recent email from our strata management”, I’ve yet to encounter them and, true to form, the email was just as soulless as you might imagine.
According to the faceless strata overlords, children had been playing in the garden and potentially damaging the irrigation system, which could “cost our strata plan money for the repairs to be carried out.”
Stock photo of my neighbours and me reading the email from our strata management company.Credit: iStock
Signing off, the strata manager warned that “children are not to play on the common property and not in the gardens; please keep them off the grass.”
Naturally, my first instinct was to figure out which neighbour had complained, but I already knew who it was because this same person complained about everything. You know the type: has lived in the building for 500 years and spends their evenings memorising strata by-laws.
On that note, it should come as no surprise that I am not immediately familiar with the strata by-laws; if anything, I go out of my way to avoid them.
But in this particular case, it seemed important to learn that current NSW by-laws state that any child for whom an owner or occupier of a lot is responsible may play on any area of the common property designated by the owner’s corporation for that purpose.
So, playing is technically allowed, provided the body corporate has deemed that area fit for play. However, when no spaces on common property are designated as OK to play, you have a nation of kids with nowhere to eat their shoes.
Compounding the issue is that, according to a report from the University of NSW, one in six Australians live in strata-titled properties such as apartments and townhouses.
That’s a lot of children who can’t go outside, run around, or play with their friends, in addition to recently being banned from seeing their favourite comedian, Arj Barker.
It goes without saying that we need rules and regulations just as much as we need strata by-laws and baby-free comedy shows – no one wants to live in a world where chaos reigns supreme. But at the same time, we shouldn’t pursue order at the expense of common sense, which is the recurring theme in this week’s war on babies.
Because one day, these babies will be the Boomers of the future, and we’ll all be made to pay for what we’ve done. I don’t know about you, but when I’m old and senile, and it’s my turn to eat the shoe, I’d rather do it outside.
Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at thomas.mitchell@smh.com.au or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.
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