There is a particular kind of obligation that accumulates between generations. It is not entirely legal, not always spoken aloud, and it does not arrive with a due date. It is the obligation that comes from having been given something — land cleared and farmed, institutions built, waterways mapped, schools founded, bridges placed across rivers that mattered — and from understanding, without much ceremony, that it now falls to you to extend that inheritance forward. Queensland has operated by this logic since it became a separate colony on 6 June 1859, separating from New South Wales and immediately beginning the long work of making something permanent from a vast, unruly, largely unmapped geography.

That work continues today. But it is increasingly conducted in a domain that the founders of Queensland’s civic institutions could not have foreseen: the digital layer. And that domain raises a genuinely new version of an old question. If previous generations owed the next something physical — the infrastructure, the institutions, the civic architecture of a functioning society — what does this generation of Queenslanders owe the one coming behind it, digitally?

The answer is not simply better broadband coverage, though that matters. It is not purely a question of coding education or technology skills in schools, though those matter too. The obligation runs deeper than access or capability. It reaches toward something more foundational: the question of whether Queensland’s next generation will inherit a coherent, stable, and authentic digital identity — a genuine sense of place in the networked world — or whether they will find themselves inhabiting a digital environment that was built by and for others, that reflects nowhere in particular, and that offers them no ground to stand on.

WHAT LEGACIES ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE.

Queensland has a tradition of building things that endure beyond the event that created them. World Expo 88 was a specialised Expo held in Brisbane during a six-month period between 30 April and 30 October 1988, with the theme “Leisure in the Age of Technology.” It attracted extraordinary attention and participation. But the event itself was never the point. It was a pivotal moment — a point from which things were never the same again for the host city — leaving an obvious physical impression on the cityscape, but with more subtle legacies too, including a shift in the lifestyles and cultural habits of local people.

The expo raised expectations and created a public appetite for a South Bank that could replicate the sociable festivity that people had enjoyed in 1988. The expo was now part of the city’s psyche. That psychic permanence matters as much as the physical permanence of the parklands themselves. What Expo ‘88 ultimately left Brisbane was not just a precinct but a changed understanding of what the city was — what it could contain, what kind of life it could sustain, what it deserved.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games Legacy Strategy, Elevate 2042, represents a shared 20-year vision for a lasting Games legacy — and a brighter future for all. The language of legacy is explicit. Supported by the International Olympic Committee, International Paralympic Committee and Brisbane 2032 Presidents, Elevate 2042 has the bold mission of making Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and the Oceania region better, sooner, together through sport, with opportunities accelerated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2032. The strategy reaches deliberately beyond the fortnight of competition into the decades that follow. The process inspired more than 14,000 suggestions submitted through projects like the Brisbane 2032 Hopes and Dreams survey, which invited people from across Queensland, Australia and the world to consider how the region could benefit from the Games.

In that aspiration lies an important lesson about how civilisations think. The ones that succeed across generations are the ones that plan for them — not as abstract beneficiaries, but as real people who will inherit specific things in specific conditions. The question is whether Queensland is applying that same long-sightedness to its digital inheritance.

THE GENERATION THAT WILL GROW UP ONLINE.

The children who will attend schools in Queensland as the 2032 Olympics approach are already forming their understanding of the world through screens. They were born into connectivity. They will not remember a time before cloud storage, before social media, before algorithmically curated content shaped their sense of what is normal and desirable and true. They are not, in the condescending formulation sometimes used, “digital natives” who instinctively understand the digital world better than their elders. They are, more precisely, people who have never experienced the alternative — and who therefore have very little basis for comparison.

Children are engaging with digital technologies earlier and more frequently, often without a clear understanding of how personal information is collected, used or shared. Online services routinely collect data such as names, images, location information and behavioural activity. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner notes that children may accumulate extensive digital profiles over time, often without meaningful consent or awareness.

This is the actual condition of childhood in Queensland today. The child in Longreach with a tablet for schoolwork, the teenager in Cairns navigating social platforms, the primary school student in Ipswich whose creative output and communications are being indexed and retained by private platforms — all of them are building digital profiles that will follow them indefinitely, in systems over which neither they nor their families have meaningful control.

A key feature of the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 is a mandate for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to develop a Children’s Online Privacy Code, which will put children at the centre of privacy protections in Australia. This is a genuine step. The Code is expected to be in place by 10 December 2026. But legislation, however well-intentioned, addresses the risks of the existing system rather than imagining an alternative one. It regulates what has already been built by others. The deeper question — what a place like Queensland builds for its own young people — remains open.

THE PROBLEM WITH BORROWED PLATFORMS.

With the enactment of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, Australia became the first country to introduce an outright ban on social media access for those under sixteen. This bold legislative move attracted global attention, with several countries reportedly considering similar measures. The ambition behind that legislation reflects something genuine: a recognition that the digital environment young Australians currently inhabit was designed by and for commercial interests in other jurisdictions, optimised for engagement and data extraction rather than for the wellbeing or development of the people using it.

The social media age restrictions aim to protect young Australians from pressures and risks that users can be exposed to while logged in to social media accounts. These come from design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens, while also serving up content that can harm their health and wellbeing. There is something important in this observation that goes beyond the immediate safety question: the platforms that currently define digital life for young Queenslanders were not designed with Queensland in mind, let alone with the particular conditions and character of life in Queensland — its distances, its communities, its relationship to country, its specific cultural inheritances. They are, in the most literal sense, somewhere else’s infrastructure.

This is not simply a cultural complaint. It is a structural one. When the civic life of a population — particularly its youngest members — is conducted primarily on infrastructure owned, operated, and governed by corporations headquartered on the other side of the world, the question of digital identity becomes pressing in a way that parallels earlier questions about land and sovereignty. What is owed to the next generation, in part, is infrastructure that belongs to the place they inhabit. Infrastructure that is shaped by its geography, by its values, by its long history, and by the character that Queensland has built across 165 years.

WHAT QUEENSLAND HAS BEEN BUILDING.

The Queensland Government has not been passive in this landscape. The Queensland Government has moved to a more secure and advanced digital identity system: on 6 April 2025, the Queensland Digital Identity (QDI) system replaced the former QGov identity platform. The new system accepts a wider range of documents than its predecessor, including international identity documents such as birth certificates and passports. It integrates multi-factor authentication via SMS or an authenticator app, and supports passkey functionality allowing users to set up local biometric login on their devices.

The Queensland Government has been exploring options for students to have access to suitable connectivity and devices both at school and at home to ensure they have the skills of the future. In partnership with regional and remote councils, insights from community engagement inform the design and delivery of tailored digital initiatives and skills training — to help ensure every Queenslander has the opportunity to thrive in a connected world.

The Queensland Government is developing a First Nations digital strategic plan in partnership with First Nations Queenslanders. This plan will provide digital pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across the state and improve digital connectivity, employment and inclusion opportunities.

Two digital service centres have been established in discrete First Nations communities, with more to follow. Funding has been secured for the Rapid Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Deployment Program, delivering 82 LEO satellite dishes in 17 Indigenous councils. Each of these initiatives represents a recognition that the digital divide is not merely a technical problem but a civic one: that belonging to the connected world is a condition of full participation in contemporary Queensland life.

These are real achievements and real investments. But they remain primarily concerned with the mechanics of access and the administration of services. The question of digital identity — of what Queensland presents itself as in the networked world, of what it offers its people as a stable and recognisable home online — is a different and in some ways harder question.

THE MEANING OF PLACE IN A NETWORKED WORLD.

When a child grows up in Toowoomba, or Townsville, or on a cattle station west of Charleville, they grow up with an understanding of where they are. That understanding is not abstract. It is embedded in landscape, in community, in the particular quality of light in the late afternoon, in the names of rivers and ranges, in the rhythms of agricultural seasons, in the stories told about the country they inhabit. That sense of place is among the most important things Queensland passes to its children. It gives them a framework for understanding who they are and what they belong to.

The digital world, as currently constituted, does very little to honour or extend that sense of place. The namespace of the internet — the system by which online identities and addresses are organised — is dominated by generic suffixes (.com, .net, .org) that carry no geographic, cultural, or civic meaning whatsoever. A Queensland school, a Queensland community organisation, a Queensland First Nations cultural institution: all of them currently address themselves online through an infrastructure that refuses to acknowledge their particular location in the world.

This is not a trivial observation. The way things are named shapes the way they are understood. A library that calls itself something.goldcoast or something.queensland is making a statement about where it belongs — about the fact that it is answerable to a community, rooted in a place, part of a particular story. A library that calls itself something.com.au makes no such statement. It exists, as all .com addresses do, in a kind of geographic nowhere — technically functional, but stripped of the territorial and civic meaning that gives institutions their character.

The Infrastructure Association of Queensland’s 2025 stakeholder roundtable on Brisbane 2032 legacy identified the importance of launching place-based storytelling initiatives to build local pride and cultural connection, and engaging schools and youth in co-designing legacy outcomes. Place-based storytelling is, among other things, a question of infrastructure. Stories need homes. And the homes they inhabit in the digital world — the addresses and namespaces through which they are discovered, accessed, and remembered — are part of the story too.

REGIONAL QUEENSLAND AND THE DIGITAL INHERITANCE GAP.

The obligation Queensland owes its next generation digitally is not uniform across the state. It is heaviest, in some ways, in the places furthest from the centres of institutional power and commercial investment. From Croydon Shire to Cook Shire, Far North Queensland faces some of Australia’s greatest digital inclusion challenges. The State Library of Queensland’s regional digital development project works with councils and communities to design local digital skills programs that improve access and skills — empowering people to connect, participate, and thrive in the digital economy.

The North–North West Queensland region extends across Mount Isa to Townsville and Normanton to the north. As one of Australia’s least digitally inclusive regions, digital initiatives are helping to bridge gaps in digital capability by working with communities to co-design local programs that build confidence, connectivity, and digital skills.

These are practical interventions in practical conditions. They matter enormously. But the goal they point toward — a Queensland in which every community, regardless of its distance from Brisbane, participates fully in the networked world — is not only a question of whether people can get online. It is a question of what they find there when they do, and whether it reflects their world or someone else’s. A child in Normanton who discovers that her school, her council, her local cultural organisations, and her community’s history are all findable through addresses that carry the name of her state and region — addresses that say Queensland or Far North — encounters a different digital world than one who must navigate the generic namespaces of a system designed with no reference to her particular place on the planet.

It is an inescapable conclusion that Queensland needs, in the short and long term, to build a steady pipeline of digitally skilled talent to maintain growth and generate more jobs. That pipeline begins with children who feel that the digital world is a place they belong to — not a foreign territory they have been permitted to enter on someone else’s terms.

THE 2032 MOMENT AND WHAT IT DEMANDS.

The Olympic Games Brisbane 2032 are scheduled to take place between 23 July and 8 August, with the Paralympic Games following between 24 August and 5 September. The children who will be in their twenties at the time of those Games are in Queensland primary and secondary schools right now. The digital world they will inhabit in 2032 — as workers, as citizens, as cultural participants, as people with interests and communities and public lives — is being shaped by decisions made in the years between now and then.

Elevate 2042 focuses on sport, health, inclusion, connecting people and places, a better future for the environment and economy. Its vision represents the 20-year journey to a healthier, more active and inclusive society. The legacy strategy’s ambition is properly long-sighted. Legacy includes the long-term benefits — tangible and intangible — of the Olympic Games that serve the host city, its people, and the Olympic Movement before, during and long after the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games can leave an array of legacies within a host city, covering not only sport but also social, economic and environmental gains. Some benefits can be experienced well before the Opening Ceremony even takes place while others may not be seen until years after the Games have ended.

The digital dimension of that legacy is still being written. A state that hosts the world in 2032 and presents its people, its places, and its institutions through a coherent and rooted digital identity — one that says clearly where it is and what it belongs to — will offer the world something more than a well-organised sporting event. It will offer a model of how place and permanence can coexist with connectivity; of how a geographically distinct society can participate fully in the networked world without dissolving into the generic.

"Legacy comes in many shapes, sizes and perspectives on making regions better, sooner, together through sport to improve lives now and into the future."

That observation, from the official statements accompanying the release of Elevate 2042, captures something important about the temporal dimension of legacy. It is not a single object handed over at a particular moment. It is a direction — a sustained orientation toward the people who come next.

THE PERMANENCE THAT IDENTITY REQUIRES.

There is a recurring theme in the history of how Queensland has handled its largest moments of civic ambition: the recognition that permanence requires intention. Expo 88 demonstrated that temporary events change public expectations of urban space, which can drive permanent changes to the cityscape. But those permanent changes happened because people chose to make them — because, when the event was over, they asked what should remain and deliberately built toward it.

The digital equivalent of that question is now available to Queensland. When the event of Brisbane 2032 is over, when the athletes have gone home and the cameras have moved on, what will remain in the digital layer? Will Queensland’s institutions, communities, stories, and identities be findable through addresses that anchor them to the place they belong to? Will a child born in Queensland in 2026 grow up with access to a digital infrastructure that says, with the same conviction that a street name or a postcode conveys: you are here, you are from here, this is yours?

The project of building a stable onchain identity layer for Queensland — through namespace constructions that carry genuine geographic and civic meaning — is part of answering that question. brisbane.queensland · schools.qld · culture.brisbane2032 are not merely technical addresses. They are statements about permanence. They say that a place exists — not temporarily, not contingently, not at the discretion of a commercial platform headquartered elsewhere — but as a matter of civic record. They anchor the digital presence of Queensland’s institutions, communities, and stories to the geography that produced them.

The obligation to the next generation, understood this way, is not primarily a technical obligation. It is a civic one. It asks whether Queensland will treat its digital infrastructure with the same seriousness it has brought to its physical infrastructure — whether it will build things that last, that carry meaning, that give the people who inherit them a stable place from which to understand themselves and their world.

WHAT IS OWED, AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW.

Each generation of Queenslanders has been asked to honour something received and extend it forward. The pastoral settlers received a frontier and made properties. The properties made towns. The towns made institutions. The institutions made the civic fabric of a society that is now, by any measure, one of the most liveable and distinctive in the southern hemisphere. That chain of inheritance is not automatic. It requires decisions — at each step — about what deserves to be made permanent and what can be left behind.

The digital world presents a genuinely new challenge to that tradition, because so little of what currently constitutes digital infrastructure was built by Queenslanders, for Queenslanders, with Queensland’s particular conditions in mind. The platforms are elsewhere’s. The namespaces are generic. The data gathered from Queensland’s children flows to servers that are indifferent to Queensland’s geography, its history, its values, and its future. Against that condition, the question of what is owed to the next generation takes on particular urgency.

What is owed is not simply access. Access matters, and partnering to make internet speeds to Queensland state schools 200 times faster than the previous standard is a concrete and important step. But access is a floor, not a ceiling. What is owed above that floor is belonging — a digital environment in which Queensland’s places, institutions, and stories are named and located and findable in ways that reflect their actual position in the world. An environment in which the act of going online does not require leaving Queensland behind.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games Brisbane 2032 is a time to celebrate First Nations culture, foster participation, and create meaningful opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes, young people and their communities. That aspiration — participation, meaning, opportunity — is precisely the right language for thinking about digital inheritance too. What the next generation of Queenslanders deserves, in the digital realm as in the physical one, is a state that took the question seriously while there was still time to answer it well. A state that understood that the names we give things online are not merely administrative details but acts of placement — decisions about what matters enough to be remembered, what belongs somewhere specific, and what is worth making permanent.

Queensland’s 165-year tradition of building things that last is, in this sense, exactly the tradition to draw upon. The infrastructure of digital identity — the namespaces, the onchain records, the permanent civic addresses through which a society presents itself to the networked world — is the South Bank of the digital age. It is what gets built when the event ends and the serious work of legacy begins. The generation now growing up in Queensland is the one that will either inherit that infrastructure, or wonder why it was never made.