The million-plus students cut off from computers in this age of billionaire excess

On Wednesdays, our mother laid out a fresh apron, climbed in her Mini Minor and zipped 25 kilometres down the road to our rural primary school.

There, she joined a whirl of other mothers intent on making life a little better for the hard-pressed teaching staff and their students.

They set up the canteen – buttering sandwiches, heating soup and arranging fruit – dreamt up fundraising events to stock the school library, sold second-hand textbooks and school uniforms and ran practised eyes over the school buildings in case anyone needed reminding that maintenance was falling behind.

Most of all, they kept an eye out for the quiet children.

There were always kids who existed at the edges; those whose families failed to provide necessities such as pens and pencils and notebooks, or who didn’t bring a packed lunch or lacked the few shillings that others spent at the canteen.

None of these children were allowed to miss out while the mothers’ club was on the job.

A pencil case, ruler and notebook was slipped their way without fuss. Sandwiches and drinks were packed in paper bags and discreetly handed over without a shilling discussed.

For much of last century, no state school was complete without what was called in Victoria a mothers’ club and in NSW an infants’ school club.

The memory of volunteer women making it their business to ensure children at the edges of my little school were provided with what was required to tackle their homework flooded back when an email landed in my inbox headlined “Urgent appeal for device donations as youth digital access gap widens”.

It asked that business and government consider donating computers they no longer used so they could be renovated and turned over to young people who don’t have such things.

The not-for-profit organisation WorkVentures, in collaboration with another not-for-profit, Good Things Australia, would see to it that the devices were wiped and refurbished by the National Device Bank.

The children’s education charity The Smith Family would do a lot of the distribution.

The appeal pointed to recent data compiled by the Australian Youth Digital Index that found 1.42 million young people in Australia had no access to a computer at home.

That included 523,000 young Australians aged 14 and above, for whom access to digitally connected computers – a laptop, desktop or tablet connected to the internet – was essential for learning.

The index, funded by the Telstra Foundation, found that even taking account of computer availability in places such as schools and libraries, 14 per cent of young people aged eight to 25, or 864,000 of them, had no access at all to a learning device in 2025, up from 10 per cent the previous year.

Governments are scrambling to catch up. The Victorian government, for instance, has pledged that by next year, state primary schools will be required to provide access to tablets and laptops for all students for limited periods at school. That, however, doesn’t mean students will be able to take home the schools’ devices.

At a time when a lot of attention is being granted to keeping kids off harmful social media, it feels jarring that large numbers of other young people are locked out of using computers for such essential tasks as doing their homework.

It feels even more jarring in an age when billionaires are all the rage and when wealth disparity is so vast that it is destabilising economies and democracies across the globe.

Vast? Any billionaire of a mind to sit down and count their money would soon discover it was beyond any human capacity to do so.

A mathematician or a child’s computer will reveal that to count to 1 million, assuming you counted one number every second for every minute of every day, would take just 11½ days.

But a billion? It would take a smidge under 32 years.

The bigger numbers, of course, have so many syllables you couldn’t manage one a second, or anything like it. It would realistically take about 200 years, even if you never slept or ate, to reach 1 billion.

Gina Rinehart, thus, would need to set aside about 11,200 years to count her pile, estimated by The Australian Financial Review at the end of 2025 to be $56 billion. That pile, of course, would grow remarkably if her latest bestie, Pauline Hanson, managed to gain the power to slash the messy red tape that so offends Rinehart and many other billionaires.

And Elon Musk, should he become the world’s first trillionaire, would have a counting job way into the afterlife. Even if he were capable of counting a number every second without a toilet break, it would take almost 32,000 years to reach a trillion. Or this: if he spent $1 every second, it would take 32,000 years to spend a trillion.

The author who depicted the last age of excess, F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew what he was talking about when he wrote “the rich are different from you and me”.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrayed it with pitiless accuracy.

In it, the wealthy Jay Gatsby spent his increasingly empty life reaching for a dream that was always just out of his grasp.

Many billionaires, of course, keen to avoid such yawning desolation and aware that society expects great wealth to come with social responsibility, pride themselves on their philanthropy.

Rinehart is said to donate $10 million or more a year to such causes as sports scholarships, poor children in Cambodia, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, cancer research, hospitals and more.

Even if her philanthropy were $20 million a year, it would amount to just 0.0357 per cent of her current wealth.

Which, you’d have to say, is more than the small effort it would take for Australian companies and government agencies to donate their disused computers in a vague, modern reprise of the work of old-time mothers’ clubs, who couldn’t abide disadvantaged children missing out on the basic equipment required for their education.

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