As the Q&A host was telling me, the conservatives have a ‘problem with women’. Or with more election campaign zing, a ‘women problem’. It’s right there in the user’s manual with a copy of Work Choices that Kevin Rudd forgot to pulp during the heady days of Kevin-07.

This ‘women problem’ is writ in stone in Guardian editorials which read like they’ve been marble-ised for future generations and brought down from the mountains like the Ten Commandments if only God wasn’t a social construct. Just ask our university humanities departments – the Pond’s Institutes of Australia’s tertiary system. Ask Clementine Ford who doesn’t have a men problem but once tweeted all men must die. But maybe we’ve got this aphorism wrong. Recent events show that rather than worry about Liberals and the ladies, the more disturbing question is whether the activist Left have a children problem.

Australian activists have a brave and heroic history of putting their children on the front line and not so much standing with them, as standing behind them, so the cameras can get better footage. Back in the 1990s during the Melbourne Waterfront disputes, the muscularand tattooed proto-Andrew Tates of the union left bravely placed young children in prams in harm’s way as the police moved in with the batons and police dogs. But despite the physical risk this was OK. It made the cause look that more sympathetic, the police and Howard government even bigger bastards and, hey, what two-year-old is going to remember it all anyway?

The chance of psychological harm and Dr Phil public humiliation on an episode titled ‘An Extinction Rebellion activist stole my childhood’ was considered minimal. Which counterintuitively was problematic for these protesters given professional protesters always need more angst rather than less. To paraphrase rock icons, British band Oasis, what they need in the kids is a revolution in their heads. Preferably one that never stops until they get the age pension and become the target of the next embittered younger generation. So, these days – based on the Scandinavian Greta-model of photogenic protest, the kids are that little bit older and the anxiety all that much greater as it is for any teenager fumbling their way towards adulthood.

Ironically, in an age obsessed with ‘feels’, for protest groups the psychological discomfort of children seems to be welcome collateral damage. As the old Vietnam war cliché goes, activists need to destroy their children’s mental health to save their own political raison d’être. Which explains all those school children climate change marches, full of distressed children, organised by teachers wanting to bolster their own catastrophising political world view.

Meanwhile at Sydney University young children, brought along to a pro-Palestinian campus protest, are encouraged by protest leaders and usual suspects academics to chant ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘intifada’ while having no idea what these phrases really mean. One academic claims they are teaching these toddler Trotskyites how to speak ‘truth to power’ without explaining that what they mean is their truth and their power.

Activist children (and apparently, the younger the better) are the new political crash test dummy for test driving ideology. And it goes beyond international politics. In the ACT the Labor-Greens government having introduced Voluntary Assisted Dying laws are considering allowing children under 18 to access it. Just to see what happens. Meanwhile in Queensland, the government – or more importantly their police – seem to have lost control of youth crime, rejecting some commonsense tough love for a raising of the age of criminal responsibility. Clockwork Orange has become Clockwork Pineapple.

A Parental Guidance Recommended warning is really needed on some of these policies and the individuals pushing them.

The Australian Council for Educational Research says teenage stress within schools is through the roof. No doubt Four Corners will do a story on it like that one about ‘kidfluencers’ and then move on to another Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels exposé. But is this really any surprise given what activist schoolteachers are telling children about the end of the world and how awful racist, imperialist, misogynistic our society is, with – if this is your sole source of information – zero redeeming qualities.

Not all of this is a left or right thing – maybe we’re all to blame at some level. Doing the social media rounds are some black and white video grabs headlined ‘What would Reagan do?’ The clips are of a late-1960s Brylcreemed, younger California Governor Ronnie angrily commenting at press conferences and public events about violent campus protests.

The contrast is meant to be between the Reagan hard line versus the more cowardly equivocation of politicians today. Which of course, is the easy low-hanging political fruit of this debate. What is interesting – beyond the tedious left-right angst – is Reagan’s constant direction to adults, (and specifically parents) to take some personal responsibility for the violent, disruptive behaviour of their children on campus. In the clips, journalists focus on whether Governor Reagan is too tough or too soft, but he pushes at least some of the responsibilities back onto what used to quaintly be called the ‘grown-ups in the room’. No doubt this is all terribly idyllic and naive. The left and right grown-ups left the room a long time ago and how many these days are willing to challenge their older children on their views and behaviour? If you want to be the adult in the room, don’t cave to student protesters demands to review research grants as Sydney University Vice Chancellor Mark Scott has. If Laura Tingle thinks writers festivals don’t allow her to explain herself properly, maybe don’t speak at them.

Recently, a Sydney bakery made cupcakes for a boy’s birthday party decorated with Palestinian flags and images of Hamas terrorists. While activists applaud the political statement and others (probably Sydney University sociology majors) argue free speech principles they are usually, otherwise oblivious too.

Without being too Pollyanna-ish you wonder if they consider what this is doing to that once-touted, maybe overly romanticised and marketed notion of child innocence. Given the cynical grind of modern political discourse, they probably couldn’t care less.

Lenin talked about ‘useful idiots’ in a gormless middle class that could be manipulated against their own self-interest to support the revolution. These days his useful idiots are a whole lot younger, seem to own PlayStations and can cry on cue about societal problems that may or may not actually exist. No wonder these activists want to lower the voting age.