The vote to cut HECs debt just went through parliament. Clever politics targeting the youth vote yet all I remember is the TikTok clip of middle-aged MPs silly walking into the chamber to vote. Apparently The Kids love this stuff but if they saw their 45-year-old dad doing this at a wedding they’d be telling him to put his trousers back on and sit down.

If politicians are so set on giving 16-year-olds the right to vote how come they keep communicating down to them like they are five years old? I get why giving them the vote makes sense. After all, if you’re old enough to join the army, pay tax, ram-raid jewellery stores, use a machete, or hire a human rights lawyer to immediately get let out on bail, then you’re old enough to vote.

Then again, according to this targeted youth marketing strategy, kids are also too dumb to understand the bona fides of a five-thousand-dollar subsidy specifically targeted at them, so need to be engaged with lovable antics by their not too serious local MP. Orwell’s 1984 was right; it isn’t enough to just do what Big Brother wants you must also love him or at least find him slightly ridiculous. It’s a pity this insight is at the end of the novel not the start as according to national curriculum results nobody under the age of 20 reads these days.

The shiniest new politician is the young and enterprising Charlotte Walker. Polish her enough and like a plate-glass window MPs from all sides of politics can recognise their own idealistic younger selves reflected in her image – just now they’re older, sclerotic and less likely to cross the floor due to a hip operation and self-interest. Any younger she’d be an embryo, and feminists would be debating when life really begins and whether it should be given a Greens how-to-vote card. At 21 years she is the youngest female Australian politician ever elected. The shining jewel in the Youff Politics diaspora which can be traced all the way from the Children’s Crusade of 1212 to Greta’s 2019 transatlantic voyage to a Caleb Bond 2014 op-ed about wearing bow ties and to that boy who talks about nuclear energy to grown men at mining industry conferences.

She’s the future of Labor politics the same way Fatima Payman was last year. Not that you’d know it as a TikTok promoting her first day in parliament focused on her giddily eating cornflakes and swirling round the building with a selfie stick like Emily in Paris but without the cute androgenous friend you can confide in, because you should never trust anyone in parliament.

An ageist both-sideism is at play, and I’m all for it. Let’s call it the utility of youth. According to this political zeitgeist ‘Kids Rule OK’ and are wise keepers of truth, well-moisturised AI bots giving a practical demonstration of IT’s GIGO principle (garbage-in-garbage-out) but also needing shiny things to hold attention for more than five seconds.

This toddlerising of our politics isn’t new: in the early-2000s the leader of the now-defunct Australian Democrats, Natasha Stott Despoja stomped around parliament in Doc Martens boots and talked endlessly to a young Annabel Crabb about Buffy the Vampire Slayer to emphasise her hip youthful credentials only to start complaining later how the media fixated on her youth, footwear and taste in hip generational cultural iconography set in Sunnydale, California.

At the time she and her deputy, also-young though actually 39, Aden Ridgeway were described as the Dream Team by breathless older journalists  who were possibly suffering angina and needed their tablets.

Like the Whitney Houston song on their CD-player, they opined that the children are our future only to then throw out all their old CDs when they invented Spotify. They don’t realise it’s scientifically proven that the skulls of contemporary teenagers are too soft to understand free-to-air TV, irony or Tasmania’s Hare-Clark electoral system.

I understand why everyone wants to idealise the wisdom of 16, but that’s not how I remember it. As a 16-year-old schoolboy I don’t recall deep Socratic debates about democracy and freedom behind the shelter sheds with the cool Greek twins Plato and Aristotle whose expelled older brother used to dangerously hoon his noisy V8 up the school driveway. It was more Lord of the Flies; with our heads the ones plunged into toilet bowls of our political consciousness. 16-year-olds can be cruel and stupid – nicknaming one Nautilus machine-obsessed champion rower dumb-bell; taking BB gun potshots at the school’s reinforced-steel gas cylinders to see what happens; lifting a teacher’s small Fiat 500 to the fifth floor of the school building because we could. Character is destiny but should it be allowed to vote?

To quote a breathless croissant-eating Emily, the answer is, ‘yes, Yes and YES’. Youth has always been photogenic political cannon fodder. Whether its trade unionist couples in matching muscle shirts rolling baby prams into police line harm’s way during the violent 1990s Docklands protests: or middle-aged academics grooming school children to spout catastrophising hyperbole at climate change protests, while bellowing at them through bullhorns about the end of the world, it’s nothing new.

Giving kids the vote on the basis they will probably vote for you, isn’t really the fresh, cynicism-free right-on move some might suggest. It’s actually quite old and musty like your recently deceased granddad’s jacket or patronising and repetitive like a now-defunct Project editorial.

Scratch a progressive and they will tell you that the personal is political – usually after the third glass but definitely before the second course. It really annoys them that for the rest of us it isn’t, as we get on with our lives. Giving 16-year-olds the vote is the start of the endgame of that cradle to the grave project (and I mean the start: after all, why stop at 16, why not, 15, 14… 5?).

The idea that the young should be allowed to enjoy childhood and be protected from the grasping political manipulation of more-sophisticated adult figures is dismissed as the height of naivety and let’s face it not politically convenient for those wanting to manipulate the naive from a position of power.