There has been nation-wide scorn and fits of eye-rolling over a planned student ‘protest’ against Pauline Hanson.
To quote our Editor-in-Chief, Rowan Dean:
‘You’ve got these school kids linking Pauline Hanson, oligarchs, fascism … linking that to billionaires, linking that to Gina Rinehart. It’s really dangerous, it’s really sinister, it’s radicalisation of our youth.’
With the quality of education where it is, there’s no point arguing this will harm their academic performance.
It won’t.
Who knows, these young people might learn something while interacting with the deep sighs of the working class who have to dodge their protest.
It’s just more of the same, isn’t it?
Remember when teachers encouraged kids to glue themselves to the road, scream at the sky with tear-streaked cheeks, and embrace the full spectrum of existential panic?
There was even a name for it – climate anxiety – described as the chronic fear of existential doom.
It didn’t take long for the climate apocalypse to be replaced by gender and pronouns. Then kids switched their rainbows for keffiyehs and started shouting about rivers and seas they couldn’t name. Now, everything is orange. The Left have decided that Pauline Hanson embodies all the positions they oppose and instead of fighting cultural battles, the culture war has a recognisable figurehead to rally against.
Which isn’t the flex the Left thinks it is.
Painting Pauline Hanson as the opposite of all things Woke is basically what GetUp! did at the National Press Conference shortly before their gotcha! meme became her Instagram userpic.
My point is that these student protests were political then and they are political now. We are simply watching the Left try out various brand wrappers to see which candy appeals: climate, rainbows, Palestine, anti-Pauline. They all taste like communism.
Many will be of the opinion that whipping children into a political frenzy to grab headlines is ethically dubious. It violates the innocence of children that served the West well. They should be in school. They should be enjoying their childhood. And their teachers should be shielding them from the adult political world while redirecting their attention back to learning.
And yes, I understand the counter-intellectual argument about traditional schooling indoctrinating kids with things like the Christian religion. All education is propaganda. The people you create through schooling determines what sort of civilisation they will continue building after you die. We used to want individualists and workers. Now we want activists who vote red and green. Australia is moving from building a nation to building a political base.
What the Left cannot deny is that the old ways created good times. The longer the education system sits within the grasp of the collectivists, the faster it declines. That is a real-world judgement on their activism. The Long March is real, but where is it marching us to? It is thrown around as a campaign line by the Right, but when did they truly try to stop the march when they were in power for decades at state and federal levels?
These protests are merely a flashpoint in a kerosene-soaked academic landscape that seems to squish children into activist moulds at preschool level, cook their minds through junior and high school, and shake out barely-literate radicalised voters who are hot with rage and brandishing a degree that ends up trodden under a minimum wage job.
It would bewilder experts from last century to witness a generation with the world’s knowledge on their phone waste prime learning years doomscrolling increasingly incoherent trends, cycling down to the lowest possible human behaviour. Their ancestors fought hard for the right to literacy. Books were treasured. Knowledge was a point of pride. Even the poor spent their time reading.
And yet too many Australian children leave school, wholly let down by every level of a high-paid institution. They discover their skill set is unfit for the world and money is going to be an immediate problem. Then in come the politicians to promise free stuff and a comfy living.
There is no point having an argument with activists dragging students out for some headline-grabbing moral cause.
It is better to ask those students why they think the working and middle classes are voting for Pauline Hanson… Why so many migrants are voting One Nation. Why our farmers vote Orange. The tradies, the retail workers, the small business owners, their grandparents.
The answer offered by social media usually claims these people must be cookers, racists, and knuckle-dragging flat Earthers.
And yet they are the same people holding up the last shreds of the economy with traditional labour.
Many of them used to be represented by the Labor Party.
How do protesters explain the political transition of these people who were ‘good’ when they were red and ‘evil fascists’ now they wear orange? Materially, their beliefs did not change.
The first step to finding out if you’ve been duped is to ask the right questions.
Not Candace Owens questions. Simple, first principles questions.
Questions such as, which political movement is opposing Pauline Hanson and One Nation?
In this case, their given name makes it clear they are anti-capitalists.
So, anti-capitalists want kids to leave school to protest against One Nation … which suggests One Nation might be the fiercest defender of capitalism on the political spectrum.
We have a cost-of-living crisis and almost a trillion dollars of national debt. This country desperately needs brazen capitalists or the whole thing will collapse into a Venezuela-sized hole.
It is hard to see how such a protest would do One Nation any harm. If anything, it belongs on a banner.
‘Hand in hand with the billionaires and the ruling elites,’ they say. The important thing to remember about collectivists is that the consequence of their vision involves making the state the billionaires with power and legislative control over everyone else’s capital. That’s where history teaches us that things become problematic. If they are fans of Lenin, they should already know this.
Despite being backed by some student unions, by far the biggest problem this protest has is its claim to be ‘pro-worker’ while the workers are standing on the other side of the fence. It’s the chicken-wire divide between privileged activism and hard work.
‘The Greens are no alternative. Despite holding left-wing positions on certain questions, the party fundamentally supports the continuation of capitalism, albeit a nicer and fairer version.’
That seems a bit unfair to the Greens. They’ve worked hard on their unworkably insane policies.
We are all old enough to know that these protesters would have a fit if they got their wish and capitalism ended tomorrow. They’d be on the first boat out. Anti-capitalism sounds edgy on a poster, but it would mean the end of everything productive and liberating in our society.
It’s a shame schools aren’t using this opportunity to teach the devastating history of anti-capitalism – the nations it ruined, the tens of millions it murdered, and the legacy of unspeakable horror that humans were reduced to when a simple economic principle, such as capitalism, was removed from the system.
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
