Pauline Hanson’s attack on SA Senator Charlotte Walker’s age reveals the Right’s Achilles’ heel is still young voters | Caleb Bond
If conservatives want to succeed in politics, Pauline Hanson has just showed them what not to do, writes Caleb Bond.
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Congratulations to newly-minted Labor senator for South Australia Charlotte Walker who has, for the past week, been acclimatising to the red leather benches in Canberra.
She also happens to be the youngest senator in Australian history at just 21.
Freshly 21, too – she celebrated her birthday on the night of the federal election.
Some birthday present that is.
But this fact has raised the ire of some, including Pauline Hanson, who this week told my Sky News colleague Danica De Georgio that Ms Walker was “no sooner out of bloody university and out of her nappies than she’s telling me I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, when I’ve been on the floor of parliament for the last nine years”.
Fair cop – Ms Walker is certainly young and lacks some life experience.
But that makes her no different to the vast majority of people preselected by the major parties these days.
The standard trajectory to politics these days is something along the lines of buggerising around in student politics at university (so we end up with people more interested in the politics of politics rather than outcomes for constituents) while making a name for yourself in Young Labor or Liberal, before leaving uni to embark on a career as a political staffer or unionist and eventually being preselected for being a good servant of the party.
There are people who do this well into their thirties waiting for the nod and, I hate to tell you, they don’t have much more life experience than Ms Walker.
They have spent the entirety of their teenage and adult lives locked in politics, learning from people who did exactly the same thing.
This lack of broader knowledge and experience being brought to politics is a real issue that holds us back as states and a nation.
People don’t think outside the square because all the people we employ to think for us have only ever lived inside the square.
Age, quite frankly, has little to do with it.
If there was a life experience requirement to be in politics, then half the parliament would be chucked out – including the prime minister, whose only experience outside of politics was as a bank officer for a year or so in 1980/81.
The reality is that if you’re old enough to vote, you’re old enough to sit in parliament.
If you’re entitled to participate in some of the democratic process, then you’re entitled to participate in all of it.
Hate the game, not the player.
And the Right should be careful of denigrating young people too much.
May’s federal election was the first where Millennial and Gen Z voters outnumbered Baby Boomers.
Young people, particularly men, were integral to making Donald Trump the 47th US President.
If conservative parties want to succeed, they need to court younger voters and they will not do so by telling them they’re stupid.
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Originally published as Pauline Hanson’s attack on SA Senator Charlotte Walker’s age reveals the Right’s Achilles’ heel is still young voters | Caleb Bond
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