Andrew Bolt: Listening to only the young and inexperienced a dangerous path

If we’re going to buy Perrottet’s excuse for dressing up as a Nazi, let’s be consistent and end this obsequious habit of acting as if the young are smarter than adults.

I am attracted to NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s excuse for dressing up as a Nazi at his 21st birthday – that of course someone that young is an idiot.

“I was just naive and didn’t understand,” the Premier pleaded.

“I’m not the person I am today that I was at 21.”

Even the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies ran with that, deploring Perrottet’s “poor choice of costume as a young man” but drawing a line between the 21-year-old fool and the supposedly wiser 40-year-old.

Federal Labor MP Mike Freelander, also Jewish, agreed: “Young people do stupid things.”

Of course! Didn’t Prince Harry also dress up as a Nazi when he was 20?

I guess it shows that someone just 21 can be astonishingly dumb, perhaps because our brain’s prefrontal cortex – the rational bit that helps us think of consequences – does not fully develop until we’re about 25.

But if we’re going to buy Perrottet’s excuse, let’s be consistent. Let’s end this obsequious new habit of acting as though the young are smarter than adults.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet admitted he dressed up as a Nazi at his 21st birthday. Picture: Seb Haggett

How is it that Greta Thunberg, a disturbed teenager, gets invited into parliaments and UN bodies to tell politicians four times her age that they’re global warming fakes?

Or take our Greens. They’re demanding we lower the voting age to just 16, as if we’d get more rational decisions from teenagers five years younger than Perrottet was in his jackboots.

But Freelander’s Labor Party really takes the cupcake.

Freelander rightly says “young people do stupid things”, yet the Albanese government last November picked a new “youth steering committee” – 15 people aged from just 13 to 23 – to supposedly advise it on everything from youth issues to even the voice, Labor’s Aboriginal-only advisory parliament.

“I’ll be taking my cue from them on that,” chirrupped Youth Minister Anne Aly, pretending she’d really let children aged 13, 14, 15, 17 and 18 advise her on one of the most contentious constitutional changes in our history.

I say “pretending” because Labor picked only child activists it could count on to parrot its lines, including no fewer than three who identified as Aboriginal and three more who said they came from Aboriginal land.

But pretence or not, this youth committee perpetrates a fraud – that we need the voice of the young, not the experienced, in a country growing more thoughtless by the day. That the young really are as a smart as a costume-store whip.