James Campbell: Look out, politicians, here come the kids

The egg that almost cracked on the Prime Minister on Tuesday was a bad sign for the way Australian politics is heading. In years to come it might be that these 2019 eggings are seen as the start of an angry new political era, writes James Campbell.

The egg that almost cracked on the Prime Minister as he met the Country Women’s Association on Tuesday was a bad sign for the way Australian politics is heading.

To be sure, eggs have connected with Australian politicians before, most famously Billy Hughes who copped one in 1917 during the referendum on conscription.

Indeed for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, the recent egg-free decades have been something of a surprise. In the aftermath of The Dismissal, Malcolm Fraser’s Cabinet must have been a boon to the dry-cleaning industry.

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No doubt my ageing memory exaggerates the reality, but it seemed to be the case that a public appearance by the prime minister and his minsters always drew youthful protesters keen to crack one over them.

So far, the commentary on this most recent incident — and the earlier, more successful, egging of Senator Fraser Anning — has largely been confined to tut-tutting about social media’s capacity to create instant heroes of idiots and hurrumphing that this is not a good thing and we wouldn’t want to see any more of it. Which goes without saying of course.

I fear that we are going to see a lot more of this sort of stuff, and worse. Picture: Alex Coppel

But I fear that we are going to see a lot more of this sort of stuff, and worse. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that in future years, we might look back and see the egging of Anning as the moment that a new age of political unrest began.

Is that over-egging it? Possibly. But there are a couple of things that make me think we are in for trouble. The first is the gigantic demographic bulge of young people that is about to come to maturity. It now 17 years since Peter Costello introduced his baby bonus in the year after Australia’s birthrate reached its nadir of 1.7. The impact of the baby bonus was immediate. By 2008, the birthrate had risen to 2.0.

Since then, although the rate has dropped off a bit, thanks to immigration and more women having children later in life, the number of babies being born is still about 300,000 a year. That means that this is the last federal election before Cozzie’s kiddies start to make their opinions heard. The impact is going to be immediate and dramatic. This year, about 300,000 people will turn 18. It will dip next year but by 2024, there will be 320,000 new 18-year-olds being added to the electoral roll.

By 2026, it will be about 345,000. And the numbers will keep rising. In 2030, there will be 360,00 turning 18. The last time there were that many young people around — the 1960s and 1970s — there was trouble right around Western world. Crime rose and at the extreme end of the spectrum, in the United States, West Germany and Italy, there were outbreaks of terrorism, something which Australia — bar the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing — was spared.

But even so, we still saw mass street protests. In 1970, 100,000 people took to the streets of Melbourne as part of moratorium protests against the Vietnam War at a time when the city’s population was less than 2.5 million.

The political discontent wasn’t simply caused by the numbers, of course. It also came from a sense young people had that the people running society were on another planet. It was era when the term Generation Gap first came into everyday use.

It only takes a hatful of self-radicalised young folk to cause mayhem. Picture: Alex Coppel

Which brings me to the second reason I think we are in for trouble. My generation — Generation X — came of age in an era, the 1980s, when the public culture was still dominated by the tastes of the Baby Boomers. For example, if there was a commercial radio station interested in playing music that appealed to us, I must have missed it. But commercially — and demographically — we didn’t matter. There just weren’t enough of us. The next generation is different. Not only are there many more of them, they’ve got money.

But more importantly, thanks to the internet, they have the ability to create their own culture and spread it among themselves in a way Generation X never had. Even more importantly, the decline of the mainstream media has made it easy for them to exist almost entirely inside this culture without engaging with anything else.

Now, that is increasingly true of everyone. We are all inside our own little silos of opinion these days and radically intolerant of the opinions of everyone else, as two minutes on Twitter will show you.

The difference between an angry and frustrated middle-aged Sky News Australia viewer and an angry frustrated youth is not the vehemence with which they hold their opinions but what they are likely to do about what irks them.

Not everyone of course — the great majority of young people will remain as delightfully apathetic about politics as the rest of Australia. But as we have seen with Islam and more recently with the white supremacist-inspired Christchurch massacre, it only takes a hatful of self-radicalised young folk to cause mayhem.

I hope I am wrong but I fear we are heading for trouble. In the meantime, the Morrison Government can take comfort from the fact at that this election, Cozzie’s kiddies are too young to vote. Because, given that ever since they were weaned they have been taught that climate change is the most important issue facing humanity, the chance of many of them voting Liberal is very low indeed.

James Campbell is national politics editor

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