When victimhood is main currency, we’re the ones who will be stuffed

Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli reads the riot act on ‘a generation of untouchables’ this week.

I can’t remember the last time a politician of any ilk said something that made me stop what I was doing and turn around. In a good way, that is.

Oh, there have been plenty of moments where what has come out of the mouths of some MPs has prompted a less than ladylike response from yours truly.

That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about something said last week that made me stop, listen and, as it happens, start writing.

This week, David Crisafulli, the man who would be Queensland premier, held a media conference to announce the state Liberal National Party’s proposed policy on youth crime should his team be elected in the October poll.

The detail of that policy, which focuses on strengthening penalties and more effective rehabilitation, is actually the supporting act here. Some have criticised it, some say it’s what’s needed. Let others fight that battle. It’s what he said when delivering the policy that I want to pick apart.

Crisafulli declared that soft policing of young people and a dearth of consequences when they committed serious crimes had created “a generation of untouchables”.

A generation of untouchables. What a statement. And broadly, what a truth.

Crisafulli may have said this in the context of a catastrophic youth crime issue in Queensland, but I want to talk about it more broadly and tease out why any of us should care.

As a starting point, come with me, if you will, to Perth in the early 1980s. I’m in the car with my mum driving past Lake Monger, a large, thriving wetland a few kilometres north of the city.

I don’t know what I did on this occasion to find myself in strife. I was a pretty straitlaced kid, to be honest, so I imagine it was something to do with my unbridled tongue. On this afternoon I was learning a tough lesson in behavioural relativity.

“Hate me all you want, Gem,” Mum said, after delivering the consequences to my actions. “But I’m not here to be your friend, you’ll thank me one day.”

Most of my maligned Generation X peers have similar stories and we laugh about them. The irony, 40-odd years later, is that for the most part our generation produced millennials, which is arguable where the slippery slope started.

Our boomer parents knew a thing or two about cost and value and hard work. They passed that on to us. What did we do? Wrapped our kids in cotton wool and gave them a medal for getting out of bed. The millennials took that baton and ran with it. Next stop Generation Z, custom-made with hides softer than butter on a January afternoon.

Sure, you could dismiss me as an “old lady shakes fist at sky” or similar, but hear me out. There is so much conversation right now about societal decline and the shredding of social cohesion. What happens when we have generational decline? We have entire cohorts who are experts in rights but no clue about responsibilities. Who value victimhood above everything else. And who despite being elected to serve the Australian people in the Senate, complain about not having a “support person” to go and front up to the Prime Minister and explain yourself after launching a missile at him and the party that put you in your $280k a year job in the first place.

Honestly, Fatima Payman is the embodiment of what I’m talking about. Deluded enough to refer to herself as the “voice of West Australians”. Deluded enough to think she is in parliament because she’s special or talented and not because of the machinations of the ALP and the West Australian union movement.

Fatima Payman is deluded enough to refer to herself as the “voice of West Australians”. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Bet they’re high-fiving themselves now. On behalf of the rest of Australia, go to your room and have a good hard think about what you did.

It gets better (or worse) because this week the ALP’s youth movement publicly threw its support behind Payman. This is the kids telling Mum and Dad to go get stuffed. While this is primarily and for now a problem for the ALP, I want the rest of us to think about why it matters. Why it does, and why it will continue to.

We are running out of time to turn the ship. Ever the optimist, I think there is still time but, when you think about how long it takes for societal erosion, the clock is ticking, loudly.

It’s not just soft policing that has created this. It’s soft parenting. Soft teaching. Soft leading. All of it. And by soft, I don’t mean the alternative is harshness or hardness. What I mean is that you cannot remove consequences, in any context, and expect to produce young people of character and substance.

It’s like anything: you get what you pay for. If a young person knows the worst they’ll face is a Monty Pythonesque you’re not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy or girl, they’ll do what they please. I’m sure I would have.

You can’t fast-track experience and you can’t learn discipline, leadership and sacrifice any other way than being disciplined, led well and having to endure sacrifice. This matters because one day, when members of the generation that are the same age as my niece and nephew are in the Lodge, we want them to be well formed. We don’t want needy brats who were told everything they ever did was spectacular and that microaggression is real (it really is not) and that there is a back door out of every situation because they’ve never had to face or wear a consequence.

The ridiculous charade of Payman’s crusade for self is such a brilliant, helpful and instructive example of what I’m talking about.

Farther afield, another terrifyingly potent example of what I’m talking about. After holding the prestigious Columbia University campus hostage to vile anti-Israel protest for weeks on end, law students petitioned administrators to cancel exams because they were so “irrevocably shaken” by the protests. And they were serious.

Back at home, the pro-Palestine useful idiot student activists from the University of Melbourne’s equivalent who made the campus unsafe for Jewish students and defied administrators for weeks on end look set to escape with a warning. A generation of untouchables, indeed.

Forget the culture wars; perhaps the real battlefield is the generation wars. Perhaps the failure started with us, the Gen-Xers.

Either way, when victimhood is the primary currency of the emerging generation, well, we’re the ones who’ll be stuffed.

We are doing this generation a disservice by allowing this softness to guide, by depriving them of the lessons that can be learned only by going through difficulty.

As for junior Gemma and her education in the area of choice and consequences, well, Mum was right. I did thank her, and have done many times since that day.