Young and the restless: the soap opera of misspent youth (may include traces of yolk)

Or, as the Book of Psalms puts it, 'Out of the mouth of . . . sucklings hast thou ordained strength'

Greens MP Adam Bandt in a Marxist chatroom during his student days at Murdoch University in 1995:

SUPPORTING the Greens would perhaps be the most effective strategy at the next election. The Greens are in many ways bourgeois, but they have been able to exert influence over the government's agenda. They are all we have at the moment . . . Let's ditch this "third party" stuff: communists can't fetishise alternative political parties, but should always make some kind of materially based assessment about the effectiveness of any given strategy come election time. Abstaining is irresponsible; supporting social democratic parties is unjustifiable; building a "new" party simply to get votes can be absurd; supporting progressives who then send people to jail is twisted.

Former Tasmanian premier Ray Groom as the member for Braddon in federal parliament, December 1982:

DR Bob Brown is leading a bunch of stirrers. Radical conservationists have set up a big camp with big signs up the Gordon River towards Warners Landing. They are out to cause trouble. They are stirrers and radicals. Most of them are students. Maybe some of them are teachers. If honourable members opposite look at the desires of ordinary Tasmanian people -- the workers; not the dreamers, but the people who do things in Tasmania and around Australia -- they will see that they realise what is best. Members of the Australian Labor Party, with their attitude, have let them down. They have been conned by a few intellectuals and academics.

Bandt, also in 1995:

ONE of the most evil things about capitalism, as someone once said to me, is that you have to pay to eat.

Tony Abbott during his student days at Sydney University in 1979:

I THINK it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.

Bob Katter reminiscing in 2004 about a highlight of his student days: throwing eggs at the Beatles in Brisbane in 1964, then getting hauled before the Fab Four in their hotel room, along with his fellow culprits:

I WAS explaining that it was an intellectual reaction against Beatlemania -- I'd thought this story up on the stairs on the way up, of course. We were having this intellectual argument and Tony Glynn was another one [of us] . . . and the [Beatles'] manager said "would you be game to throw the eggs [now]". And [fellow egg-lobber Peter] McHugh's sort of shaping up . . . and Gary Williams, the fifth one, he stepped in between McHugh and Paul McCartney or whoever and he said: "Hey, settle down. Obviously you can't throw eggs here, we'll have to go and find an oval somewhere." It was all taken seriously for a while. John Lennon just sort of sat there saying, "Everywhere we go now we're going to have eggs thrown at us" . . . . Our reputations were made from that point forward. We walked around like conquering heroes for the next two or three years.

The Guardian's Lost in Showbiz blog finds a fresh angle in the Paul Hogan imbroglio:

IS tax really what this is about? Lost in Showbiz has an alternative theory: namely, that the country is seeking aggressively to fill a gap in its celebrity offering. As you know, Australia only has five or so celebrities (all of whom are referred to by first names only). There's Nicole, of course, and Cate and Kylie and Hugh, and though I don't think they count Mel any more, what with The Unpleasantness, they are thought to have officially adopted Russell, after Heath's untimely death. But it was the loss of Steve Irwin that hit them the hardest. After all, Steve was really their JFK, until he was assassinated by that stingray he was papping. Clearly, then, Australian culture is missing an ageing larrikin and I'm afraid the coincidence is way too glaring to conclude that the Hogan affair has so much as a brass razoo to do with a tax bill.

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