Young Liberals

Economic rationalism and privatisation were sufficiently uncool when I was at university, that almost nobody wanted to be a Young Liberal. Even people who wanted to be Old Liberals didn’t want to be Young Liberals. It was the early nineties, there was a recession on, and the thing to do was to try your hand fighting for a redistribution of wealth while you still didn’t have any wealth to redistribute.

Life, we were told, would be an inexorable wander to the right of the political spectrum. If you stuck a bolt through your nose and chanted revolutionary chants at university you might end up in the centre. If you started in the centre, it was just a matter of time before you’d wake up wearing moleskins, fighting for a flat 20% tax rate and an enlargement of the union jack on the Australian flag.

To be a Young Liberal was to be different, to be brave. It took courage to stand up when everyone else had mobilised against you and say ‘you think I’m a knob now, just wait until you see how I turn out’. I always thought that the Young Liberals were an easy target, and that the red-necked views of their more extreme members were consistently given prominence to make a mockery of the movement as a whole.

Having said that, I always liked to be a part of this process, and I don’t particularly feel like missing out now.

The Young Liberals this week conducted its national conferences, and discovered with three controversial resolutions the meaning of the old adage, ‘if you’re going to say something foolish, don’t say it in a slow news week.’

The first resolution was one put forward in Queensland, and related to whether mothers caught ‘red-nippled’ breastfeeding in public, should be given on-the spot fines.

My view is that if we are going to fine the mothers, we should at least be consistent and fine the babies as well. After all, it takes two to tango. If the little tackers on the end of the nipple weren’t there sucking away for dear life, the likelihood is that the whole sordid affair wouldn’t be going on.

Another possibility might be to cut off the demand for milk. As I understand it, the current situation of public breastfeeding is very much caused by babies becoming publicly hungry. If we can stop them crying for a feed, we might just be able to keep Australia’s breasts tucked firmly away. The answer here is diet tablets. There are pharmaceuticals now available that act as effective hunger suppressants, and if parents could be convinced to give them a go, this country could start producing a thinner, more docile cut of infant.

Also on the social agenda in Queensland was a G-plate for geriatric drivers. The idea was that the plates could be used to stigmatise people over 65, and to remind them every time they glance in their rear view mirrors of the fleeting nature of life on Earth. Also, the G-plates would allow other drivers to better construct their abuse of people they perceive to be driving poorly. Instead of screaming, ‘What do you think you’re doing you stupid bastard,’ we would be able to shout with confidence, ‘What do you think you’re doing you stupid, old, bastard.’

The G-plate is all about community building.

The third resolution for discussion comes from the Western Australian conference, where Young Liberals proposed that National Sorry Day be abolished and replaced with a day of thanksgiving for our European forefathers. The WA State president Alan Dungey suggested that Sorry Day was ‘disgraceful’ and that aborigines had many good reasons to be grateful Australia was settled by British settlers.

My only query with this suggestion, apart from the way it glosses over attempted genocide, is whether a national day of thanks is in order when we’ve already got Cook’s Cottage. For those who don’t know it, Cook’s Cottage is the place to go if you want to see really, really small furniture or an old wooden spoon. If the Young Liberals want to get a bit of colonial fervor going, I say we forget about a day of national thanks and ship out more houses that Captain James Cook might once have visited. Brick by eighteenth century brick. One for each capital city.

In fairness to the Young Liberals, only the third and most politically destructive of these resolutions was actually passed. The other two were rejected, possibly because they didn’t embrace the suggestions contained in this column, but more likely because they were complete bollocks.

Still, it’s easy for me to criticise. The fact is that as time ticks by, I’m sliding to the right as well. Chances are that one day I’ll be a Young Liberal - old and angry and demanding that something be done about breastfeeding. I just hope it doesn’t happen until I’m well and truly on my G-plates.