Sex, Lies and the Young Liberals
July 23rd 2008 00:02
It is a regular night on the town for thousands of teenagers across the country. It is a part of youth culture. Knock back a bit too much alcohol. Do some dumb things. Get physical with members of the opposite sex. Most people wouldn’t bat an eyelash. They know what goes on when the kids go out to play.
Now imagine the same thing happening, except this time it’s at a hostel in Canberra and the teenagers are Young Liberal Party members at a national conference that supplied them with vodka and ended with them kicking in walls, spitting and having fairly public sex in the claustrophobic environs of a hostel room. I love the classiness of it most of all. Well, that’s not the truth. What I love about it most of all is imagining exactly how much trouble the Young Liberals would have got into from the people in charge as word of the embarrassment spread. It really does not look good for the Liberal Party. Especially when you consider that just a few months ago Federal Liberal Leader Brendan Nelson was able to take advantage of the unruly behaviour of Young Labor at the 2020 convention. Once you lose the high ground, it’s a slippery slope to the bottom.
In a way it’s no big deal on the surface. Kids will be kids and Australian people have never been opposed to a little bit of binge drinking every now and then. But the point is that it could not have come at a worse time. Binge drinking is the beat-up of 2008, with the Ruddbot trotting it out every time he feels the need to get behind the pulpit and sermonise to the nation. Which puts the Opposition in a bind. You see, you can’t just say the binge drinking is a fantastic thing. Everyone knows that it can cause social and medical problems. So all the Liberal Party can do is agree with the idea behind stopping young people binge drinking and disagree with their methods. So, when something like this happens you can virtually hear the screams of fury coming from Parliament House.
Get any group of young people all herded into the same area at the same time, and something is going to happen. Hormones. Drinking. Inability to determine what is and isn’t risky behaviour. And the Young Liberals weren’t doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. Bad behaviour, yes. Inappropriate, yes. But not necessarily bad. What was bad was their serious lack of judgement. Show up at what is fundamentally a political conference, get trashed and then go wild. In our combative political system that gives free reign for all kinds of negative imputations against the very party they had all gathered to support.
To do it in Canberra, where there are political partisans under every rock and around every corner, just shows a level of judgement catastrophically low.
Newly elected leader of the Liberal Students’ Federation Byron Hodkinson has apologised to the hostel for the incident and had banned the people involved from further participation in the conflict, without having expelled them from the organisation itself. He says, “they’re still students and not public figures, after all”. Good point, Byron. But even you must have come to the realisation that bad behaviour from what most would consider “the future of the party” cannot be good for the image of the party as a whole and it’s certainly not good for the credibility of the Liberal Students’ Federation itself. What senior party official will allow a group with a reputation of bingeing and destructive behaviour to come to Parliament House for a cocktail party in the future? None. If Byron Hodkinson wants to restore the credibility of his organisation, he needs to make sure this kind of thing is kept behind closed doors. I’m not saying don’t do it, just don’t do it where people can find out when you are representing the organisation.
Otherwise there will be no more cocktail parties for the Young Liberals. There can be no spitting, kicking and sex at a Parliament House function. Not from the young people anyway. With the politicians themselves? Well. Anything goes.
Now imagine the same thing happening, except this time it’s at a hostel in Canberra and the teenagers are Young Liberal Party members at a national conference that supplied them with vodka and ended with them kicking in walls, spitting and having fairly public sex in the claustrophobic environs of a hostel room. I love the classiness of it most of all. Well, that’s not the truth. What I love about it most of all is imagining exactly how much trouble the Young Liberals would have got into from the people in charge as word of the embarrassment spread. It really does not look good for the Liberal Party. Especially when you consider that just a few months ago Federal Liberal Leader Brendan Nelson was able to take advantage of the unruly behaviour of Young Labor at the 2020 convention. Once you lose the high ground, it’s a slippery slope to the bottom.
In a way it’s no big deal on the surface. Kids will be kids and Australian people have never been opposed to a little bit of binge drinking every now and then. But the point is that it could not have come at a worse time. Binge drinking is the beat-up of 2008, with the Ruddbot trotting it out every time he feels the need to get behind the pulpit and sermonise to the nation. Which puts the Opposition in a bind. You see, you can’t just say the binge drinking is a fantastic thing. Everyone knows that it can cause social and medical problems. So all the Liberal Party can do is agree with the idea behind stopping young people binge drinking and disagree with their methods. So, when something like this happens you can virtually hear the screams of fury coming from Parliament House.
Get any group of young people all herded into the same area at the same time, and something is going to happen. Hormones. Drinking. Inability to determine what is and isn’t risky behaviour. And the Young Liberals weren’t doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. Bad behaviour, yes. Inappropriate, yes. But not necessarily bad. What was bad was their serious lack of judgement. Show up at what is fundamentally a political conference, get trashed and then go wild. In our combative political system that gives free reign for all kinds of negative imputations against the very party they had all gathered to support.
To do it in Canberra, where there are political partisans under every rock and around every corner, just shows a level of judgement catastrophically low.
Newly elected leader of the Liberal Students’ Federation Byron Hodkinson has apologised to the hostel for the incident and had banned the people involved from further participation in the conflict, without having expelled them from the organisation itself. He says, “they’re still students and not public figures, after all”. Good point, Byron. But even you must have come to the realisation that bad behaviour from what most would consider “the future of the party” cannot be good for the image of the party as a whole and it’s certainly not good for the credibility of the Liberal Students’ Federation itself. What senior party official will allow a group with a reputation of bingeing and destructive behaviour to come to Parliament House for a cocktail party in the future? None. If Byron Hodkinson wants to restore the credibility of his organisation, he needs to make sure this kind of thing is kept behind closed doors. I’m not saying don’t do it, just don’t do it where people can find out when you are representing the organisation.
Otherwise there will be no more cocktail parties for the Young Liberals. There can be no spitting, kicking and sex at a Parliament House function. Not from the young people anyway. With the politicians themselves? Well. Anything goes.
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