The Young Liberals, in their membership drive, have made their target clear.

Carn git me, Prodos!

UPDATE: In case the Prodos link isn’t clear enough, here’s the header of his blog.

Just an update on everybody’s favourite cartoon conservatives, the Young Liberals. When last we heard from them, they were being laughed out of the Senate at the conclusion of their “lecturers are leftards” campaign. Now, they’re doing their best to ensure that nobody under the age of 30 ever votes for the Liberal Party again.

THE Young Liberals are proposing nine months of compulsory national service for all young Australians, to be completed before age 24.

Young Liberal president Noel McCoy said the aim was to provide a sizeable low-cost workforce that would help to offset the effects of the financial crisis.

At the same time he said it would help instil a work ethic and sense of national pride in young people.

Areas suffering from chronic inter-generational welfare dependence would benefit from having people returning to their communities having acquired broader experience, skills, discipline and values.

“We’re a big believer in a hand up, not a handout, and this is a very practical way of achieving that,” he said.

Yep, welfare dependence and unemployment can be solved by universal, state-sponsored indentured servitude. Also, string enough cliches together and you never know, the innattentive might just mistake it for an argument. But wait, there’s more:

Mr McCoy said under the proposal students would not be able to graduate from university without a certificate of completion of national service.

“There are a number of national and social benefits,” he said. “It would help lessen the potential youth unemployment crisis we are facing as a result of the global financial crisis.

“It would also provide a social benefit by developing a deep appreciation of Australian society and its traditions. It is a good way of integrating young Australians of all backgrounds and socio-economic stata [sic.] in a shared experience of serving their country.

Making the posession of actual qualifications dependent on some utterly useless and wholly symbolic period of military service is bound to be good for the skills shortage, and the economy as a whole.

This is the kind of stuff you used to hear in RSLs or at Wilson Tuckey’s place, until even they realised that (a) there are currently no realistic external military threats to Australia, that (b) reluctant conscripts might well be a liability in a highly specialised, technology-intensive defence force, and that (c) on the whole, schemes like this constitute a huge waste of everybody’s time.

I’m glad the Young Liberals are still managing to party like it’s 1949. But I wonder what Malcolm Turnbull thinks…

The Victorian branch of the Young Liberals have elected themselves a fearless leader by the name of James Paterson.

Next stop: The Lodge

Here’s James Paterson, writing as “The Neo-Con”, at his now-defunct blog a few years ago.

Just in case you hadn’t guessed from the title – I’m right wing.

In Australia this makes me a Liberal – but don’t worry American readers, not your pansy left-wing liberals, in Australia the Liberal party is the mainstream conservative political party. Sure, there is ‘One Nation’ but they are a little nutty and located on the fringe, and Family First is just not my cup of tea. In other words, if I was in America, I’d be a member of the Republican Party.

Our equivalent of the Democrats is called the Labor party. Yes it’s true; they cannot spell, as they are the party of the trade union – or labour – movement. We do have a Democrat party, but they have like four federal Senators and aren’t even recognised constitutionally as a ‘party’ because of their low representation. They are stuck somewhere around and in between Labor and the dreaded Greens, but its hard to pin them down on a scale more accuratley than that, because no one really knows what they stand for.

There’s some hardcore political analysis right there. The Liberals are in good hands.

UPDATE: I wasn’t aware an archive of Paterson’s site existed, but here it is.

In one fell swoop, Overland editor Jeff Sparrow* slaps down Miranda Devine, the “populist Right” and the Young Liberals, whose “undergraduate” bleatings about Left-wing bias in universities and schools were rightly dismissed as “farcical” at the conclusion of a Senate Inquiry last week:

But the Young Libs are, at least, authentically undergraduate. Miranda Devine, on the other hand, is old enough to know better. Yet she too threw her weight behind Make Australia Fair – and with accusations that were even more risible. Why, there’s a Brisbane school, don’t you know, that celebrates Mao Zedong as a “freedom fighter”, right next to George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi – Liberal Senator Brett Mason popped in once and caught them in the act.

Devine’s revelations about Brisbane’s Long March High are not just nutty. They, like the Make Australia Fair campaign, epitomise the peculiar brand of petulant victimology that now grips the populist Right. The Young Liberals’ education campaign website reads, in fact, like one big pity party, a compendium of stories of youthful Tories oppressed by mean teachers, and books with which they don’t agree and posters they see on university walls.

“I have found the constant liberal-bagging, jokes and Labor pushing agenda threatening and frustrating,” confesses one disconsolate young reactionary. “In class discussions I constantly feel like my opinions aren’t welcome and quite often I do not say anything.”

But hang on a second. Aren’t the Liberals the champions of individual responsibility? Don’t the Young Libs themselves proudly proclaim their opposition to the “nanny state” and declare that “while we believe the government should provide the individual with the best opportunities possible, we recognise that the onus is on the individual to seize the opportunity”?

Didn’t, in fact, Ms Devine herself devote her next column to an attack on the whole notion of government intervention?

And there’s plenty more gold where that came from. Read it and weep, wingnuts.

* Writing, in this instance, in Crikey, which I can’t access because I’m a tightarse non-subscriber.

The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Chuck A. Spear, Keri and Craig discuss:

* Let’s Cook! With Craig
* Mardi Gras
* John Howard
* Gay marriage
* Kevin Rudd’s razor gang
* Carers’ allowance
* Joe Hockey’s arse
* Young Liberals
* Left wing bias in education
* Christopher Pyne
* Nick Minchin
* Andrew Laming
* Brendan Nelson
* Hire A Hubby
* Masculinity
* SNAGs

** Because there’s still a blockage in the (inter)tubes use only the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

[display_podcast]

 GrodsThink RSS feed

And the results are in. Winner: personality!

It’s a conundrum that has long puzzled right-thinking (pun intended) Australians, but brokenleftleg has re-asked the question and The Happy Revolutionary has offered the first four possible answers; I added the final two.

Vote early, vote often. Poll closes COB tomorrow (Friday).

UPDATE (9.30am): I’ve added a seventh option, as suggested by Damian.