When Feelings Matter More than Fact: Australia’s Emerging Politicians

The Lost Art of Argument

H. A. G. Longstaff

HAVE TIKTOK ANTICS RUINED OUR ABILITY as young people to empathise with alternative views? Over the past holidays I took part in the NSW Youth Parliament, appointed by my local MP as the Youth member for North Shore and subsequently elected by my peers as one of only 15 Youth Cabinet Ministers.

Youth Parliament is NSW’s flagship youth leadership and engagement program and has been operating for 20 years. The program provides high school-age students with the opportunity to engage with civic leadership, policy development, and democratic parliamentary debate. The program involves young people designing a Bill (proposed new law), which is then debated during a mock sitting week in NSW Parliament House Lower House chamber – the session chaired by an actual MP.

Throughout this experience, Youth Parliamentarians had the opportunity to meet young leaders from electorates across the State, as far north as Tweed to as far south as Bega. There was a plethora of opinions and perspectives, many differing largely from mine. Few of us were shy to express these opinions. Within these debates, which at times turned quickly to arguments, I sensed a loss in our young society of an ability to express oneself with a clarity of thought and fact without getting too emotionally attached to one’s argument. As former UK Cabinet Minister Rt. Hon Rory Stewart says in his podcast series The Long History Of Argument – From Socrates to Social Media: “I grew up believing that the way to reach the truth was through argument. In our often polarised world, it can feel like we have forgotten how to disagree with one another in a constructive and civil way. Sadly now we live in a time when argument defines us and divides us, yet the skill of arguing well and truthfully matters so much to our democracies and our lives.”

It was disappointing to see NSW’s supposed ‘best of the best’ be very close-minded in their approach to differing views. At times when speakers expressed their opinions on today’s hotly-contested issues (including gender diversity and the Voice), they were met with shouts of “Shame!” and other slurs. That may be a foundational method of disagreeing on Tik Tok, but is this really where we want our society to be heading?

I doubt much of the audience heard a single word of a speaker before they decided to exclaim their personal political slogans, drowning out the well-thought out and inspiring speeches. Amidst the chaos of the Youth Parliament, I was reminded of a quote from Margaret Thatcher, a famous British PM; “One of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.” I found this reflective of my experiences, where many young leaders would rather shout to deafen themselves to new ideas than quietly sit, listen and perhaps even learn. If they sat quietly and listened, maybe they would agree with the new perspective offered, maybe they would not. But at least they would have been respectful.

It was the Youth Member for Mount Druitt who shared; “It was the great American author Charles Bukowski who described life as a circus”. Indeed life in the Youth Parliament was largely similar to one. Life is like a circus of trivialities, sideshows and ideas that end as quickly as they began.

A message to Shore boys: don’t let yourselves get wrapped up in the trivialities of theatrics, but rather use argument as a vehicle to understand and empathise. Remain open to differing ideas, even if you may not necessarily agree.