OPINION: Protest Pauline Hanson. But do better than this

Are the kids OK?

Well, by the looks of yesterday, I'm not entirely sure.

On Thursday, students around Australia did something teenagers have been doing since teenagers discovered both politics and the intoxicating thrill of not having to sit through two hours of algebra: they walked out of school.

This time, the target was Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

And, before we go any further, protesting is not the problem.

Young people should care about politics. They should question the people seeking to govern them. They should be angry about things. They should occasionally make adults uncomfortable.

God knows democracy could use a few more people paying attention.

But somewhere between political engagement and a placard declaring “Let humans be humans you old fucks”, something appears to have gone slightly off course.

Some of the other choice signs included “Pauline the PIG” and “Monoculture can suck my dick”.

While the creative side of me weeps at the lack of ingenuity, the more sensible side is left wondering when political engagement became indistinguishable from the comments section of a particularly ugly social media post.

Michelle Obama famously offered a better standard: when they go low, we go high.

Some of these kids, however, appear to have received the memo upside down.

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Thousands of students across the country have walked out of class to protest against Pauline Hanson and the rise of One Nation. Organisers for the 'Say No to Pauline Hanson' rally say they are demonstrating against racism and standing up against the “far right”. For more details, click the link in bio.

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And then there’s social media, because we all know the internet has a very long memory.

These are kids. What happens when the 15-year-old holding a vulgar political sign becomes a 25-year-old whose views have changed? Or when they apply for a job and that photo is the first thing a prospective employer finds?

Teenagers are supposed to change their minds. They shouldn't necessarily have their adolescent politics following them forever.

It's fine for us adults to ruin our lives on social media. Heck, we're experts at it.

But maybe we should give the kids a few more years before they join us.

READ MORE: Is Pauline Hanson to 'blame' for this attack against a Chinese restaurant?

Protest is the point. So is how you protest

There is something genuinely encouraging about teenagers believing politics matters enough to leave the classroom and stand in the street.

They can't vote yet, and so protesting is one of the few political levers available to them.

Listen, dismissing every politically engaged teenager as brainwashed is both lazy and patronising. Teenagers have opinions. Sometimes extremely strong ones. Anyone who has ever asked a 15-year-old (heck, even a 10-year-old) to put their phone away knows this.

Nor should criticism of Thursday's rallies be mistaken for an endorsement of Hanson.

You can disagree vehemently with One Nation's policies, rhetoric, and worldview while still asking whether calling a politician a pig reflects the kind of political culture we want young Australians to emulate.

Those aren't contradictory positions.

They're actually rather important ones.

Because if the argument is that Hanson's political rhetoric is divisive, dehumanising or inflammatory, responding with your own version of divisive, dehumanising and inflammatory rhetoric creates an obvious problem.

Then there's the question of who's behind it

This is where things become more interesting.

The protests didn't simply materialise simultaneously in cities around Australia because thousands of teenagers woke up on Thursday morning and independently decided Hanson was preferable to period three geography.

There was organisation behind them.

The National Union of Students was involved, alongside the relatively new High School Anticapitalists, which helped organise the Victorian rally.

Ahead of the demonstrations, activists also circulated material designed to help high school students organise inside their schools. Reporting on the campaign described a toolkit containing practical advice on recruiting classmates, distributing material and coordinating protest activity.

Now, political movements organise people. That's what they do.

There's nothing inherently sinister about a toolkit, a flyer or an activist convincing someone else to attend a rally. Conservatives organise. Progressives organise. Unions organise. Political parties organise. Advocacy groups spend enormous amounts of money trying to persuade the rest of us to care about things every single day.

But when the people being organised are schoolchildren, transparency matters.

Who is speaking to them? Who is supplying the material? What political organisations are involved? Where does the messaging originate? And are students being encouraged to form their own political views, or being handed somebody else's fully assembled worldview and told where to march?

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare took a fairly sensible position ahead of the rallies: students have a right to protest, but high school students should be at school during school hours.

It's hardly the stuff of authoritarianism.

Then someone stole a journalist's microphone

If the placards offered one snapshot of the temperature, Melbourne provided another.

News24 Victorian political reporter Georgie Dickerson was covering the demonstration when a protester approached during a live cross and grabbed the microphone from her hand.

The encounter unfolded on camera. Dickerson tried to retrieve it before the protester disappeared into the crowd, forcing the journalist to give chase.

“We had to chase that protester through the packed crowd,” Dickerson later said.

The microphone was eventually recovered, and Dickerson continued reporting.

It's a small incident in the scheme of a nationwide protest. But it's also strangely instructive.

Journalists aren't participants at political rallies. They're there to report on them.

You don't have to like the journalist. You don't have to like the outlet. You can chant behind them, wave your sign in the camera and make their live cross an absolute nightmare if that's how you want to spend your Thursday afternoon.

But grabbing their equipment crosses a fairly obvious line.

A movement supposedly concerned about the direction of Australian democracy should understand that a functioning media is part of that democracy too.

Note: Mediaweek has reached out to Victoria Police about the incident