As Crikey has noted before, Australia’s young people are considered fair game by policymakers. We’re pricing them out of the housing market. We’re loading them up with student debt they’ll have to pay off before they can take on their massive housing mortgages. We’re frying the planet, which will inflict huge economic costs on them. Some of our major employers systematically underpay them, and in some cases do so with the active collaboration of the union that is supposed to represent their interests.

And we vilify them constantly. We accuse them of being responsible for killing a huge number of industries. Young people, we’re told, are killing TV, restaurant chains, the car industry, department stores. They “hook up” with randoms online (alternatively, they don’t have as much sex as their parents’ generation, because they’re lazy). They’re addicted to their phones. They have no loyalty to employers. They grow silly beards. They travel overseas and pursue other self-indulgences. They eat food that’s too expensive; one alleged demographer has accused them of eating “smashed avocado with crumbed feta on five-grain toasted bread”, although the only real problem with their getting into the housing market, according to Joe Hockey, is that they need to just “get a good job that pays good money”.

Now Pauline Hanson wants to ban them from voting, wanting the voting age to be increased to 21 because “they’ve never held a job, they’ve never paid any taxes, they have no understanding of politics”. Let’s leave that factual error and irony-rich statement to its own devices — Hanson presumably would prefer the voting age to be increased to 65, and the franchise limited to One Nation voters. But that piquant observation was made in the context of a call by super-rich mining magnate Twiggy Forrest to ban young people from smoking.

Forrest was tapping, like a miner into a seam of iron ore, into the rich nanny state tradition of demonising young people. Nanny state public health lobbyists routinely call for the drinking age to be lifted to 21. In 2012, the Australian Medical Association demanded that the drinking age be raised — not to 21 but 25. This is despite repeated evidence that Australia’s young people have significantly cut down their drinking. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s National Drug Survey in 2016 shows daily drinking by people under 25 has fallen by two-thirds in the last decade. Binge drinking has also fallen dramatically, and fallen by more than two-thirds among under-18s. Binge drinking among people in their 40s, 50s and 60s — the age groups of the people who routinely demand an increase in the drinking age — has actually increased slightly.

None of that of course acted as a brake on efforts by the NSW and Queensland governments to impose draconian restrictions on the hospitality industry (which both serves and employs young people) with lock-out laws designed to turn the streets of major cities into ghost towns in the name of pandering to middle-aged newspaper readerships.

It’s a similar story with smoking, by the way: Twiggy would be better off targeting people of his own age group — the rate of daily smoking among 18- to 24-year-olds is actually below that of middle-aged people. But the war on the young is eternal.