An example of this was the two men in suits at the Canberra demo who displayed signs defending the virtues of free trade - their signs were seized and torn up. There may be some reason to suggest that counter-demonstration is really not a good idea, and likely to lead to clashes. But this argument has to cut both ways - it requires tolerance for everybody's demonstrations and meetings, not attempts to use guerilla tactics to take over or break up those of the enemy, a common tactic of the violent Left. Happily we do not in Australia have street fighters of the extreme Right. In fact, as the growing popularity of Anzac Day celebrations among the young shows, the general feeling of young people is quite different from the obsessions of the lefty baby boomers in their heyday.
Youthful idealism is a great thing, and never to be regretted.
What is to be regretted is the way in which it is exploited by elders for their own ideological and power-seeking purposes, or its corruption into fanaticism and rigidity which persists into middle age and beyond. A great deal of this is happening at present in matters of the environment, social policy and attitudes to the rest of the world. Flatly untrue propositions about trends in living standards and the distribution of income between rich and poor countries are presented as fact, while careful refutations of such propositions are rejected as biased or financed by global corporations. In fact the young, here and in the poorer countries, are the chief beneficiaries of globalisation, the freedom of markets and movement of capital, equality of opportunity and that form of social organisation which is called capitalism.