Lawyers of tomorrow … Malcolm Turnbull draws law student protest at his alma mater … Campus chaos  at University of Sydney … Students see in Turnbull what they’ll be when they grow up … The unbearable smugness of being … Max Shanahan reports from the front line 

Sydney University, and specifically the Law School, is the breeding ground for Australia’s most annoying and egotistic people. 

Yesterday (September 2), past and present collided beautifully in the law foyer as Malcolm Turnbull (an historically annoying and egotistic person) was prevented from giving a speech to an audience of law students (an incredibly annoying and egotistic demographic) by a troupe of enraged student politicians (an equally annoying and egotistic demographic). 

Rarely has so much joy spread so quickly to so many people. An impenetrable sense of righteousness equal to all parties blossomed in the moment that a gaggle of student activists paraded, megaphones at the ready, into Malcolm’s speech. 

The activists got to do some shouting, get new Facebook DPs, and the important achievement of moving the speech to Zoom. The organiser, Ben Hines – Sydney Uni Law Society President and one-time campus Liberal – got some premium schmoozing with Malcolm as they hid from protestors in a kitchen annex. 

The attendees earned the right to lament “cancel culture” and the “intolerant left”. 

Malcolm got the opportunity – which he did not waste – to feel wronged, take the moral high ground and smarmily correct students on their geography. And I get to earn some cash from this piece. 

The entertaining, and generally unsettling, thing about student politics at the University of Sydney is the astounding lack of self-awareness enjoyed by most of its participants. 

A platoon of students marched into the law building shouting “bourgeois scum off campus”. Holding a loud hailer aloft and speaking against the organisers of the event was Lauren Lancaster, SRC President, activist, and daughter of two prominent silks. 

Funnily enough, there were no protests when DPP Sally Dowling SC gave a speech in the same SULS series – although Lauren was right in saying: “[Turnbull] will have nothing valid to say to you for the next hour.”  

You can follow the action here …  

Students have gathered at the New Law Annex to protest former Liberal PM Malcom Turnbull’s presence on campus pic.twitter.com/o0shmgNiSF

— Honi Soit (@honi_soit) September 1, 2022

GPS old boys regularly vociferously debate each other on whose niche left-wing campus faction best speaks for the working class, until they buy a suit and take up a clerkship at Clayton Utz defending beastly corporates. 

Debaters lie in wait on Twitter and Facebook, composing essay-length missives detailing their “principled stance” on the important issue of whether true leftists should seek election to student bodies. It’s all a bit silly a lot of the time. 

Politics is not and will never be a “nice” or “welcoming” vocation, yet the transplantation of the spite and vindictiveness of real world politics to the generally niche controversies of an elite campus alienates a majority of students who would otherwise be supportive of important campaigns on education and other issues. 

What hope of a student movement if most of the students can’t stand the leaders. There wasn’t any point to the Turnbull incident other than to have fun, shout at Liberals, and generally run rampant. 

For that we should be, in a sense, grateful – it’s always good to have things happening on campus about which to gossip at the pub – yet to frame the action as anything other than an act of self-gratification only means that I have to hear more from Turnbull than I ever would have wanted, and to endure more torturous debates on Twitter about “free speech” and “deplatforming” – it’s so 2016. 

Malcolm Turnbull is what happens when a USyd student politician grows up. 

The unbreakable righteousness, the sensitivity to criticism, the lack of self-awareness, the private school entitlement, and the debater’s unctuousness combine to create an unholy amalgamation of the worst features of campus characters on the left and the right. 

As Turnbull delivered ad hominens against the intruding activists and reached immediately for the “fascism” card, one saw the exact template used by student politicians in their own speeches. 

Like some sort of reverse Dorian Gray, they had to rid the campus of Turnbull, for in him they saw an incredibly unflattering portrait of themselves.