One Nation has criticised local government candidates over the use of high school students in campaigning, after a recent post by a Hobart City Council hopeful.
In a post on Tuesday, One Nation Tasmania said candidates “are enlisting high school students in uniform to wave campaign signs on roadside nature strips while grandstanding about lowering the national voting age.”
“Children in school uniform should be in classrooms learning, not serving as roadside billboards for activist politicians,” the party
The party claimed candidates were using school students as political props rather than addressing ratepayer concerns.
The post was published with a photograph from Hobart City Council mayoral candidate Tiffany Ashdown’s campaign.
Ashdown subsequently responded with a statement encouraging the involvement of youth in politics.
“We talk a lot about young people being disengaged from politics. These students are proof that is not true,” Ashdown said.
“They are paying attention. They have opinions. They want to be heard.”
Ashdown said the question of engagement for young people was one she felt strongly about.
“The decisions being made right now, about housing, about the climate, about what our city looks like in 20 years, these are decisions that will shape the lives of young people,” she said.
“It seems right to me that they should have a voice in that conversation.”
More than 200 students are expected to gather on Parliament Lawns today for a separate protest against One Nation.
The Hobart Against Hate rally is scheduled for 2:30pm and has been organised by college and university students, with speakers travelling from across the state.
The protest is primarily directed at Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and what students describe as “harmful rhetoric”.
Pauline Hanson criticised similar student protests on the mainland last month, posting that “schools should teach young Australians how to think, not what to think.”
