Protesting students disrupted Q&A last night with a dropped banner protesting education cuts. In response, the programme cut to a musical interlude and the protesters received a stern rebuke from host Tony Jones. "That was not what democracy is about," he instructed them. If we take our bearings from recent history, we might conclude that Jones is right. The protesters did not act in accordance with what have now become the table manners of Australian political life.

So what are the rules of our new Australian political etiquette? Demands are not to be made directly, but solicited in focus groups. Public opinion is not contested and expressed, but produced in the abstract realm of statistics. Only individual interests, which can be aggregated, measured and calculated for the expert formulation of policy, matter. In all of these cases, questions are not to be asked by people of their representatives (and banners certainly aren’t allowed to be flown).



We’re all spectators of democracy. We react to agendas not of our own creation, which are themselves the products of lobbying, or perhaps an expensive meal and a bottle of Grange.



To the extent that participation is invited in the central institutions of democratic life, including on Q&A, it is subject to close moderation. Guests and audience questions, as well as on-screen tweets, are selected for their relevance to a conversation that has already begun, not in the studio but beyond and before the program, in the interaction between the media and national politics.



Even within these limits, some questions turn out not to be questions at all, but "comments" that don't really need to be addressed. Any impassioned conflict that exceeds this format is by definition a failure of management, an embarrassment. In the case of Q&A, it was a reason to stop broadcasting.



But conflict can never be fully resolved. If it is managed too closely by liberal political institutions like political parties and the press, if we indulge in the illusion that we are post-political (and therefore that government is a matter of technical administration, or that difference can be ordered by the market) there is nowhere within the system for political passions to go. This leads to frustrations that might erupt in unexpected places.



This brings us back to Q&A, and our students. Their concerns are both well-founded and rarely canvassed in a system where both major parties are committed to a marketised, user-pays conception of the university. This generation faces a double bind. On the one hand, another generation (that received its education for free) is working up to a position that forces young people to pay more than they do already. Higher education is an indulgence that "we" can no longer afford to invest too much in. On the other hand, young people are pilloried for worrying out loud that their lengthy, expensive university education may only lead to an unpaid internship.

Young people's political responses to this can only ever be wrong. Debt-laden graduates who submit to the vocational logic of contemporary higher education, and then enter a ruthless job market, are castigated for their self-obsession and political quietism. Boomers who got their start and their breaks in a forgiving welfare democracy are perennially surprised when young people without the financial capacity for independence become restive in junior jobs, readily leave them for better-paid opportunities, or comport themselves differently in the workplace.

But the students who directly protest the tightening of these screws are condemned for their lack of political decorum. Even though no one in the major parties is pretending to represent their position, they are told to wait their turn. When they express themselves beyond well-worn political channels – in angry encounters on social media, or by disrupting old media, they are accused of disrespecting democracy.

Whether young people are too careerist or too political, they are always too selfish. Either way, the imperative of “good government” is now the management, constraint and repression of democratic life - which also includes protest. Q&A shows us how this works in miniature.

The failure of central institutions –media outlets and political parties – to accommodate passionate disagreements can have far more troubling consequences than studio protests. For example, the emergence of Pauline Hanson in the 1990s showed how the far right can capitalise on a harmful economic consensus that is unable to be challenged by its discontents. Her legacy had major consequences for Australian political culture, and can still be seen in policy approaches to refugees and indigenous affairs. Rather than managing impassioned conflict, as the ABC did last night, we need to find ways to return it to the centre of our politics.