The young protesters at Melbourne’s rally against Pauline Hanson were keen to tell me what they believed and far less keen to explain it. One girl said she was there to get Hanson and “the far right” out of government, and when I asked whether communism was the answer, she told me she believed in socialism. Fair enough, so I asked her to name one country anywhere in history where it had worked and that she would like Australia to copy.

She said she wasn’t a professional and I should ask someone who was. When I pointed out that Hanson had given me plenty of examples, I was told Hanson isn’t a professional socialist, which is an odd standard for an ideology that supposedly belongs to the workers. Her definition, when it finally came, was that everyone deserves equal rights. I believe that too, but it isn’t what socialism means.

The conversation worth having came next. One of the group announced that One Nation says there are no good Muslims and introduced her Muslim friend as one of the greatest people she had ever met. He told me he was born in Iraq and came here at three as a refugee, his family escaping the war and the terrorists that came with it. So I asked him the obvious question, which was whether he understood why so many Australians don’t want to import the same people he fled.

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His friends answered for him. Not everyone escaping terrorism is a terrorist, they said, and I agreed, because nobody I know is making that argument. The difficulty is vetting people from places like that, and the ideology underneath it all is jihadism, which would turn Australia into something much closer to Iraq if it ever took hold here. When I asked him directly, as a practising Muslim, whether we should keep that ideology out, he said he didn’t think we should and then admitted he was nervous. I don’t hold that against him. His friends, though, decided the question itself was the offence, calling it targeted, clearly offensive and heavily biased, even though the only reason they had put him forward was his story.

A few metres away, a young man told me he wanted open borders “of course,” because where you’re born shouldn’t decide where you get to live. I put to him what migrants keep telling me on the street. Many of them support One Nation precisely because they fled terrible places and don’t want the same ideologies and tribal conflicts following them here, since this time there would be nowhere left to run. His reply was that Australia is already becoming those places because politicians take donations from billionaires and gas executives like Gina Rinehart. I’m fairly sure Gina Rinehart isn’t importing jihadism, and when I pressed him, the question about those migrants went unanswered.

There’s an old line that if you’re not a socialist when you’re young you have no heart, and if you’re not a capitalist once responsibility hits you have no brain. A lot of the kids at this rally are running on feeling, without rent to pay or consequences to live with yet. In ten or fifteen years many of them will work out that emotional politics isn’t the answer, and the immigrants already backing One Nation will have got there long before them.

Watch to the end and share it far and wide. Nobody else is putting a camera in these crowds and asking the follow-up question. We are. But it doesn't happen without security, and security costs thousands every single time. If you want us back on the streets asking the questions nobody else will, go to ProtectAvi.com right now and chip in. Every dollar keeps us out there.