Federal finance minister Mathias Cormann had planned to give a presentation to the top end of town in Perth on 20 June. It was to have been a $250-a-head luncheon with his swanky big business mates in a swanky big business venue. He was going to boast about the Liberals’ wave of attacks on students, workers and the poor.

The National Union of Students West branch responded by organising a welcome party of angry protesters wearing top-hats and smoking fake cigars. We were informed shortly after arriving that Cormann had heard about the protest and, lacking the courage of his convictions, cancelled his presentation.

These slimy Liberals are cowed so much by a bit of public opposition that they are cancelling their engagements all over the country.

Activists at the University of Western Australia managed to scare off foreign minister Julie Bishop a few weeks earlier simply by asking about when she was coming to speak. Abbott and education destruction minister Christopher Pyne have also cancelled public engagements lest they suffer being shouted at by the students whose lives they want to destroy.

Now they’re getting bodyguards. How pathetic.

The Liberals and their backers have whinged that student protesters are just “damaging their own cause”. Typical was Fairfax columnist Annabel Crabb’s comments that students should stop protesting “like it’s 1969”.

Aside from missing the obvious point that the protests of the ’60s and ’70s forced significant concessions from Liberal and Labor governments alike, Crabb also has missed a more immediately obvious question: if the protests are so damaging to our cause, why are the Liberals so frightened of them?

It seems that the protests, which have received widespread support, damage the government’s cause more than ours. We need to keep coming out to show our opposition like it’s 1969 if we want to have any hope of busting the budget.