Last week, Youth Minister Anne Aly unveiled a new youth engagement strategy aimed at including young voices in government decision-making.
It didn’t garner much media coverage, perhaps because it didn’t contain many surprising components. It mostly just locks in existing consultation mechanisms, such as the government’s Youth Advisory Groups, through which selected young people advise government departments. Added to this was the National Youth Forum, an annual talkfest, the first of which was held last Wednesday in Canberra with 110 young people aged 14-25 from across the country. The whole strategy is guided by a steering group of 15 more young people.
The government is keen to demonstrate it is listening to young people — more than 4,600 of them for this report. But what exactly all that listening amounts to is vague, beyond yet more listening.
This is not to say there is no point in consulting with specific groups of young people. In the areas of health, education and social services, and especially trauma-laden topics such as domestic violence and suicide, young people are frequently impacted in particular, harmful ways. Gathering data on their experiences — and, importantly, their interactions with government agencies — helps improve government policies and agency processes.
But on broader political issues important to young people, such as housing and climate change, it’s unclear whether such “youth consultation” achieves anything that traditional political processes cannot.
What did Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen, for instance, learn from the government’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change and COP28 that wasn’t evident from the thousands of students who have walked out of class multiple times to protest the slow pace of Australia’s emissions reduction?
On such thorny intergenerational issues, the problem is not so much a lack of information or understanding from ministers, but their hedging against countervailing pressures from vested interests and older generations content with the status quo. What will move the needle is not another tick-a-box forum, but concrete electoral pressure that politicians can’t ignore.
Exhibit A: teal MPs Monique Ryan and Zoe Daniel are currently pushing for HECS indexation changes. Based on a recommendation by the Universities Accord, they want debts indexed by either the consumer price index or wage price index — whichever is lower. They also want indexation to be calculated at the end of the financial year so that money paid off in that year isn’t included.
Ryan has become something of a TikTok star due to her proposals, and her petition gained 80,000 signatures in just six days. She and Ryan will present it to Education Minister Jason Clare in the coming days.
I don’t doubt Ryan and Daniel sincerely support such proposals, but their advocacy is undergirded by self-interest. Their electorates house many young students, with Kooyong boasting the highest number of voters under 24 in Victoria (and not far off nationwide). Ryan and Daniel can’t win reelection without them, and young people have been increasingly vocal online about these issues after the 2022-23 financial year saw debts rise substantially with inflation, providing clear incentives for opportunistic leaders.
Fair enough, but what about the young people who can’t vote yet? Well, perhaps we should enfranchise more of them. This would ensure their interests are directly represented, rather than mediated through committees of government-appointed prefects. It’d give them real power — though, as some cynics argue, perhaps the lack of real power is part of why politicians like “youth consultation” in the first place.
If the state can jail a 16-year-old, shouldn’t they at least get to vote on the laws that send them there?
But what about kids below the voting age, you might ask? Indeed, what about children who haven’t even been born yet? How can government processes, especially in an ageing society, be calibrated to meaningfully account for the interests of the young and future generations?
Thomas Walker, CEO of the youth-led think tank Think Forward, has a few ideas. He commends the government’s strategy, and is impressed by Aly’s engagement with current advisory group participants. But he hopes her strategy is a first step, followed by “a broader effort to embed intergenerational thinking into policymaking through legal mechanisms with teeth”.
He points to Wales’ “future generations commissioner”, a product of the country’s 2015 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. This legislation imposes a legal responsibility on government agencies to govern with future generations in mind, by adhering to a list of “sustainable development” principles. It has already prompted various progressive changes, including the cancellation of most major road projects and reinvestment of the proceeds in public transport projects.
Walker is also a fan of Senator David Pocock’s Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity Bill, which a Senate committee is due to report on this week. If passed in its current form, it would require governments to consider the impact of climate harm on young people and future generations in their decision-making, and to not make decisions that pose a material risk of harm to their health and well-being.
“It’s a good-faith effort to embed the rights of young and future generations into the government decision-making process,” says Walker. “However, the government’s refusal to support the legislation perhaps provides a more realistic view of how far they are willing to go”.
Aly certainly seems a passionate advocate for young people. But when representing their views to cabinet, the question remains how often her colleagues move beyond listening and act.
What more should the government be doing to consider the rights of future generations? Should we consider lowering the voting age to 16? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
