Page 1927 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 August 2007
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Incidentally, I have not heard lately anything from the Liberals on their policies of multiculturalism, or any policy on young people. I have not seen them conduct any forums for young people or do anything to help young people become leaders in our community. Fear not, the ACT Government is to the rescue. The ACT government remains committed to taking positive steps in engaging the multicultural community, and young people within the multicultural community in particular. The theme of the youth forum was “youth together—talking together” and that is what they did—and we listened.
I had the privilege of meeting 18 leaders, all fantastic young people, during the morning session of the youth forum. These young leaders were nominated by schools contacted by the Department of Education and Training—and I thank the minister for his support in this and the Office of Children, Youth and Family Support within the Department of Housing and Community Services—and I thank my other colleague minister for her support; and of course the service providers including Multicultural Youth Services, the ACT Youth Coalition and the Sudanese Youth Association. A lot of people in this town are not aware that we have a Sudanese Youth Association, and I am very pleased to be able to publicise that here.
From that very productive morning session, issues were distilled into four main themes which were workshopped in the afternoon by the group of 100. Young people from educational institutions all over Canberra were invited. There were representatives from Melba, Lanyon, Telopea, Melrose and Stromlo high schools; Lake Tuggeranong, Hawker, Narrabundah, Radford, Daramalan colleges—all of those institution colleges, of course; Canberra Grammar School, which is the boys school, and the Australian National University.
The four themes developed by these leaders were community attitudes to multicultural people, including racism and policing; cultural education; making culture cool—a very big theme, not to be confused with artistic appreciation, which often a lot of people misconstrue, but in this case it is about cultural background and making that culture cool—and sport, recreation and health. I am pleased to say that the people who attended the youth forum continue to provide written submissions on identified issues. Anecdotally, students who came from other countries found it amazing that they were able to speak directly with the Minister for Multicultural Affairs—something that would not happen easily in their countries of origin. This accessibility is important.
As a small digression, we found that in a lot of the cases—as you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker—when young people come from a country that has suffered oppression of some type, any authority figure is feared by the young people. Whether it is a police officer, a soldier, a politician or a headmaster, these people are afraid of authority. These people were amazed that our young people have no such fear of authority. Certainly there is fear of police from time to time, but they certainly do not fear teachers, as my colleague’s brother can attest to.
With much fruitful discussion during the afternoon workshops the leaders came up with the following key ideas. With respect to community attitudes of multicultural people—which is about racism and policing—they wanted to increase the number of programs; increase efforts to promote awareness of existing helpful programs and
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