Page 419 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 20 February 2018
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As part of our engagement with the community, we must ensure that young Canberrans are heard. Often the loudest voices in our community are not the youngest. In fact, they are the oldest. Yet many of the key issues that young people are directly concerned with are a responsibility of the ACT government. The schools they go to, the transport they use, housing affordability and the environment are all the ACT government’s responsibility, and the people deserve to have their say on those issues.
The ACT government, through our Youth Advisory Council, YAC, seeks the views of younger Canberrans. But we still need to get better at tapping into the voices of young people in our community more broadly to ensure that they are heard and considered in government decision-making. There is no doubt that this generation requires a more targeted and innovative engagement to ensure that their voices are heard. Much of our engagement with young people is done in the digital space. However, it is important that this is not the only way we engage.
Traditional forms of media and traditional forms of social media no longer capture all young people. For example, we now know that Facebook has a problem with young people. Research from eMarketer shows that 700,000 fewer 18 to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook this year in the UK alone as younger users defect to other services like Snapchat. Meanwhile, there has been a huge increase in older users, particularly the over-55s, which will become the second biggest demographic of Facebook users this year. So we do need to find other ways of engaging with young people as well as engaging with older people on these platforms as well.
I posed this problem to young people at the recent teen start-up in January at the Museum of Australian Democracy. I asked them to come up with a solution for how to improve government engagement with them. I am always impressed by the energy and ideas of young people. The solutions they came up with were certainly fantastic. It is pleasing that some of the government’s thinking about engagement with the community more broadly was reflected in some of the solutions that they came up with.
Of course, it is up to not only us as a government to engage with young people but us as a parliament as well. In November last year at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference, I participated in a workshop with young people focused on the importance of participatory government in peaceful democratic societies. This was part of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s ongoing interest in engaging with more young people.
Recommendations from the CPA’s youth round table included: introducing compulsory classes in schools to educate students about politics and the parliamentary process; establishing apprenticeship or internship schemes within parliamentary organisations in order to provide training for those with an interest in joining the world of politics; inviting youth representatives to participate on policy-making bodies; establishing youth advisory boards to ensure inclusivity; and allowing candidates to stand at election at the same age as they can vote.
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