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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (11 April) . . Page.. 1036 ..

MRS CROSS (continuing):

Unfortunately, society in general has few outlets from which to hear positive messages about young people. Unless an achievement is extraordinary, it seldom makes the news. Sometimes we become so focused on an achievement that we forget the tender age of those concerned.

William Wills was still a young man at 24 years of age when he set off with Robert Burke in 1860 to explore the Australian interior. Our sports men and women we regularly applaud on the world stage are also young. For example, swimmer, Ian Thorpe, still only 20 years old today, became the youngest male ever to qualify for the Australian swimming teams, aged 14. The Australian Institute of Sport has many residents who still attend school and who will one day become legends in their field.

Canberra's young people do face challenges. More and more they need education that will translate into a good job. Statistics show us that without this foundation a growing number of our youth will eventually struggle. Consider ACT prisoners, for example. More than half did not finish high school. Three-quarters did not have a job when they committed their offence. Obviously, not all who leave school early will end up in prison. But these are common factors in the cycle of behaviour that indicates the value of gaining a good education.

To further emphasise this, the two most common risk factors for youth suicide are education and employment. One of the biggest favours this generation can do for our young people is to give them the best education, one suited to individual needs, so they can plug into the work force. We need to ensure that services are available for those who find that the pressure of life is about to overwhelm them.

While on challenges, I would like to lay down a series of challenges for our young people. Youth generally consider that they have creative minds. Here is a way to exercise them. I came across a website recently that listed inventions that are needed, and I would like to throw some of them out as a challenge. If our youth can solve some of these, they not only will be rich and famous but will have done great good for mankind. Inventions that are needed are as follows:

• erasable paper-that is, paper that can be wiped down with a scanner or some such device so it can be used again;
• a remote control gun disabler-a device that can, by remote control, disable any other loaded weapon;
• truth print-ink that prints, or a device that converts print, to show the truth in black, fiction in red and what cannot be determined as either true or false in blue or purple (imagine the difference that could be made to the world);
• poker machines that do something useful when operated by people addicted to noise and jingles;
• appliances that are durable, mendable, multiuse and have available updateable modules;
• more computer games where knowledge and thinking, not violence, win the game (an added suggestion being a youth-to-age game where you grow older as you play);

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