Page 799 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 29 March 2006

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(2) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) investigate how such a scheme could be implemented in time for the 2008 ACT election;

(b) release a public discussion document on the scheme within six months; and

One of the things that we all seem to agree on in this Assembly is that we must develop a more inclusive society. Yet, despite having the highest proportion of young people of any state or territory, our young people continue to feel alienated by the media, institutions and formal political processes. “Political apathy” is a common term used these days by politicians and the media to describe our young people. According to many commentators, those aged under 18 are individualistic with little regard for the community they live in. This message could not be further from the truth. The overwhelming majority of young people care and are engaged in the process but, because of the distrust that they have of politicians and formal political processes, they have found more informal methods of expressing and engaging in their feelings for their community.

In a survey conducted by the Australian Youth Electoral Survey, for example, 85 per cent of young people felt that state and territory government decisions impacted on their lives; yet only 20 per cent felt that they could influence the decisions that their state and territory governments were making. Even more alarming is that when asked to what extent young people agreed with the statement “Australia is a democratic country”, fewer than 55 per cent of respondents in the general sample, and fewer than 44 per cent of the indigenous sample, agreed. The numbers supporting the statement “Australian society is fair” were even fewer.

These results point to young people feeling powerless when it comes to formal political decisions that affect their lives and that the decisions being made are often unfair and made in an unfair manner, in their perception. It also indicates that they are able to distinguish between substance and appearance, in that they recognise that voting for both of the two seemingly identical parties, at least at the federal level, of professional politicians every three years or so is not sufficient to justify calling a system democratic. In a country that has one of the most inequitable distributions of wealth and power in the developed world, it is not surprising that they have doubts about the fairness of our society.

An overwhelming number of young people, 89 per cent, stated that they wanted to participate in decisions about issues that affect their lives. But society in general, and governments in particular, are not responsive to the demands expressed by young people. Apart from the Northern Territory, the ACT currently has the worst rate of voter turnout for young people. But are we at all surprised that young people feel apathetic towards formal political processes? After 18 years of being told their opinion does not matter, of course people aged 18 to 25 are likely to be turned off by politics and politicians.

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