The concept of youth media has a particular connotation that we keep reproducing for ourselves, confirming all the reasons why youth voices and concerns are sidelined. Centrethought believes that whatever the cause for this rut youth media finds itself in, we need to do better.
Young people need to break out of the narrow field of select ‘youth’ issues we are allowed to contribute to by encouraging other young people to speak loudly, persistently and intelligently about the deep, structural issues our society faces. Here at the beginning of our adult lives we are looking at the bleak stretch of predictions out to 2030, 2050, 2100 and beyond. We understand that we have the most at stake. The decisions made today with one eye on the next election will have outsized effects on those of us who will see our world shaped by the aftershocks in the decades ahead.
When young people turn to student or youth-focused publications for political analysis we see a limited set of topics that we feel like we have license to comment on. These are largely confined to such issues as tertiary education, mental health, climate change, asylum seekers and socially progressive ideologies expressed through pop culture. While all of these should be talked about by young people because they impact us and the kind of society we want to be, it’s equally true that government procurement strategies or industry-specific tax concessions will shape the world we will spend the rest of our lives in. Thirty years from now we may well be facing down exacerbated social and economic problems in a context of a collapsing ecology, caused by people who will either be long gone by then or else are comfortably retired on the dollars they ripped from the tax base and dropped back into their superannuation accounts. That world will be unforeseeable to us now, just as a world of smartphones and countless YouTube celebrities was unforeseeable to journalists reporting on a car phone conversation that got Andrew Peacock fired from cabinet in 1987. Our failure to do what we can now to ensure a strong position will be regretted when we have moved into a world more openly hostile to stability.
Writing about university education helps illustrate this. The same two talking points are repeatedly trotted out: a) the government is “attacking” education and b) the only just path forward is “free” education. Regardless of your disagreement with the freeze to the Commonwealth Grants Scheme and the various nooses successive governments have been tightening, a united voice in favour of a patently unviable policy solution is the best way to ensure we are all ignored. We watch our student representatives highlighting the plight of universities ahead of the devastation of TAFE and cheering on a policy of higher education paid for by the entire tax base instead of by the graduates who by far make more money in their lifetimes than those unable to go to university. Advocacy within limited areas of apparently self-serving policy is not how we prove to our policymakers that we’re watching everything they do, and that we notice when we’re being done over.
Instead, we have to produce writers who unleash a rolling wave of clinical, informed and wide-ranging analysis. We need analysts who rolls their eyes at hyperbole because they know the kind of slow moving catastrophe we’re sleepwalking into doesn’t need a cherry on top.
We need young writers who agonise over the details because they’re not writing for the approval of clicks or likes, they’re writing to be right. Having the most at stake means we need to be front and centre of every debate, and be clear, clever and insistent on the facts.
Absent this cohort of young minds, the public policy analysis that is written will overwhelmingly concern itself with the older, more secure Australians who won’t feel the brunt of a hollowed out workforce that we can already see emerging.
Speak to your friends and get passionate, read up on reports and get informed – then pick up a pen.