Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will take this opportunity to raise an issue that is particularly important to my electorate, and that is the antisocial behaviour attached to binge and extreme drinking, particularly by young people. In our city we have been trying to tackle that problem. I am delighted to see the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, raising that as an issue of concern for him and for this government.

This morning I received a very moving email from a young university student responding to Kevin Rudd’s interest. I think that is the wonderful thing about our new Prime Minister: he does inspire young people to be active and to participate in the processes of government. This young person admitted to his own problems occasionally with binge drinking. He described it as escapism. What he was escaping from, as a university student with two part-time jobs, was the pressures of work, the pressures of study and the pressures of trying to make ends meet to sustain himself. I thought it was a most honest appraisal. But he was saying, in a way, that young people do need help and that it is not just the binge drinking; it is the social reasons and the causes of this problem that are important.

His email today to me, plus our youth summit coming up, prompts me to announce that I will be setting up a youth forum, a youth advisory group, in the city of Newcastle to work with me on this particular issue. The hoteliers and the business community have been very organised. The police, Newcastle City Council and state agencies are making an effort in this regard, but I think that the young people of Newcastle perhaps need to have their voice organised in a constructive way in order to participate in what is, to them, such an important debate.

It is the reasons for this antisocial drinking that we have to tackle. The pressures on young people seem to be extreme. My own children in the city of Newcastle describe the spiking of drinks as a nightly occurrence. They describe the availability of drugs in almost every hotel in the inner city. This shocks and alarms me as a mother, but as the federal member for Newcastle I believe that they are issues that need to be dealt with. Young people must be part of the solutions.