Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 10 October, I had the honour of closing the 2008 Youth Affairs Council of Western Australia Fairground Youth Conference in Fremantle, which was attended by around 230 youth sector workers and young people from across WA. The conference addressed the notion of a fair and equitable playing field for young people, with discussion of such issues at the conference as youth homelessness, access to public space and Indigenous youth. The YACWA conference was a significant contribution to our democratic process following on from the 2020 Youth Summit held in Canberra earlier this year.

Conference attendees were pleased with the Rudd Labor government’s commitment to hearing young people’s views through the new Australian Youth Forum launched earlier this month by the Minister for Youth, the Hon. Kate Ellis, which is intended to be a communication channel between the government, young people and the youth sector. The conference heard from inspiring young people, including Bronwyn Taylor from the Balgo community, where she now works as a full-time youth worker, and Alexandra Shaw, who was the Western Australian Young Person of the Year for her work as a leader in the deaf community.

Australia’s young people have critical role to play not only in our future but also in our present, especially when you consider the implications of our rapidly ageing population together with global issues of climate change, the fast rate of technological change and the downturn in the world economy potentially having catastrophic long-term effects on retirement savings and investments, among other things. Young people need to be involved in today’s solutions, since they will bear the brunt of yesterday’s failings. (Time expired)