Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Thursday 30 January, I visited a local secondary school within my electorate: Hampton Park Secondary College. The school is home to kids who come from over 70 different nationalities. While speaking at the school assembly, I asked the students to raise their hand if they were concerned about the future. Over 75 per cent of the students raised their hand, which leads me to ask the question: what can we do or what should we be doing about this? I reflected on this in a framework. I asked a number of students afterwards: 'Do you have hope for the future? What are your hopes for the future?' The response back was concerning, and it's the topic of my conversation here tonight. The impact of the answer to that question, which was that the students didn't have hope for a better future—they wanted a better future; they didn't believe it would happen—led me to explore the concept of politics and hope. What role does that diminution of hope, that potential extinguishment of hope, play in our democracy and in our parliamentary life? From any perspective—from a rational perspective, from a societal perspective, from a communal perspective or from a religious perspective—the death of hope, the extinguishment of hope, is a problem. It's a problem because of the consequences.

I broaden the definition of 'hope' as in trust, because to hope you've got to trust that something will happen. This ties into some questions that I asked post that important discussion with the kids from Hampton Park Secondary College. Around this place I asked two very good staff members, people who work in this place, what they thought about politics and politicians. This is what a young intelligent person, a good person who works in this place, basically said about politicians—generally their perception of the community's view of politicians. They said: 'From a young person's perspective, we're telling politicians, loud and clear, what we want—the future we want and the lives we want—but it's not going to happen. They listen, they laud us for our engagement and our opinions, they talk about how inspiring we are and how we are the future, but we don't see any action and we don't see any change.' That's from someone who works in this building. What are we supposed to say to the people we say are disconnected? It's not that the person is wrong, but that is what people believe. They're right to believe that, because a number of young people that I've spoken to around the country also reflect that.

I asked a respected journalist—I'm not going to name him—'So what do you think? Is there any hope in politics? Is there any hope that anything is going to happen?' I asked him to send me a message. I said: 'Tell me what you think. Is there hope in government? Do you think the world's going to change?' People read this gentlemen's work. This is what I got back. He said: 'People have traditionally looked to governments. We might have disliked politicians, but we relied on governments in a way that some others didn't do. Government is central to our conception of what Australia is, but trust in government has vanished. If other countries never trusted or even disliked government, a loss of faith in institutions isn't such a problem. Here it's much worse because people believe that governments are important. We're such a small population on a large continent in a vast region, so government has to work well. Now it doesn't. It's not just the perception that politics is controlled by vested interests; it's the learned helplessness of governments over the past 20 years. A nation that built the Snowy can't roll out the NBN or run a census and they're certainly not up to the challenge of climate change. This is a result of the power shift between government and the private sector over the recent decade, which no longer even delivers the economic prosperity that it did in the early 2000s.' That's from a journalist that I really respect, a journalist that is read by a lot of people. That's his personal opinion. Do you know what? I don't have to go very far in my constituency to hear that back, whether it's from the tradies that I doorknock or the young people I speak to.

The previous speaker, the member for Fisher, spoke about youth suicide. We had some terrible difficulties with that problem down our way. When you want to see the lack of hope and the lack of trust and despair, its ultimate manifestation you can see in some of the terrible things that happened in that region in 2011 and 2012. Yet the hope of a few of those kids who got together then led to a forum that was on the Four Corners program. It covered a forum that I hosted with Professor Patrick McGorry. That led to the creation of two headspace services. So there was, in the midst of that darkness and despair, some concrete action taken to address that issue. But the preconditions, I think, are there in such a way for the problems that we have in our society.

This issue that comes back to me from person after person is about their lack of trust, their lack of faith and their lack of hope that things can be better in politics. The previous speaker touched on that in a different way and about how he's taking action to deal with that online, which I commend him for. But I guess what I wanted to talk about is the perniciousness of this lack of hope, the death of hope, the death of trust in political bodies. If you're an authoritarian regime that wants to do a democracy harm, what's the best way you can do that? You extinguish hope. You extinguish hope that your voice can be heard. You extinguish hope that the future is going to be better for your kids than it was for you. You extinguish hope that action can be taken about climate change. You extinguish hope that there might be a problem in the community that can be fixed by institutions, because trust in the institutions has been taken away. Once you take away trust in an institution you take away hope, and hope is important.

There was an article written by a gentleman called Titus Stahl which I referred to just prior to coming in here. It was written very recently. It's entitled 'Why politics needs hope (but no longer inspires it)'. I wanted to just touch on why we do need hope from a rational perspective. This is from the end of this particular gentleman's article about hope:

So it is rational, perhaps even necessary, to recruit the notion of hope for the purposes of justice. And this is why the rhetoric of hope has all but disappeared. We can seriously employ the rhetoric of hope only when we believe that citizens can be brought to develop a shared commitment to exploring ambitious projects of social justice, even when they disagree about their content. This belief has become increasingly implausible in light of recent developments that reveal how divided Western democracies really are. A sizable minority in Europe and the US has made it clear, in response to the rhetoric of hope, that it disagrees not only about the meaning of justice but also with the very idea that our current vocabulary of social justice ought to be extended. One can, of course, still individually hope that those who hold this view will be convinced to change it. As things stand, however, this is not a hope that they are able to share.

If I want to subvert democracies in the West—if I'm in an authoritarian regime—I'm going to be looking at the instruments that I can use to extinguish hope. This is where I agree with the previous speaker, in terms of the mechanisms that can be used by those who want to weaken hope, trust and faith in institutions. And social media can do that, and they do.

In the past—I was thinking, and I was talking to my staff about this—when I was growing up, we would all converse over five television programs or four TV stations. Those, and the printed media, were how we got the news. Now we have so many ways of getting information. We have more information available to us as individuals than at any other time in human history, and yet I think that, when we have a political discourse or a discussion, opinions have narrowed and the tolerance of a diversity of views has narrowed. What's happened in that blizzard of information is that we've reinforced biases, not created a community of interest where there can be conversations.

So to those young people at Hampton Park Secondary College who started that conversation: we here have hope, but it is something that we need to talk about, and I thank them, and I certainly hope that this speech has inspired some belief that there could be hope in parliament and in this place.