Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, I had the privilege of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, which has, somewhat surprisingly to some, for 27 years been based at the Faculty of Education of the University of Tasmania after moving from its original birthplace here in Canberra at the Australian National University, where it resided for its first three years.

The Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies is the nation's only youth-specific clearinghouse and publishes Australia's only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to youth studies—Youth Studies Australia. Along with the ACYS website, the Youth Field Xpress email newsletter and other occasional publications, the ACYS plays a vital role in acting as a repository of youth-related information as well as a conduit through which research from diverse fields that relates to 12- to 25-year-olds can be collected, classified and redistributed.

Over the course of the last 30 years, the ACYS has gone from strength to strength, consistently adjusting their method of communication and information gathering as the technology of the times changed. As the Managing Editor of the ACYS—Sue Headley, who has been with the clearinghouse in an editorial capacity for no less than 16 years—has observed, the development of the ACYS has been a story of technological innovation. When the concept was originally received from the ANU, it involved the publication of a small bundle of notes regarding youth studies. The expansion and increased professionalism of the journal saw it published externally, until the advent of desktop publishing when staff at the ACYS were ahead of the curve and were able to make the technology of the time work for them. While the core work of the ACYS remains centred on providing an evidence base for researchers, practitioners and policy-making involved in work with young people, its role and expertise as a publisher has gone from being incidental to being a substantial enterprise in and of itself. Its imprint, ACYS Publishing, plays its own important role in publishing academic and reference texts.

But the principal role of the clearinghouse is to process and repackage information on young people into an accessible, reader-friendly form; one that can be used by service providers, government and practitioners. It is to create a scholarly basis for action; to ensure that our thinking about young people is informed more by rigorous, peer-reviewed evidence and data than by the preconceptions, suppositions and memories that too often inform our views about a demographic that is, by its very definition, facing issues and challenges that are new and unique to a new and unique generation.

The ACYS has managed to remain contemporary because, like all good work in academia, it has forced itself to examine and explore new trends and issues uncovered in research. But it has also remained contemporary by virtue of its diverse staff. Ably led by an experienced editor in Ms Headley and with an enthusiastic director in Professor Rob White, the ACYS is constantly refreshed by staff with diverse specialities, skills and backgrounds. Externally, it is linked to the dynamic network of peak youth bodies around the country, themselves constantly refreshed by the turnover inevitable in organisations that maintain a youth membership. Indeed, it is partly this relation to the state and territory peaks—including, I might say, a very close relationship with the Youth Network of Tasmania, and the terrific work done by Joanna Siejka and Naomi Marsh at the network, and the Tasmanian Youth Forum—that makes the clearinghouse so important. I thank these bodies for their dedication and the work they have done for the clearinghouse, making it as vital and as contributory as it is. It is a contact point as well as a resource; a place to allow youth practitioners to speak a common language based on common data.

The ACYS and Youth Studies Australia are funded by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and its work is demonstrative not just of the government's commitment to dealing with issues affecting young people but also of its approach. Since it came to power, the Gillard government has expanded and improved the opportunities for young people in a number of ways, including the ongoing support of the clearinghouse. It has expanded and improved those opportunities for young people to actually contribute to youth and to other government policy that may affect youth. By establishing the Australian Youth Forum and funding the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, the government has sought to ensure that its policy is grounded in the views, experiences and very real issues that young people face. Those real issues are very much those that the Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies researches and raises every day through its publications, through its email newsletter and through the ACYS website.

I encourage those senators interested in our youth and in youth studies in Australia to go onto the ACYS website (www.acys.info) and inform themselves about some of those publications that the ACYS has recently published and is continuing to publish as it goes through the process of migrating past issues of Youth Studies Australia over to its new site. These will include a range of issues prior to 2005, and this allows us as senators in this place to look at the changes over time not just in data but in youth studies. It shows what issues were important to youth in 2005 compared with those issues important to youth in 2011.

One of the articles currently on that website is 'The continuing importance of the cultural in the study of youth'. This is an academic study of youth culture that has in fact changed markedly over the past two decades. One only has to start thinking about technology as being at the forefront of some of those changes in youth culture, whether it be the various acronyms used in SMS messaging—which I still have some trouble understanding when I receive the occasional text from my teenage son—or whether it is to do with more detailed issues that may be affecting youth in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, race and so on. In the article, by Andy Bennett, he says:

… the term youth culture is itself now regarded as increasingly questionable, given the multi-generational followings for punk, dance, hip hop, hardcore and other music and style-based genres once deemed to be exclusively the domain of youth.

I encourage those interested in youth studies to read Andy Bennett's article as it provides a very good evaluation of that term 'culture' when it comes to youth cultural studies and of the notion of culture as a direct product of our class relations, as he refers to it.

The clearinghouse has played a vital role in bringing the attention of policymakers, researchers, community workers, teachers and young people to the substantial work that is being done across so many areas of academia. It has performed this task for 30 years and has demonstrated its capacity not just to adapt and stay active but to excel. I congratulate the ACYS for its 30 years of cutting-edge work and I look to forward to its continued, changing contribution into the future.

Senate adjourned at 19:49