Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I've said it before and I will say it again and again: we must urgently break the monopoly on power held in this place by the stale, pale and male majority which currently occupies both of the legislatures of this parliament. It is failing our generation and failing it profoundly. The reality is that our parliament, its institutions and its processes were crafted overwhelmingly by rich, old white guys, and they function to keep rich, old white guys in power.

The very name of this parliamentary system, the so-called Westminster system, speaks to the history, the DNA, of this place. It traces back to the houses of parliament in the United Kingdom, created as a decision-making space not out of a desire to give all people everywhere a say in decision-making that affected them but out of a desire to find a way to mitigate the tensions between the land-owning aristocracies of the United Kingdom so that they didn't have to keep killing the king. Killing the king cost everybody a lot of money. Over the generations this institution has been forced, dragged kicking and screaming through the ages and across continents, to be more representative of the communities it was created and set up to serve, yet there is so much work still to do. The mechanisms of this place, the conversations that it facilitates, the culture that it breeds are still those which are in opposition to and stand apart from the desires, hopes and aspirations that are held in our community.

This parliament does not represent the diversity, the energy, the hope or the dynamism that exist in our community. At every step of the way, its processes, its rules, function to constrain. They function to bring those within them back to an imaginary middle where, it is posited, everything is safe, normal and stable. In reality, this status quo is causing so many in our community to struggle, and causing so many more to disengage from the process because they do not see here in this place any representation of themselves or the issues they experience in day-to-day life. The conversations in here, the language that is used, are alien to the rest of the community.

I think there is a growing knowledge in our community, from WA to Queensland to the ACT and everywhere in between, that the strangeness of this system, this separation, is by design. This place in which we work and how we are encouraged to work as community representatives is by design. The minute you enter this place you are subjected to a siren song which sings to you a ballad of centrism. You are told implicitly and subconsciously to come to the centre; to get on with the serious business of government; not to rock the boat in any way, shape or form; always to bow nicely as you pass the chair; and to get on with quiet committee work, because that is your job.

That is a notion which people reject. It is something which we as young people laugh at, darkly, knowing that the net result is a system and an institution which fails to act on the issues that shape our lives. It fails to address the mental health crisis that we experience as young people. It actively seeks to increase the barriers that are between us and getting a good education, getting a good job, getting a good, safe home. And, when it comes to that critical issue which is shaping our future and shaping our present, that of the climate crisis, it is not only failing us; it is making it so much worse. The only way to counter the pressures of this parliamentary institution is to push back. That is something the community does by organising, by linking arms, by raising voices. But we as community representatives have a responsibility, too, to engage communities in a meaningful way and to bring young, passionate, diverse voices into the centre of everything we do as representatives of our communities.

To this end, I am extremely excited to have established within my office a youth advisory society, a fantastic group of young people from across the country who have decided to give a bit of their time to help guide our work as an office, our agenda as an office, and to help shape what we focus on and how we speak about the issues that matter to them. We held our first meeting just a couple of days before the resumption of this parliamentary sitting. It was fantastic to talk with people from the NT, from the ACT, from WA and from many places in between about the issues as folks see them, not as is often filtered to the outside world through a lens of 'this is how young people speak about youth issues'. It was really great what one of them put to me; it was superb—'the frustration that we as young people feel, watching the same conversations happen in this place over and over again'. We seem to go through cycles in this parliament, having faux conversations, fake conversations, about issues from climate change to getting money out of politics, where both major parties load the sound bites onto the back of their respective backbenches and end up, at the end of it, absolutely nowhere.

This decision-making space has incredible powers. It has the power to address many of the issues that young people face, and yet we so rarely hear, in this space, a conversation that relates to deep, radical, transformative change in this place. In fact, if it was not for the presence of the Greens in the Australian parliament, most of the conversation would focus totally on an imaginary middle that fails to serve a single person in the real world beyond the big end of town, which is operated by some of the wealthiest corporations and richest families in this country.

Finally, I think it's worth observing that, although we young people are so often subjected to ridicule and to reflexive dismissal, particularly from older folks at times, and we are discredited and written off as idealistic or as immature—or pick your badge for the evening—it struck me, as it so often does, that when we sit together as young people and imagine a future, when we talk about the changes that are needed, often the topic of conversation is how to redesign our communities. We talk about how to redesign decision-making spaces, so that they include everyone. In a youth space I have never heard the idea that folks who are older should be permanently shut out of decision-making spaces. I have only heard the demand that our voices be heard equally, alongside everybody else in our community.

We are out there right now working in community spaces. We are responsible, I would proudly state, for the democratic overthrow of such despots as president Trump. We are rising and working together to bring forth the moment when this place is able and genuinely does the work of bringing together people. I am so proud to work with this community into the future.

Senate adjourned at 21:57