Very, according to a survey conducted by Anglicare Victoria and its partners.
Anglicare Victoria, the state’s largest provider of children, youth and family welfare, distributed a last-minute questionnaire to all Victorian candidates standing for the House of Representatives and the Senate in the forthcoming Federal Election.
The survey on a range of youth issues was conducted in partnership with the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, Centre for Multicultural Youth, Youth Substance Abuse Service, CREATE Foundation and Koori Youth Council.
Anglicare Victoria CEO, Paul McDonald, said the results proved convincingly that candidates across the political divide believe that more needs to be done to support children and young adults if we want them to play a meaningful role in society.
The 13-question on-line survey was delivered on 10 June to 322 Victorian candidates standing for the House of Representatives and the Senate, with 17% completing the survey. A further 5% logged on to the survey but did not provide responses by the 20 June cut-off date. (Three candidates completed the survey twice.)
“On every question, candidates overwhelmingly supported affirmative action by government to the needs of young Australians,” Mr McDonald said.
“We were particularly heartened by the positive responses to firstly increase the Youth Allowance by $50 per week to bring it closer to the Australian Poverty Line (86.8%), secondly to address the appalling 1 in 2 incarceration rates of young Indigenous people (96.4%), and to create a national youth strategy (98.1%)”.
Mr McDonald said that Anglicare Victoria and its partners believe that neither of the major parties has fully grasped the enormity of the issues facing young Australians.
“The questions we posed were carefully targeted to highlight the key issues that are of most concern for many disadvantaged young people in the country,” he said. “Governments need to revolutionise their policy approach to this significant percentage of the population and better grasp the difficult life transition issues that many young people are facing in Australia today”, Mr McDonald said
“These are issues that should be high on the national agenda, given the impact they have on our domestic policies, our economy and on our social values. Our hope is that political aspirants will be made aware of the issues at a time when they’re most attuned to community concern.”
Mr McDonald said that when asked if the candidate would support a federal policy for States and Territories to extend the age at which young people formally exit the Out-of-Home Care system, from the current age of 18 to the age of 21, 92.2% were in favour with 56.9% agreeing and 35.3% strongly agreeing.
Among the other questions raised in the survey was whether the candidate would support the introduction of a Federal Minister for Youth and Youth Affairs. Only 1.8% of respondents disagreed, with 29.1% agreeing and 69.1% strongly agreeing.
Only one question, whether the candidate supports the current Federal Government’s proposed policy to make young people wait four weeks before being eligible to receive Youth Allowance payments, was rejected by the candidates.
“This is a positive given that it is a highly-contentious policy and a discriminatory one that unfairly targets Australia’s vulnerable young,” Mr McDonald said.
Of the respondents, 80.8% either disagreed (42.3%) or totally disagreed (38.5%) with the proposed policy.
“One of the pleasing outcomes of this survey is that political candidates, whether from the major or minor parties or those standing as Independents, recognise how important it is to provide pathways for young people in Australia,” Mr McDonald said.
He said that by international standards, young people growing up in Australia are reasonably fortunate with access to universal healthcare and education, and they enjoy high levels of physical and emotional wellbeing.
“However, the reality is that young Australians also face significant challenges as the community adapts to economic and social shifts both here and abroad. One of the aims of the survey was to identify some of these challenges through the available data and to give candidates a context for the survey.”
These challenges can be seen in a range of indices of hardship and adversity. For example:
- The national youth unemployment rate for 15 to 24 year old youth is 12.2%. Young people are at much higher risk of unemployment than other age groups.
- The Youth Allowance is available for young people under the age of 22, who can receive $216.60 per fortnight if they are not living at home, with an additional maximum value of $87.10 per fortnight for rent assistance. This is nearly 50% below the 2015 Australian Poverty Line of $517 per week for single people.
- According to the most recent Rental Affordability Snapshot, young people receiving the Youth Allowance or the Newstart Allowance are locked out of the rental market and this impact can be seen in national rates of youth homelessness with 41.9% of the 105,000 people who reported as homeless were under the age of 252.
- An increasingly large number of young Australians are experiencing significant mental health concerns. The second Australian child and adolescent survey of mental health and wellbeing found that almost 11% of 12-17 year olds reported having deliberately injured themselves; this equates to 186,000 young people.
- The reality for Indigenous youth is far worse. These children and young people grossly over-represented across all outcome indicators, including mortality, education, health, detention and incarceration, and placement in Out-of-Home Care.
“About one-half (49%) of all young people in sentenced detention on an average day are Indigenous,” Mr McDonald said. “This is nothing short of a national tragedy made worse by the fact that Indigenous young people are seven times more likely to be in the child protection system than their non-Indigenous counterparts.”
“We should be ashamed and embarrassed by this and yet in the final weeks of a hotly-contested Federal Election, I believe there have only been a handful of candidates that have raised youth-related issues publicly.”
