LISTENING TO THE NATION – WHAT DO AUSTRALIANS MOST WANT FROM THEIR GOVERNMENT?

Rebecca Huntley is a social Researcher and author, most recently of the Quarterly Essay Australia Fair. Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist, a regular contributor to the Australian Financial Review and author, most recently, of Fragile Nation. During the 2019 federal election campaign, a majority of Australians believed that there would be a change of government and that what Rebecca Huntley calls the “progressive centre” was a sign that Australians wanted change. While the election result was not as predicted, with the Coalition government retaining office, the observations and research of both Rebecca Huntley and Dr Tanveer Ahmed do suggest that there is a quiet revolution taking place in Australians thinking. Rebecca Huntley and Tanveer Ahmed addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 7 May 2019.

LISTENING TO THE NATION – WHAT DO AUSTRALIANS MOST WANT FROM THEIR GOVERNMENT?

REBECCA HUNTLEY

Thank you Anne and Gerard for inviting me back to The Sydney Institute. I realise this is my forth time coming to speak here and I guess that means that both of you probably disagree with what I have to say but will defend my right to say it. More than that, you provide me with a platform, so I’m incredibly grateful to both of you for your generosity and your continual commitment and contribution to intellectual life in Australia.

Thinking over the last couple of days about what to talk about, I decided not to talk too much about my Quarterly Essay – a cunning plan to get you to buy it. I am sure there will be lots of opportunities in the questions to address some of the things in that Quarterly Essay. Tonight, I want to address that content from another direction.

Tonight I am sharing speaking duties with Tanveer so I wanted some of my comments to connect with the things that interest him about stress and anxiety, mental illness and social cohesion, as well as the experience of refugee and migrant communities, communities I know he works with. These issues are not unrelated to my Quarterly Essay. I spend quite a bit of time in the essay talking about affordable housing in Australia which is a major source of stress pretty much for everybody, the young and the old.

  I also talk about general community attitudes to new migrants and asylum seekers in that essay.

My starting point tonight is to talk about young Australians, their concerns, priorities and how that might play out politically, especially in the next couple of weeks. As many of you would know there is now a record number of Australians who are enrolled to vote. We have almost 97 per cent of eligible voters on the roll. We should be proud of that, certainly in terms of advanced democracies around the world. This is, in part, thanks to the highest enrolment rate in history of young voters. Some of you would know that around 100,000 Australians enrolled to vote in the lead up to the same sex marriage survey. The majority of those voters were under 25 at the time.

At the moment, about 18 per cent of the electoral roll is aged 18-29. The Australian Electoral Commission’s data shows this very clearly, both in terms of enrolment and participation of young voters, that there has always been a deficit in the late teens and early 20’s. It’s going to be interesting to see if they make an impact at the next federal election. Not for a moment wanting to generalise about what young voters care about but I’ll talk a little bit more about that later.

Let’s see first of all whether, in fact, if young voters are concentrated in any seats of interest. Does it really matter what they think and does this kind of influx of voters into the system make a difference?

 The ABC Hack Team have crunched the numbers on this and found that the highest number of young voters live in the suburbs of capital cities and not the inner city. We tend to associate younger voters with the inner city. Now they might drink and socialize in the inner city but a lot of them cannot afford to live there. A lot of them are still living with their parents.

The exception here relates to the seats covering inner city Brisbane. Queensland is going to be of real interest at the next election and, to some extent, Melbourne where you have large student populations. The other areas where younger voters are concentrated are the seats of Herbert and Lindsay.

  Herbert in Townsville is held with an incredibly slim margin by Labor’s Cathy O’Toole. It is interesting for two reasons. Townsville is where Clive Palmer’s nickel mine has fallen over and there is a lot of interest there in terms of the progress of the Adani mine. Lindsay in Western Sydney, held by Labor’s Emma Hussar who is retiring at the next election, is also on a very slim margin. In both of these seats about a quarter of the people enrolled to vote are under 30. So they are really interesting marginal seats.

The other seat where young voters hold power is Dickson, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s seat. He has a tight margin of almost 1.7 per cent. Labor’s Anne Aly’s Perth seat of Cowan is on 0.7 per cent and Attorney General Christian Porter’s seat of Pearce is also marginal. It’s only really in two of these seats I’ve done qualitative research.

Townsville is an interesting place for a lot of reasons. My mother’s family are from Northern Queensland, so I’ve got a soft spot for Northern Queensland. Townsville has been hit hard economically by issues around crime and youth unemployment. When I was there doing research I met two young men, one was an apprentice and the other was working in a coffee shop. Their biggest issue was job security.

The young man who was working in a coffee shop said that any one week he may get 4 hours of work in the coffee shop and the next week he may get 35 hours. He said that renting and even buying houses in Townsville wasn’t an expensive proposition but there was no way he was ever going to get a loan and would struggle to rent an apartment with that kind of employment situation, variable and precarious. He could move to Brisbane to get a full-time job but he would struggle to be able to rent in Brisbane. So, he felt like he was in a Catch 22 situation. He questioned whether something like investment in mining with Adani was going to lead to jobs that would give him any kind of permanency, maybe more people buying coffees but perhaps not. The other young man was an apprentice and was quite keen for Adani to be established. But, again, he was concerned with longevity in regard to those jobs and whether he would be able to get any of the jobs that might be on offer. Both of them were around 20. I think they are going to be there, living in Townsville with support from their parents, for some time.

Dickson is an interesting seat. It will be one to watch for a whole range of reasons. It’s a seat that has changed over time whilst I’ve been going there, from a place that feels like regional Queensland to now a place that feels very much like an outer suburb of Brisbane. For the young people I talk to and listen to in Dickson, the really big issues other than job security is the cost of university and TAFE and, to some extent, the environment.

 If there is going to be an influential youth vote in marginal seats at the next election you will find a range of different issues determining those youth votes depending on where they are.

The common issues for younger Australians regardless of background are housing security and job security. They are of course connection and if there isn’t some stability or sense of progression, then young people find it extremely hard to plan for their future. But there is another issue that tops the list whenever I am conducting research in this cohort, and that’s mental health. Nearly a fifth of people in Australia who use Medicare subsidised mental health services are under 25.

 In any research I do with young Australians, mental health is always viewed as incredibly important. It is an area they want government to address as a matter of priority. They also recognise that it’s not just governments’ role, that a whole of community response to mental health is needed. Whether it be anxiety and depression or suicide rates in Indigenous communities there is a real concern not just for their own peer group but their peers in other parts of society.

Last year Amos Washington, the Australian Youth representative to the United Nations, travelled the country and ran about 152 consultations with more than 4000 young people. He found that mental health was the number one issue across all the young people he talked to, whether they were in universities or juvenile detention centres or in community organisations in cities and remote communities.

 In 2016, the Mission Australia Youth Survey found concerns about mental health across the country had actually doubled since 2011. Close to 22,000 young people were involved in that survey and more than 20 per cent cited mental health among their top national issues. It’s not something that we normally think of as a political issue; we see it as a health issue. But it’s becoming increasingly important to young Australians.

Both major political parties have made commitment in terms of mental health at this election. Some politicians have spoken, sometimes quite frankly, about issues of mental health as well. Obviously more can always be done. One area that is of interest to me is that any new government might need to look at the ongoing effectiveness of Headspace, a program that has enjoyed bipartisan support from the moment it was established. It clearly struggling for various reasons to find a model that can deal with the complexity of issues that young people are presenting, and also deal with the sheer volume of young people turning up to Headspace centres. Academic Professor Ian Hickey is one of the key architects of Headspace. He has said that, after 15 years, Headspace needs to develop more depth and sophistication.

Finally, I want to talk about something which I think intersects with Tanveer’s interests. That is stress and mental health in refugee and new migrant micro populations. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last six months doing focus group research and consultations in collaboration with translators and community facilitators in refugee populations in Western Sydney looking at the issue of health care. A lot of the findings there have reinforced some of the other work I have done in those communities in the past. It’s clear that refugees, particularly new migrants, generally struggle with navigating our health care system. It requires a lot of ongoing support and education. When they arrive, they get blasted with a lot of information which can often be hard to absorb and there is not always a lot of follow up.

There are obviously huge issues with stigma around mental health, more in some communities than others and enormously complex mental health problems. What’s really clear though is that Professor Ian Hickey is one of the key architects of Headspace. He has said that, after 15 years, Headspace needs to develop more depth and sophistication.

The younger generation feels very much caught between wanting to be part of the new community and having to manage their parents and parents’ expectations. And they often become translators in the health care system. Gender dynamics change, particularly for well-established couples, when they come here as well. Sometimes that can lead to endless amounts of turmoil in the family. Tanveer has written a lot about this and talked about it in the past.

Of course I’m not a healthcare expert, or a healthcare systems expert, or a psychiatrist but what was clear about what I was hearing in those communities is a need for well-funded and staffed community health care centres, numerous points of contact within and outside the health care system to support refugees as well as new migrants and refugees who are able to improve or develop their English language skills to develop their own capacity to navigate the health care system. These are things we all sometimes struggle to deal with, even if we’ve lived in this country all our lives.

 Obviously, there’s a lot more government can do to facilitate better care but there also has to be a whole of community approach to making that happen. I know that Tanveer has some more practical experience with the best approach here and I’m looking forward to his response to some of the things I’ve said and any of my musings about politics as well. Thank you.