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Youth 2020

The new Australian government ran a Youth 2020 summit for kids. It's a long story, but applying for it was a bit of a nightmare. To read more about it go to:

www.australia2020.gov.au/youth

Basically, 100 young people between the ages of 15 to 24 years were chosen from all around Australia to get together and talk about things which they think are important for Australia's future, like the environment, education, health etc.

We were too young for the Youth Summit, but instead, we were told we could apply for the Schools Summit, but the entries had already closed for it!!!

The good news is that Professor Will Steffen who is an environmentalist at ANU (Australian National University)...it's in Canberra, was selected from loads of applications to actually go to the 2020 Summit.

He has very kindly taken the time to write about what it was like at the Summit and what they got up to!

From Prof. Steffen (but I've explained some of the tricky Professor-type words)

"The 2020 Summit was a very interesting exercise in opening-up government and engaging (involving) people from all walks of life. I was impressed with the amount of time we had to discuss critical (very important)issues - in my case, how are we going to deal with the challenge of mitigating (reducing the problem of )climate change?

Our group had some strongly divergent (very different) opinions, and I suspect that some people in our group had not previously had the chance to debate issues with others who had strikingly different perspectives (very different ideas on climate change).

Was the Summit a success? That depends very much on what you expected. From my perspective (point of view), I believe it was an outstanding success. I view it as important first step, but only a first step, in opening up government to a new style of democracy (every person having a say in how the country is run).

Having lived in Sweden, the 2020 Summit was very much like a Scandinavian approach, moving away from the sterile, often destructive approach of traditional party politics in Australia towards an approach that emphasises open discussion and ongoing debate and a movement towards a consensus approach to critical issues facing the country.

We still have a long way to go to emulate (copy) the Swedes, for example, but the 2020 Summit was an important first step



Image thanks to: www.greely.com (we couldn't get permission to use the Youth 2020 logo)