Australia youth summit to get underway
Updated
To coincide with the end of International Youth Week, Australia will this weekend hold a 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Hugh Evans, Youth Summit chairman and founder of the Oaktree Foundation.
PODGER: The Youth Summit agenda is covering the same issues as the 2020 meeting next weekend, how will it feed into the main summit?
EVANS: Well, the way that will work is that over the course of the next few days, myself and 100 other delegates who have come from across Australia with a range of ideas under those ten broad topics will ultimately be fed down into a communique, and that communique will highlight one: our vision for Australia by 2020, recognising that many of the young leaders who come to the summit this weekend are actually going to be the leaders by 2020 and also it's going to actually include key ideas and policy recommendations to take to the summit the next week, so we're going to be taking that in the communique and myself and ten other youth delegates will be going to the summit next weekend.
PODGER: Why weren't young people included in the main summit? Do you feel as though youth issues are being separated if you like, from the main event?
EVANS: Well, it's important to recognise that young people were included in the main summit, so anyone over the age of 18 but of course under the age of 25 could go along to the main summit and many of them are as separate delegates. But in addition to that, we also have our own group of delegates.
I think there's nothing wrong with separating them, because I think what we've done here is we've actually highlighted some very specific policy recommendations that are important to young people. What I would say though is it's important to realise that there's no such thing really as youth issues, because really young people care about the same issues that old people care about. When we're talking about the issues of climate change, that's something that young people will have to inherit for the future and we talk about issues of global poverty. It's also an issue that young people have to inherit. So I don't think there's been any attempt whatsoever to sideline youth issues. I think what they've done is they've highlighted this and their also well included in the actual summit next week. So myself and these ten other delegates are going to attend the main summit, and we can. In a sense, we already have a week of preparation up our sleeves to be able to take our ideas very strongly to the next week's agenda.
PODGER: There's 100 young people attending the Youth Summit in Canberra this weekend. How were they picked?
EVANS: The way that they were picked was that basically we had about 1300 applicants all up, so a very, very large number of applicants from right across the country.
From there what we did is the Department of Education, Enterprise and Workplace Relations short listed the top 250 applicants based on reading all their applications and access them on the basis of two key areas. One, what particular area of the summit they'd like to contribute to and secondly, what experience they had in the past and also what ideas they are willing to bring to the table.
Then what we did is we set up a steering committee, I chaired that steering committee made up of really amazing young leaders from right across the country and we then that steering committee weighed it through all the 250 applicants and independently voted on the top 100 applicants. We then took those top 100 applicants and they became the people who were invited to attend the major summit. So as you can see it was a very rigorous process that took many, many weeks, but ultimately when you look at the delegates, you can see that we have a fantastic cross section of Australian society.
