Blogging a dead horse

Following the Prime Minister's RM Williams inspired Youth blog, which lasted all of two weeks, Youth Minister Kate Ellis has launched a similar idea. The $80,000 Australian Youth Forum website aims to start a "national conversation with young Australians" and was launched last Thursday along with a few other youth-related trinkets. Kate Ellis gloated in Parliament that nothing like this had ever been done under the previous government, which she said "sidelined youth and abolished the portfolio."

But it has since emerged that consultations with many youth organisations was minimal. Worse was a recent incident where young people were flown to Canberra to discuss a report. Only trouble was the report had not been released and they had no access to it. Like an episode of The Hollowmen, they spent the day being scurried around the halls of parliament waiting for Kate Ellis to arrive and discuss a report they were not able to see. Ellis never showed up. The whole affair wasted a serious amount of time and money and reflected the low priority the portfolio has.

So is it worse to blatantly not do anything for young people or just pretend to do it?

Along with this report, more young people trinkets were launched last week. No fewer than three press releases were put out on the same day explaining the components of this new "strategy for young Australians". The first was the "national conversation" which would include the occasional live web chat (the next one is on 12 November), round tables and ideas via YouTube, twitter and the like. The second press release showed the dosh being spent on youth centres and the final component was a competition to get young people to submit "fresh" ideas for a youth forum in 2010.

These are all admirable enough but a conversation is normally a two way activity. Submissions coming in have been minimal — a week later there have been no YouTube videos (apart from Kate Ellis' own) and only four subscribers to the Australian Youth Forum YouTube channel . On Twitter, despite some expression of support for the initiative, no one has actually suggested anything under the #youthconvo tag. On the website itself there has been a bit of activity, mainly because on Wednesday Canberra delegates were encouraged by their minders to write something. The most ideas and "votes" were under the gambling section, many relating to limits on pokies access. But it was difficult to come up with ideas for the other sections, many of which had vague banners like "the vision", "core priorities for action", "the goals" and the "next big question". It's hard to encourage people to come up with ideas when the language used is so uninspiring.

The first live chat between students at Lyneham High School in Canberra and the PM highlighted another kink in the new youth "strategy", namely it promotes technology for technology's sake. Lyneham High is about a 15 minute drive from Parliament House and it would have meant more for the PM or even Kate Ellis to actually go down and have a face-to-face chat with students. Young people love technology — we get it. We like Facebook and MySpace and twitter, but not every message put in an IT box and wrapped up in a technology bow means that we will automatically buy it.

It was almost better under the Howard regime, which unashamedly abolished the portfolio. It was never likely to gain much of the youth vote. The Rudd Government, which got an impressive chunk of younger voters on side during the Kevin 07 campaign, has to look like it's doing something. There are some serious issues affecting young people — youth allowance and teenage unemployment are just two examples. The latter has jumped from 14.3 per cent to 19.5 per cent, significantly more than the 5.8 per cent general unemployment rate. All these blogs and conversations aimed at reaching out to young people are nice ideas but communication is only beneficial if something concrete emerges. Depressingly, it seems you only need to be seen to be listening. If you were to survey a bunch of people aged between 18 to 25 and asked them which was more "yoof" friendly, the Howard or the Rudd government most would almost certainly say the latter despite little difference between the two. I suppose this just means that spin works after all.

The Goanna is Bella Counihan.