Hangin' Out For Space

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday August 26, 1996

DEBRA JOPSON and LEONIE LAMONT

They won't be seen and not heard like their parents may have been, and everywhere the Simpson generation congregate they are criticised. In the second part of a five-day Herald series, DEBRA JOPSON and LEONIE LAMONT at the issues teenagers care about.

ROLLER skates, roller blades and skateboards can be frightening. Older people are fearful of being knocked over. The noise irritates shopkeepers. When people see boisterous youths in a group with the boards under their arms, they often see them as gangs and "think the worst".

So says Robbie McInnes, a program officer for Eastern Area Service for Youth (EASY), whose clients include many of the youths who are constantly moved on - from the streets, car parks and shopping centres - by police and security guards, often for simply "hanging around".

But under a pilot scheme, which will be watched by youth workers all over Australia, skating and skateboarding are about to turn respectable in Sutherland Shire, where EASY outreach worker Hal Holley admits that both pursuits have a particularly bad name.

EASY will work with Sutherland Shire Council and the management of Westfield Miranda to pluck the problem from the street and plant it smack in the middle of southern Sydney's biggest shopping centre. Holley envisages a true-to-life streetscape within the shopping centre, complete with gutters and pavements, where skaters and boarders can carve out fanciful patterns, perhaps dazzling those who now feel intimidated.

The issue of how much public space to turn over to young people is a far bigger question than whether clattering wheels alarm pedestrians. It is symbolic of how adults view youth culture, with all its pimpliness, gangliness, brashness, boisterousness, as well as its ability to shock, charm and refresh. Many adults are alarmed by today's youth culture and long for the "seen and not heard" method of dealing with teenagers; keeping young people tucked away until they're ready to be "grown up".

The executive officer of Youth Action and Policy Association (YAPA), Andrew Marsden, puts it simply: "Young culture is not valued."

When the Australian Democrats conducted their annual Youth Poll earlier this year, they found that the top four issues among the 1,500 15- to 19-year-olds surveyed were: the family, education and training, employment, and the environment.

But more than 80 per cent of those surveyed also believed there were not enough nightclubs for under 18s and 43 per cent said they had attended a nightclub under-age.

At Westfield Miranda, management has pledged $10,000 cash and $20,000 in office services and the Australian Youth Foundation has provided $40,000 to let kids do exciting things - and be seen doing them. Three-on-three basketball, indoor rock climbing and arts and drama are all under consideration.

Everyone involved is hoping for a reduction in the shoplifting, graffiti and anti-social behaviour which a small proportion of kids who hang out at Westfield indulge in, but Holley is hoping for more. "Hopefully, young people will be celebrated as young people. The things they do will be part of normal life."

What's normal? According to Triple J broadcaster Angela Catterns, the mainstream media treats young people "a bit like novelties". "They're one of the dreaded fringe groups, often portraying them as either victims, or perpetrators ... Anna Wood on one hand, the Paxtons on the other," she says.

Catterns, a speaker at a youth forum run recently by the Evatt Foundation, says a survey into youth attitudes by the British independent think-tank, Demos, had strong correlations in Australia. The Demos report, Freedom's Children, was based on interviews with 1,000 higher educated Generation Xers in North America and Europe.

"Members of this generation, more than ever before them, are the inheritors of freedom, and they value it deeply. They are the most educated generation ever, and for women there's no going back to the rigid family and work roles of the past. There is a major swing away from tradition and authority and a loss of trust. Many have lost faith in politics altogether," she says.

In a qualitative survey five years ago of about 50 16-year-olds, a Queensland University lecturer in government, Dr Ian Ward, found that "rich, wrinkly and rowdy" described the youths' image of politicians they gleaned through TV. Today, he believes, nothing has changed.

Adults who follow current affairs closely have a completely different picture of politics and politicians to many teenagers, who often see only part of the picture when the family has the TV switched to the news.

"They saw them (politicians) driving around Parliament House in white cars and in suits ... They belonged in a world they had no feeling for or contact with," says Ward.

When young Australians are asked what issues they care about, powerful themes emerge. Issues raised during the Evatt Foundation's election forum include legalising marijuana, unemployment, youth suicide, forest policy, selling off assets and buying Australian, the needs of single parents, immigration and education funding.

"THE big issue is jobs, jobs, jobs," says Marsden. "Young people want to participate in society, and the right to participate is almost exclusively valued on what you produce. Young people, like others, want their share."

Politicians do not bewilder Marsden. He wants them to get tough on business. For all the hype about traineeships, he says they have always fallen far short of targets set, and the only way to compel business to take on trainees is to make it mandatory.

"With all the Olympic projects and infrastructure, the State Government could put into contracts a requirement on the tenderer to take on so many trainees," he says.

However, young people have high expectations of the jobs they get. As Catterns says: "Young people are more educated than previous generations. There's a great desire to translate educational achievement into success."

It was clear from Triple J's election hotline that "the majority of young Australians would rather be self-employed entrepreneurs than nine-to-five employees". "Small business, believe it or not, is a huge issue for young Australians. They feel they are working hard and getting nowhere," says Catterns.

A recent Youth Affairs Council of South Australia survey of 1,300 people aged from 13 to 25 found that employment was the issue they would most like to hear discussed by politicians and the community during election campaigns, followed closely by environment and education. In the Democrats' Youth Poll, jobs rated as number three in issues of concern to young people, after education and training and the family.

Not surprisingly, these teenagers do not support youth wages, with only 11 per cent agreeing that younger people should be paid lower wages than their elders for equal work. YAPA has been campaigning for the age of an employee to make no difference to pay rates, arguing that youth unemployment has gone through the roof despite youth wages having fallen in comparison with adult wages.

In the Democrats' survey, more than 75 per cent of respondents thought that higher education should be free and only 9 per cent thought the Government was doing enough to care for the environment.

Seven out of 10 surveyed were worried about Australia having one of the highest levels of youth suicide in the world, with more males dying by their own hand than in motor vehicle accidents. More than 80 per cent wanted condom-vending machines in schools and 92 per cent wanted sex education to be a school subject.

Wrinkly and distant as those politicians may seem, their actions rebound on young people's everyday life. The impact of unemployment can not be overestimated, as it affects every facet of a young person's life, says Marsden. Without money, without consuming, they are kicked out of shopping centres. "They don't want to be seen as lesser citizens because they don't consume as much," he says.

The crackdown on dance parties following the death of teenager Anna Wood after taking Ecstasy had made it "virtually impossible" to book a safe venue for young people to get together in, says Marsden.

THIS is why so many eyes will be on the Westfield Miranda project, which is aimed at addressing the demise of the free village green and the rise of the for-profit shopping centre as magnets for youth engaged in the ancient art of hanging out. As Sutherland Council's blurb says, the aim is "to build bridges with thousands of young people who feel isolated from the general community and become a model for similar programs throughout Australia".

At Westfield Miranda, Brooke Duley , 15, of Oyster Bay, and Emily May , 14, of Stanwell Park, have exhausted their after-school shopping funds and are hanging out, complaining that fun activities like playing pool are confined to licensed premises.

How does it make them feel?

"Like you're a loser," says Brooke. "You are under-privileged because you're younger."

At the same shopping centre, Vinh Tran and Peter Whelan, both 14, complain that if they sit at tables in the food halls without eating or drinking, security guards move them on. But they do not want to go. "It gets boring but it is still better than sitting at home," says Tran. Holley says it is difficult for young people to find social outlets. "It is hard trying to find low-cost but accessible social venues young people can go to to give them a break from the usual sources of authority they have. They want to slip out from under teachers and parents and have their own space to do what they want to do," he says.

Writing recently in The Alternative Law Journal , the director of Brisbane's Youth Advocacy Centre, Gwenn Murray, claimed that the NSW Children Parental Responsibility Act, which allows for curfews in some areas and for police to remove children from public places, was unfair.

But the picture that emerges is of young innocents being moved on by authority figures across Australia every day. Murray tells the sad story of Muslim and Samoan youths who last year invited some of the participants in the National Police Ethnic Youth Relations Summit in Melbourne to a barbecue at Southbank Parklands in Brisbane.

None of the police officers turned up, she claims. But there were security guards who came and "hassled the boys for laughing too loudly while they were playing in the pool".