While I am ashamed to say I am not a born and bred Tasmanian, my formative teenager years were spent in Launceston and now I have spent almost half my life in our gorgeous state.
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Like many others my age, I was desperate to get out of the city when I finished school eight years ago and never intended to come back. To cut a long story short, clearly I am back living and working in Launceston (I met a boy), but not a single one of my closest friends even contemplated staying.
In fact, I could name perhaps 10 people who graduated with me still living in Northern Tasmania. But this isn’t just an anecdotal observation.
In 2013 Tasmanian workplace demographer Lisa Denny told The Examiner Tasmania had consistently lost people in their 20s to bigger cities and opportunities abroad.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the state’s population at the end of the June quarter 2016 was 519,100 – growth of just 0.5 per cent. It’s a far cry from the state government’s target to grow the population to 650,000 people by 2050.
“Tasmania’s unbalanced population age structure, caused by a disproportionately lower number of working and reproducing aged people, is contributing to Tasmania’s imminent projected population decline,” Ms Denny wrote in 2015. “The best solution to mitigate Tasmania’s anticipated population decline and to adequately provide for the population is to retain and attract working families to Tasmania.”
Methods suggested to attract young families to move to Tasmania have included flashy tourism campaigns and promoting housing affordability to bait exiles from the mainland’s expensive property market.
But why not focus on preventing the urge to leave in the first place?
With a youth unemployment rate of 16.2 per cent in November last year, it is without a doubt finding a job is a major factor in the drive to escape the state.
The state budget contained measures to reduce youth unemployment, including funding of $1 million over four years for the Beacon Foundation, which works to improve students’ job readiness, and $600,000 over two years to assist small business to take on apprentices and trainees.
On Friday, Unions Tasmania youth engagement officer Adam Clarke said there were 7300 unemployed young people under the age of 24 in Tasmania and only 2000 job vacancies across the entire state.
Job boosting efforts, such as the projects being brought forward by councils under the state government’s Northern Economic Stimulus Package and the UTAS relocation to Inveresk are designed to help but creating employment opportunities is just one piece of the puzzle.
Teaching our young people to take more pride in their hometowns and changing hard-wired sentiments is critical to ending the state’s two-speed economy.
As a wide-eyed 17-year-old ready to explore the world, my opinion of Launceston was anything but glamorous. In fact, I was ashamed to tell people I was from Tasmania.
This deep sense of disgrace – be it from the parochial jokes by mainlanders, the lack of progress and development across the city or just negative conversations held by influential adults – stayed with me until I started getting to know my city as a young adult.
Now I adore our fair city. I am constantly inspired by the people I interview, who are putting their blood, sweat and tears into making Launceston a better place to live.
If only I had learnt about these people and their efforts at 15 and not 25.