National Youth Week kicked off on Friday.
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However, it did so with a sombre note.
It is the last National Youth Week that will, so far, be funded by the federal government.
It is a move that goes back to the 2015 May federal budget, when the government made $3 million of cuts to youth incentives around the country.
The future of the week will move into the hands of the individual state governments, who must choose whether to fund it out of their own budgets.
The week began in 1989 out of NSW, and was picked up nationally in 2000.
Last year, 23,000 young Australians were engaged in the event.
The Tasmanian government has stated that its “future commitments towards National Youth Week have not changed”.
Peak youth organisations are concerned that the state might not dedicate funds to running National Youth Week events beyond their current commitments.
The youth unemployment rate is more than double that of the average unemployment rate.
Nationally, the youth rate is 13.3 per cent, versus an average of 5.7 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey, released in February, showed that the country’s young people are frustrated, and worried.
They are worried about their financial security into the future, they are worried about crime, about terrorism, inequality, and the environment.
They feel, on the whole, that the odds are stacked against them, and that they will not live up to the standard set by their parents’ generation – a standard of high-paying jobs, home ownership, and control.
While this doubt and collective anxiety clouds their everyday, the federal government is cutting funding to youth affairs.
It is reiterating that feeling of being forgotten and unimportant, by taking money away from events and initiatives that celebrate, encourage and educate the nation’s young people.
There has not been a federal minister for youth since former prime minister Tony Abbott scrapped the role in 2013.
That speaks volumes to how the much the government values the country’s young people.
How can they value themselves, if no one else will?