NEITHER OWNED NOR SHARED, BUT BORROWED
“Lonely, pretty lonely”.
That’s how Quinn, aged 15, described lockdown. Despite this fact his entire family of four (plus 3 dogs) were home together for the extent of Queensland’s lockdown. The loneliness Quinn was referring to was the disconnection from his friends.
For many still in school, lockdown was a time of uncertainty, confusion and loneliness. When Queensland first initiated its lockdown, teachers were only notified by news reports that they would have to shift online.
Vanessa Kutcher is in charge of child participation at UNICEF Australia. This year she has been heading up a team of young ambassadors as they’ve undertaken research into the rights of children in Australia.
What Vanessa told me was that children were particularly concerned about their academic futures. With much of their school year spent within bedrooms and on dining room tables. COVID has ushered in an unprecedented era of online learning. One we were grossly unprepared for.
With such a quick shift away from the classroom and onto learning through platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It would have certainly left many students from rural and less advantaged areas, reeling.
This change was done as well as it could have been given the circumstances. We went into lockdown fast and some consolation is now found in the fact that in Queensland at least, life is almost back to normal.
Vanessa also noted how they’ve found lockdown to exacerbate the stress and anxiety felt by young people.
“Young people who aren’t in major lockdowns right now (major lockdowns being similar to the one Victoria is under at the moment) are expressing that they’re experiencing lower levels of stress and anxiety.”
This stress and anxiety is apparently down to a number of reasons. Education, especially around grade 12 examinations, is causing young people a lot of stress.
Financially, the burden of the economic downfall we’re enduring is also affecting the younger generations. According to Vanessa, young people have been reporting greater levels of financial stress. This has been due to many young people working minimum wage essential jobs. As their parents join the ranks of the unemployed, many people under the age of 18 have since needed to become a source of financial security for their families on top of keeping up with their schoolwork.
A lot of the time these jobs young people are working haven’t been able to move online. Therefore, the risk of COVID for them, as a general demographic is disproportionate. Despite this, newspapers like The Australian have been vilifying young people, with one frontpage article blaming them for Victoria’s second wave. Citing that people from their late teens to early twenties had the highest rate of infections. Overlooking the fact that this age bracket would have been the least likely to have been working jobs that could be moved online, while being the most financially instable. Incentivising them to risk infection to stay employed.
While looking forward, young people are the ones who will have to deal with the brunt of the recovery effort. The recession will rest uneasily on the backs of many, especially those who will have to carry it the furthest.
Given this, and the uncertainty surrounding concessions for end of school exams like ATAR, it is understandable that young people aren’t hopeful for the future. Especially when the Morrison government is spiking the fees for a multitude of tertiary courses. Courses that include liberal arts degrees like sociology and anthropology which will be key in deciphering and understanding the change in the way we live that will come out of such an unprecedented moment in history.
A future tainted by not only financial burden, but ecological destruction. Young people, even before the Covid fallout, were facing down the barrel of a future tainted by the promise of ecological destruction. Something fervently voiced by the youth of this country, yet, after a worldwide school strike on March 25th, 2019. Our nation’s leader, Mr Morrison only told them to go back to school.
Our young are going to inherit exactly what is left to them. How we respond to the challenges the world yields to us today are going to shape the future of our children. With no formal way for them to have a say in our policy making, maybe it’s time for our politicians to not only listen to committees of business and industry leaders, but those of us who we borrow the earth from.
