The politics of youth

“Today's youth is the weak link, as it remains the least integrated element in the global economy - but in another way, it could also be the strongest link, owing to the enormous energy, the great aspiration, and the vast capacity for revolt it possesses.”

“As such, the youth can be explosive and act as an emancipator, but it can also be destructive if rejected and marginalised. Examples are numerous: France in 2005, Tunisia in early 2011, London in the summer of 2011. Again, the key element to remember is the need to recognise the dignity of those individuals."

That widespread marginalisation is why it is so extraordinary that citizens around the world don't quite get what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about. More than 60 per cent of Australians say they don't understand the objectives or the motivations behind this global initiative. Hello? Has self-interest and profit seeking muted our sense of social responsibility and numbed our collective conscience?

Vast numbers of young people all around the globe know firsthand that profit-led economic strategy hasn't delivered jobs and incomes. There's a colossal blockage in the "trickle down" artery.

Many young people intellectualise the state of the nation and see that they will be paying for the bailouts, the desertification of the planet, and the ever-increasing likelihood of "an exchange" of the nuclear variety. They have no jobs, or casualised and low-paid jobs, and can't afford the glittery prizes tempting them on the box. They lay the blame squarely at the feet of the 'money elite' for sucking the juice out of their futures. The U.S Federal Reserve is their enemy's 'HQ', with its secret loan bailouts of banks during the global financial crisis to the tune of $7.77 trillion (some say it's $16 trillion, but either way it reveals who's running the show), and that's on top of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Excessive government responses to the ongoing non-violent protests in the West only emphasise the reality of democracies that depend on tear gas, capsicum spray, police brutality and citizen surveillance. They have left many young people questioning whose interests their government serves.

The other risk is that disenfranchised young people who don't intellectualise their problems instead search for the self-worth or dignity they might otherwise derive from paid employment. They end upfollowing people or groups who use hope as a tool to recruit, misdirect and channel their anger and frustration towards minority groups or immigrants or asylum seekers or intellectuals or persons of different faith or nationality. Impressionable young minds corrupted with dangerous ideologies. History has shown how such redirection of popular frustration has played out with devastating consequences, and it's sobering to note recurrent reports of the rise of neo-Nazi groups across Europe.

If you then add poverty and high food prices to high youth unemployment (as occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, as acknowledged by the International Food Policy Research Institute) you have the perfect storm. One needs little imagination to appreciate how hunger would focus one's mind. That instinct to survive may help to explain the bravery and tenacity of the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, for example. When the many become desperate, really desperate, they're hardly going to accommodate the social and political order bestowed upon them by the insulated and corrupt.

Food, and the price people have to pay for it, in turn depends on oil. Oil in fertilisers, in tractors for ploughing, sowing and harvesting, in transport from the farm to places for storage, manufacturing and distribution, and so on. If oil prices rise, as they inevitably will, so too will the price of food. Unfortunately, not all young unemployed people or their families - either here or abroad - live in accommodation conducive to self-sufficient kitchen gardens or have the skills to develop them. Usually cash-strapped charities become the backstop, to the extent that they can cope with the demand.

In its January 2012 report 'Resolving the Food Crisis' the Global Development and Environment Institute and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy criticised increasing deregulation of commodity markets and increasing financial speculation in agricultural commodities, increasing land use for non-food agricultural crops (like biofuels for industrial uses) and a bias toward cash crops for export over food production for domestic use. Rising oil prices are likely to exacerbate this profit-driven approach to agriculture, and in turn will reinforce the trend of rising food prices.

Although Australia has that critical ingredient for unrest - high youth unemployment - we're lucky, for now at least, that our young people still have food in their bellies. But there are more twists and turns, like the irony that Australia has both an ageing population heading into retirement and high youth unemployment and an inadequately skilled workforce. Governments warn us about the dire consequences of the first, hide the true extent of the second and bemoan but do little about the third.

One small not-for-profit organisation in the Hunter Valley is doing some heavy lifting to address this problem. Youth Express launched an advertising campaign - "Time to train" - last week, urging businesses to train, employ and mentor young people in their local areas.

The Government was on the right track when it included a training clause as part of its procurement process when it was building school halls, but that was always doomed to fail because training requires more than one-off, short-term contracts. According to Youth Express, what's needed is the employment and training of young people sourced from the area where the jobs are available on an ongoing basis; there is also a need for legislation making it mandatory for training to be included in the cost of doing business, particularly in the resource sector.