Elena Jefferys

Okay. I've written some stuff. I will be reading a bit off my sheet. What I've written about is around the title Discussion About Work For and By Young People. One of the toughest things about my job I found in Gibber is keeping up self-esteem and confidence in our youth project. Because our target is disadvantaged, marginalised and street present youth, self-esteem among that group is generally pretty low. Young people who work around Gibber and who are the Gibber support community, we've had special opportunities which have enabled us to service other young people who haven't been as lucky.

So even though as workers we've obviously had more educational and social advantages than our target group, there are politically grey areas that the whole project falls into such as advocacy and information provision from our project to the broader community which often brings the support community and the target group a lot closer together because, even though we're from different areas, we're all young people. So when our project or when young people in general are under attack from the federal and state government, it affects all young people and even those of us who have had opportunities to finish school or go to university, things like that, and especially, who are even more marginalised, who are in and outside the detention centres and stuff like that.

Work for the dole, the youth allowance, the defunding of youth services, lack of rent assistance for homeless youth, anti-youth laws and curfews such as Operation Sweep, and Operation Family Values in WA, increased juvenile detention laws, increased anti-graffiti laws, lack of emergency services such as food and shelter and housing and stuff, the closing of schools, increased prices for public transport, the cutting of valuable transport services, all of these things combine to send a very clear message which young people pick up today and that is that you aren't responsible enough to look after yourselves and we don't care about your needs, and that's a clear message that comes to young people no matter what area they're from.

We at Gibber challenge and disagree with the agenda of industry-based arts programs, including eco-tourism. We work very closely with a group called Dumbartung which is a Nyoongah art corporation in Perth and we adopted their policy - we adopt straight from them their policies on things like eco-tourism and working with industry. We found that the art and writing of the Gibber target group has repeatedly been treated insensitively and as a commodity by various groups from the Juvenile Justice Department to Barking Gecko Theatre Company and other nameless groups who, as a result, we've decided not to work with any more and stuff like that.

We believe that the young people that we work with, as a community they know themselves what they need and what they want and what they want to say, but often there's just a lack of access to the necessary structures for that community to be able to formulate and communicate their message in a way that other people can understand. So what we see is things like graffiti bombing and stuff like that which is definitely a venting of that frustration and young people can read that to each other and they can read what each other have written to each other, but that message doesn't get out to the broader community. People call it vandalism and even like fringe arts groups call it vandalism and can't sort of understand why it is that kids might graffiti areas and stuff like that.

We find that government consultation is increasingly a scam for spending less money on youth services while corporate tax is at an all-time low in this country and things like the price of really simple things like food and rent are consistently going up. Anyone who thinks that young people don't know what's going on, then they too are the result of government propaganda of mass media and conservative powers. What we found is that in our support community and with the young kids we work with, they're the people that know the most what's going on because they're the people that are directly affected and feeling the effects every day, with homelessness, poverty, lack of education, and lack of access to services and stuff like that. So that's pretty much all I wanted to say.