YOUTH DIGITAL INCLUSION
PROJECT
740. Ms E. HAMILTON to the Minister for Youth:
I refer to the McGowan Labor
government's $5.5 billion recovery plan that includes support for young
Western Australians who may have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Can
the minister outline to the house what this government's investment in
the youth digital inclusion project will mean for young, vulnerable Western Australians
and their access to the support services they need?
Mr D.J.
KELLY replied:
I thank the member for Joondalup for
the question and for the hard work that she puts in representing the young
people of her electorate.
Throughout the pandemic, a lot of
sections of the community were hit hard. Of course, one of those sections was
young people. When we look at the impact on employment, we see that is the
cohort most significantly affected. But it
is not just in employment; the impact on young people in areas such as mental
health has been quite significant. One of the issues that has made it
more difficult for young people to access the services they need is that when
the pandemic first hit, many youth services' shopfronts were forced to
closed, and those services moved to online delivery.
For a lot of young people, online delivery is not difficult because they are
used to living in that environment. But for disadvantaged youth
particularly, who may not have a mobile device or who, when they run out of
data, would ordinarily go to a library to access the online world, a lot of
those opportunities ceased to exist.
As part of the pandemic response,
the government put together a youth task force. We asked the Youth Affairs Council of Western Australia, which participated,
what our key responses should be for disadvantaged young people. One of the ideas YACWA put forward—I want
to thank the council and CEO Ross Wortham, in particular, for their
contribution—was a program to get repurposed digital devices, whether
mobile phones, laptops or tablets, into the hands
of disadvantaged young people. We worked with the Office of Digital Government—as
Minister for Innovation and ICT, that
was a great collaboration—and put together the youth digital inclusion
project. Through some relatively modest funding of about $160 000, that
will see up to 300 refurbished devices made available to service providers to
put into the hands of young people selected as needing them the most. Those
devices come with six months' worth of free data. It means that young
people between the ages of 16 and 24 who would otherwise not be able to access youth services online can do so through
this program. It was a great collaboration between the Office of Digital
Government and the youth services sector. It is just one example of how this
government has taken a nuanced approach to this pandemic.
I give a shout-out to the
Hello Initiative. It is a similar program run by a not-for-profit in
conjunction with Total Green Recycling. It provided repurposed devices
to young people in the justice system who would otherwise have found it
difficult to maintain contact with service providers. It put together a similar
program. I understand that by June it had provided about 60 devices to young
people.
The other initiative that came out
of the youth task force, again put forward by the Youth Affairs Council, was
the idea of a live dashboard so that young
people could go to one place to see what youth services are available to them.
Again, it was a modest investment of about $20 000 and delivered by the Youth
Affairs Council of WA. It was another way of ensuring that during the pandemic
young people could readily access the services that they need.
Finally, Mr Speaker, I want to draw
the house's attention to the document ''Digital Inclusion in Western
Australia: A Blueprint for a Digitally-inclusive
State'', which is now out for public consultation. Members on this side
of the house see the opportunities that the digital economy provides. In
so many ways, it can improve the lives of Western Australians and solve
real-life problems. But it would be naive to think that all Western Australians
will be able to access digital services in the same way. The concept of the
digital divide is very real. Members of this side of the house are determined
to do what they can to narrow the digital divide. We have put out—again
it was put together by the Office of Digital Government—a draft digital
inclusion blueprint that outlines a number of initiatives we think could be
progressed in order to narrow that digital divide as much as possible. It is
currently out for consultation. We have had so much interest that we have
extended the consultation period to the end of October. I invite members of the
house who are interested in dealing with this important issue, especially
during this pandemic, to look at that draft document.