Recently, we asked how you were feeling about Australian politics right now. The responses were grim: 89 percent of you didn’t feel inspired by politics; 83 percent had no confidence that the Labor Government would address your issues; 93 percent felt unrepresented. That didn’t sound good, so we decided to take your concerns to the seat of power. That’s right, Junkee went down to Parliament House. During Budget Week, no less. We spoke to Senators and Members of Parliament from the Labor Government, The Australian Greens, and the Independents about the stuff you told us you care about. (We reached out to Liberals too, but no one wanted to talk. Honestly, we tried.)

Two years ago, Stephen Bates was working at an Apple store. Then he was elected as the Federal MP for Brisbane in the 2022 Federal Election. As a proud gay man, Stephen holds the Greens portfolios for LGBTIQA+ and Youth. A key part of his campaign was using geo-located Grindr ads with the slogan “the best parliaments are hung”. Truly iconic stuff. This is the politics I want to see. Talk about knowing your audience.

Since being elected, Stephen has consistently pressured the Labor government to implement stronger climate laws and shift to renewable energy, lower the voting age to 16, build more social and affordable housing, introduce rent freezes, and include mental health and dental services in Medicare.

Stephen was one of the easiest interviews I did in Canberra. Probably because it felt like I was talking to a friend — someone who truly understood the struggle of being in your early 20s, trying to pay rent, earn a decent living, all while worrying about the climate. He just got it. Ironically enough, Stephen is the youngest person to currently have a government portfolio for youth at 31 years of age. Both the Minister for Youth, Anne Aly, and the Shadow Minister for Youth, Angie Bell, are in their fifties. He’s also the current “Baby of the House” — the youngest current member in the House of Representatives. But his age shouldn’t make him an outlier. We need more young people in Parliament.

Here’s our chat.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full interview just below.)

Ky Stewart, Junkee: We've surveyed our audience to see how they feel about politics and it's pretty grim. Eighty-nine percent said they don't feel inspired and 93 percent said they don't feel represented. Why do you think that is?

Stephen Bates: I'm not surprised by those numbers and I'm not surprised that's how people feel because as someone that's kind of inside the bubble now, I feel the same way. It’s very easy to feel depressed, hopeless, and helpless because you look at all the things happening around the world and in the country at the moment. I have the second youngest electorate in the whole country. The general vibe that I get [from them] is everything's broken, I don't think anyone in power is going to fix it. We're not seeing the government take climate change seriously. We're not seeing them do any sort of huge systemic reform on housing or on higher education or in mental health. The unspoken agreement we have between ourselves and society that, ‘If I just work hard, everything will be fine and I will be able to afford a house and I will be able to do all the things that I want to do’, [has] pretty much broken down.

That's why I think so many young people feel so despondent because even if I do work hard, even if I do get a job and I get medium levels of success, that's actually never going to be enough. I remember reading this stat that said something like, at the moment, if you're just coming out of high school now it's going to take you 41 years to save for a deposit on a house. Immediately you're so far on the back foot that you just feel like, well, what's the point? That's when we see those stats you just mentioned [where] people feel politics is uninspiring and pointless. Part of my job is to try and push through that in my head and try and present some sort of hope for people that things can be better. Because a lot of the time they are already better overseas and we're just getting the bum end of the deal here in Australia.

You recently criticised the Treasurer for telling more young people to have babies when we're already struggling to take care of ourselves, let alone take care of a child. What motivated you to speak out?

It was such an eye roll. You [the Treasurer] really just have no idea. Why do you think no one's having kids? We have created a society that doesn't encourage people to have kids because it's so expensive. People are feeling depressed and hopeless so why would you want to bring another person into that world? If you actually are serious about family values and actually wanting people to feel safe and secure enough to have kids, you need to make childcare universal. You need to be wiping people's student debt. You need to be making higher education free. You need to be getting off coal and gas. You actually need to be creating a future that is exciting and that people want. This feels kind of morbid, but [a future] that people want to live to see and that people want their kids to be able to grow up in.

A lot of young queer and trans and gender diverse people are feeling very unsafe at the moment. What are the main concerns you've heard from young queer people?

On a personal level and from hearing from other people, it's the fear of importation of the US-style culture war and the US policies that are now coming out like banning drag queens and Florida’s Don't Say Gay bill. It's the fear of what could come and I think we're already seeing the LNP especially buy into that and think, ‘It worked for Trump, maybe it'll work for us.’ I don't think we're at the same level as the United States yet, but I think it's our responsibility as the Greens and as progressive Members of Parliament to stop that before it even tries to get in here.

We're looking at some of our policies like bringing gender affirming healthcare into Medicare and normalising it so it’s just another aspect of healthcare that people get access to. Then you see things like the book ban that happened in the [Cumberland] council in Sydney. That's terrifying because the fact that a politician can even decide what people are reading or what people have the ability to read is scary in and of itself. In the upcoming, well, if it is upcoming, Religious Discrimination Bill, you can in this country at the moment be fired from a job because you are queer. You can be fired from a job if you get divorced while at work, you can be fired from a job because you become a single mum while you're at work. People don't realise that that actually happens in this country in 2024. There is an opportunity there for us to increase protections and make sure that people's human rights are respected.

Something we've also been pushing for in the federal Parliament is an LGBTQIA+ Human Rights Commissioner. We have the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and the former Sex Discrimination Commissioner even say we need that role because there's so much that needs to be done and monitored because you may win your rights in the short to medium term, but they can always be taken away again. So we need a commissioner like that whose sole focus is to make sure that queer rights across the country are being protected across all jurisdictions, not just in the federal government.

But I think I am hopeful for the future. I think that everything is always an uphill battle, unfortunately, but we've gone up the hill multiple times before and I don't see why we can't do it again this time.

When it comes to the epidemic of male violence against women, and there's concern that many trans women are often left out of the conversation. When trans women go missing, their cases aren't investigated as thoroughly. How can the nation better address trans women's safety and include it as part of the push to protect women?

That's a good question. Like you said, the violence that trans women face is extreme and horrific, and I think part of our role in addressing that is broadening out the conversation to include trans people in that discussion, even all queer people in that discussion. We do experience higher rates of mental illness and we do experience higher rates of violence more generally as well. I think it's important to have those nuances in the conversation because if we're not actually doing that, then like you said, no one's going to really care. I think about this example in New South Wales where they had this report handed down onto the police force that basically said, you ignored queer hate crimes for years and years and years, do the following things, but please don't just do an empty apology. And so the one thing they did was offer an apology and didn't actually address the systemic issues.

A lot of the time in these scenarios, it's the same with domestic violence, there’s already solutions that have been presented to governments multiple times and they get completely ignored. So to answer your question, there is already the expertise and the solutions that are out there that have already been presented to different parliaments across the country, it's actually just pressuring the government to do something about it in the budget. The government basically said [back in 2022] they wanted to establish this 10 year LGBTQIA+ health and wellbeing plan, which would include things like this allegedly, no mention of it since then, no money for it, no anything for it. We've basically been fobbed off saying, oh, that'll be included in the plan, that'll be included in the plan. Now there's seemingly no plan anymore. If we are not in here pushing and pushing and pushing and there aren't more queer people in politics doing that, then I think the government's just not going to do anything about it. And so if anyone is watching this and is queer and wants to get into politics, it's awful, but you need to do it.

Have you seen a correlation between a lack of queer representation in politics and levels of homophobia and violence in the real world? How can we change the culture to be more inclusive for queer people?

I think definitely in this place, if we weren't here, I think it would happen a lot more. I honestly think, without sounding obnoxious, that me being in the House of Representatives as a very openly gay man, tempers things and the people that may think things will never actually say them because there's the personification of it sitting near them. And I think that does help a little bit. The Senate's a whole other issue. Even if we didn't have progressive people in Green Senators who will vehemently speak out against that, and if a motion does come forward that's terrible — we usually get one every couple of sitting weeks — one of the cookers will bowl something up. If we didn't have people in there who were immediately going to try and shut it down, it would happen so much more often.

I think that seeps out into broader society as well. You have people using homophobic slurs in the AFL. We need people in public positions of leadership to be actively calling that out and saying, ‘That's actually not cool. That's not okay to do that’, because if there's no voices doing that, it becomes acceptable to do. You were alluding to it earlier, [but] these things never happen suddenly. I lived in Florida for a little bit before it went off the deep end, but you could feel it building. This is in 2012, 2013, 2014, the state had just voted for Obama. They had a Democratic governor. I'm pretty sure it was deemed more of a progressive place to be, but the rumblings were starting to begin and the government there was very, ‘Oh, we won't deal with that. We don't want culture wars. We are so scared of any form of backlash from anyone that we'll just be quiet and everything will be fine’. Ten years later, look where they are now. I think it's one thing to not want to be involved in culture wars, but I think at the same time we have a responsibility to actually stand up and defend our community. If we don't do it, who else is going to?

The government announced that they were wiping $3 billion of HECs and will index it at whatever the lower percentage of wage growth or inflation is. How did you feel about that?

I was honestly surprised they did anything because I spent the best part of last year annoying the Education Minister in Question Time about it. People reach out to me a lot about this issue in the electorate and across the country, asking, ‘Hey, this is a really big issue. The 7.8 percent indexation, you could see it coming from a mile off that this was about to happen. Are you going to do anything? Why wipe the indexation? Why won't you wipe student debt? Or even bits of it, even America has wiped bits of student debt’. And [I was] just met with a constant, ‘Oh, that's not a priority. That doesn't actually help anyone. It's not really going to do anything for anyone in a cost of living crisis’. So now to see them turn around and say, ‘Actually maybe it will help people’, was surprising.

They went about as far as I would ever expect the current Labor Party to go, which was basically applying a bandaid to it. So obviously I would like to see student debt wiped entirely. You shouldn't have to pay for education. That's becoming clearer and clearer. They're talking about how they want way over 50 percent of the workforce to have a tertiary education. So if we're starting to see tertiary education as fundamental to existence in society as primary and secondary education, well then we should be making tertiary education free. If you want people to be able to access it, you have to remove that barrier. You basically have to create a society where people can choose the paths they want to go down without fear of financial penalty for doing so.

Even though they've done this little change to the indexation, people are still going to leave uni with tens of thousands of dollars of HECs debt. It just might not inflate at the same speed that it was before.

There's a lot of frustration with how much money the government makes off our loans and our debts, especially when that money seems to go towards fossil fuels or weapons manufacturing. How do we hold government accountable when it spends our money??

Yeah, that's the million dollar question. Obviously I'm going to say support Greens politicians, but I think there's also space for protesting, getting involved in community organising, and grassroots activism because really that's been the most effective method of change throughout history. Huge changes have never just been the government doing it because they felt like it was a nice thing to do for people. Women didn't just get the vote. It came from people in a lot of cases sacrificing themselves in order to do that. I'm not saying people need to throw themselves in front of horses for HECs debt, but I think getting involved in activism and grassroots organisations is a really, really effective way to create change like that. I think when we have a two party system at the moment, you're pretty much guaranteed that your tax money is going to be spent on terrible things. On weapons manufacturing, or 14.5 billion dollars this year in fossil fuel subsidies. That is going to happen because that is who they are bought and paid for, and I think that is only going to break if we smash the two party system in this country. There is no other way around that.

I think there definitely is space to work outside of the system, but there's also a role for working inside of the system as well in trying to affect the legislative change that we really, really want to see to make things better for everyday people. Like I said earlier, it's a very uphill battle, but it's a fight worth having and because it has the possibility of leading to so many positive things. I think if people allow themselves to get wrapped up in the despondency and in the despair, that works so well for the two major parties because they don't want people to think that a better world is possible because then that means they have to actually pull their finger out and try to create that better world.

Recently, Prime Minister Albanese suggested that students chanting “From the river to the sea” wouldn't be able to locate Jordan on a map. What did you think of that belittling of the students?

I think you summed it up perfectly when you said belittling. It is belittling. This is someone who spent the better part of his political career advocating for Palestine, and now that he has the ability to do anything about it has just completely capitulated on everything. It's fascinating to watch it happen in real time in the chamber and equally devastating. I think it feeds into that broader narrative we were just talking about crushing hope. They would rather that everyone just lives in their little box and goes to work, comes home, and consumes things through online shopping because that's what capitalism requires you to do and that's what they want you to do. It's important to push back against the narrative that young people don't know what they're doing. I've experienced that in this place. I've been giving a speech in the chamber and someone yelled at me across the room, ‘Quit and come back when you're older’.

That's what these people think of pretty much everyone in the country [who is] under 40 really. That young [people] don't know what they're on about, that they don't understand the world, and that they're all just stupid. I think that's where the Prime Minister's comments come from. That underlying, subconscious belief about young people. What we try to get across to people is no, young people actually do understand how the world works and they hate it, that's why they're doing what they're doing. And justifiably so.

Sorry that you've had people yell at you. What do you do?

I just stare at them. Literally, what's wrong with you?

We experienced that when we mentioned the School Strike 4 Climate to Chris Bowen, who said he didn't need young people to tell him what to do. Do you think protesting the government helps?

Yes, because if it wasn't helping, they would tell you to protest. The fact that they're saying, ‘No, it did nothing. It didn't influence me. I am amazing and don't worry about anything. I have everything under control’, really tells you all that you need to know, which is that protests were effective. And protests and activism actually go beyond trying to just lobby the government to do things. I think it's about creating a broader buy-in from society at large, because every time there are those school structured climate strikes, it's in the news because sometimes the mainstream media loves to just be like ‘Boo, children are having opinions’, but every time that happens, it's mentioning climate change, it's bringing it into the public consciousness and it's making people aware of it [and think] ‘Maybe I should also be caring about it’.

That's really what led to the election we had in 2022. In any other election year, Labor should have won 90 seats in the House of Representatives because of how angry everyone was at ScoMo and how angry everyone was at the Liberals. [But] they scraped in with a one seat majority because people were so mobilised and so motivated by things like the School Strike 4 Climate. They thought, ‘Oh wow, actually maybe a better world is possible and I don't have to settle for the polished turd over the gross one’. I think that's why we saw the Greens with so many seats and the Independents win so many seats because of that pressure on the ground against the government.

So how do we get those passionate people on the ground protesting and younger people into Parliament?

That's a big question. It's so existential. When I was running, I was renting, working full-time in retail, and had my HECs debt. It's obviously way worse now with the rental crisis and cost of living in general, but for me, I think the thing that motivated me was a combination of ‘don't let the bastards win’ and ‘don't let them get you down’ versus the experience that made me interested in politics. And I think those are the moments that you have to really, really hold onto.

So I had a moment while I was living in the States where I was working at the quote ‘happiest place on Earth’ at Disney World and had an experience where I walked into the stock room and one of my coworkers was on the floor crying because she was having to decide on insulin or rent. I had never been political really at all throughout my whole life and in that moment it was like, oh my God, how has this happened? I think everyone has an experience like that and it's about taking that experience, holding onto it for dear life, and using that as the motivation. Because I'm not going to lie, it's very hard running for office and it’s time consuming and takes a lot of resources. There's questions around publicly financed campaigns we could get into, but I think it's really about finding your passion and running with it. I joined the Greens because they were the most closely aligned with my values, and I found them to be really welcoming. I was 28 or 29 when I put my hand up to run, working in retail at an Apple store in North Brisbane, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, cool’. It wasn't a dismissal of, ‘You're young, you're stupid, you don’t know what you're doing’. It was, ‘You seem passionate and somewhat intelligent so you should do this’. I found it to be a really, really supportive experience, which is really, really awesome.

Obviously [that’s] not going to be the same for every single person that does it, but I think if you don't at least give it a go, you're never going to know if you can succeed. Even looking back now, I think, oh my god, two years ago I was working in an Apple store and now I'm sitting in the House of Representatives. That is wild that can happen to someone, but I think it needs to happen to more people because without people from all those walks of life, things are never going to change.

If everyone just votes for the exact same type of person but from the red team instead of the blue team and expects systemic change, that's never going to happen. We need younger people in this place. We need queer people in this place. We need people from all kinds of backgrounds. We need working class people in this place because without those voices at the table, nothing will ever, ever change.

Other articles in this series: Chris Bowen, Tanya Plibersek, Larissa Waters, Adam Bandt, Lidia Thorpe, Max Chandler-Mather, David Shoebridge, and Monique Ryan.

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