batyr Chair, Ellen Derrick described the incoming CEO as a “powerful voice” who is “deeply passionate about amplifying young voices and their lived experience, alongside equipping young people and their communities with the tools to live their lives and flourish.”

“Acheson’s leadership is centred around driving transformative change, with lived experience at the core of this,” Derrick said in a statement. 

As a prominent figure in the Australian youth sector, Acheson has served as the CEO of Youth Action, Chair of the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition and Executive Manager of Policy and Advocacy at Arafmi. She was the lead youth lived experience consultant for the United Nations World Youth Report in 2022, and earned the title of Financial Review’s Woman of Influence in 2019. Last year, she was a Bob and June Prickett Churchill Trust Fellow, researching the ways involving young people in decision-making can help address rising mental ill-health. 

She is also the Co-founder of Numbers and People Synergy, a data analytics company working to improve social development policies. 

Acheson said she is “beyond excited to join the batyr team.” 

“I have been championing batyr from the sidelines for many years and it’s an absolute honour to now be stepping into the role as CEO to lead this incredible organisation,” she said in a statement.

“Their expertise in prevention and championing lived experience is being recognised and acknowledged in Australia and abroad for its proven impact.”

“I’m already proud of batyr’s work on the ground to date, and can’t wait to amplify this further. I’ll continue to ensure the team are supported, motivated and inspired to keep driving positive change for young people now and for generations to come.”

Derrick added that Acheson’s “depth of knowledge and experience across youth and mental health” is “inspiring.”

“We are excited to officially welcome Katie into the batyr family and see her leadership build on our strong foundations and guide batyr into the future.”

Acheson begins her role on February 19. Last week, the organisation launched its fifth Splash the Stigma swim fundraiser that will continue through the month of February. Splash the Stigma is batyr’s annual drive to “turn the tide on mental health”, where people are invited to take up swimming challenge to raise money for the charity’s education programs to help young people better understand their mental health.

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Marlee Silva has been having a recurring nightmare. 

It’s the day after the referendum for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In her dream, she is waking up to the news that it’s been a No vote.

“I just don’t know how we would pick up and carry on,” she says.

“I know we can overcome everything, and we will… I just don’t want to think about the ripple effect and the impact it would have on our community.”

A Gamilaroi and Dunghutti woman, Marlee knows this might be the last chance she will have in her lifetime to create and see change for her people.

Up until now, she’s held back her voice.

“I’ve been towing the line for a while because I don’t want to draw attention to myself – it’s not about any one individual person,” she says.

“I absolutely can’t be silent anymore. I’m not holding myself back.”

Marlee, a writer, journalist and activist, is ready to speak out on the referendum for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which is set to take place between September and December. Australians will vote on recognition for Australia’s first peoples in the Constitution and an independent and permanent parliamentary body set up for First Nations’ peoples to have a say in policies that directly affect them.

And according to Professor Megan Davis, co-author of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, it’s critical that young women like Marlee are given platform during this debate, as it’s young First Nations’ voices that have been critically missing up till now.

Thankfully this is changing.

Allira Davis and Bridget Cama, co-chairs of the Uluru Youth Dialogue, are running the Hands on Heart Voice Conference at Barangaroo on Gadigal Land (Sydney) August 24-26.

The goal of the conference is to educate, activate and connect nearly 100 young non-Indigenous voices before the referendum.

“Leaning on our allies right now is really crucial at this point,” Allira Davis says.

“Once people understand the message, it’s powerful.”

What is the Voice?

The Indigenous Voice to Parliament is one of three pillars that constitute the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written in 2017 by more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates of the National First Nations Constitutional Convention.

Should the referendum end in a Yes vote, the Voice in Parliament, an independent and permanent parliamentary body, would be selected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from local communities. It would be gender-balanced, involve youth representatives and allow First Nations’ voices to be heard.

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It is the first step of the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart: voice, treaty and truth. Following the Voice, Makarrata, meaning “the coming together after a struggle”, will allow for treaty and truth-telling processes for Australia’s history.

While other former British colonies like New Zealand, Canada and the United States have a treaty with its Indigenous peoples, Australia does not.

Young voters and young voices

Young Australians have immense power to decide the fate of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) estimates Millennials and Gen Z make up about 43 per cent of the nation’s voting population.

They have already shown their strength in numbers in the 2022 federal election. After nine consecutive years of a conservative government, reports found young people were to blame in the shift to a Labor-led government and a record of 12 independent seats in the Upper House. 

The focus on “issue-based politics” emerging this decade is the driving force for this shift. Research shows young people become more engaged when political conversations are more issue-based or policy-based, rather than partisan-based. 

You only have to look at the Black Lives Matter, climate action and reproductive rights movements – to name a few – to see that it is largely young people spearheading this action.

But young people can’t vote for a cause they can’t see, which is what Cobble Cobble woman Professor Megan Davis is concerned about. In a recent interview on the weekly Women’s Agenda podcast, The Crux, she expressed her concern over who is driving the conversations surrounding the Voice to Parliament.

“All we have is bureaucrats and politicians who think they know better, who think they know best, and they don’t allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have a voice,” she says.

“We know that Gen Z is leading the nation as Yes voters. Where are their faces? Where are the faces of the Australians who support this?”

Professor Davis says it’s up to young people, particularly young Indigenous women, to step up and let their voices be heard in the conversation.

“Because they will inherit this. This is their future. And the country needs to listen to what they are saying,” she says.

“And it’s really a large proportion of Gen Z who are saying Yes.”

To spotlight Millennial and Gen Z voices, Allira Davis and Bridget Cama, co-chairs of the Uluru Youth Dialogues, are targeting young people in their Hands on Heart Youth Voice National Conference, which will take place August 24-27.

Allira Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman, has worked in public service, policy programs and advocacy. Through working with the nation’s leaders, she has always been told that young people are the hope for the future.

“So that’s what we’re trying to do,” she says. 

“We’re trying to be hopeful… getting a bunch of young, amazing, deadly people together and hopefully pushing this movement towards the Yes vote.”

During the Conference, the team at Uluru Youth Dialogues will break down key elements of the referendum, including what a referendum and the Constitution actually is, how the Voice would operate and more. All the information they will share with these young people is available on the Uluru Statement’s website and social media accounts.

Bridget Cama, a Wiradjuri First Nations and Pasifika Fijian woman, is an associate of the Indigenous Law Centre at UNSW. She says informing young people on the key details of the vote, including all the legal aspects of it, will help spread information to Australians easily.

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“We know that the community is thirsty for information,” she says.

“They just don’t know where to get it from at the moment because the issue is being so politicised in the media.

“This was an issue that was never meant to be politicised in terms of party lines. This was from the Uluru Statement, which was an invitation to the rest of Australians to make a decision of whether or not they would walk with us to Voice and Makarrata – treaty and truth.”

‘My role, my duty’

As discussions and debates over the Indigenous Voice to Parliament continue to surface and grow in volume, Marlee is vividly reminded of her school days.

She was in Year 7 and the only Aboriginal-identifying student in her Sutherland shire high school when Kevin Rudd delivered the Sorry speech in 2007. Suddenly, all eyes were on her.

“I got looked at as a bit of a unicorn… a symbol,” she says.

“I became the educator and the example of Aboriginal people for my peers. And that was a lot of pressure, particularly because I was still a kid that was still learning. Even now, I’m still learning.”

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Marlee was discovering her own identity and her own culture throughout high school, yet as a young person, she was still relied on to educate everyone around her – even her teachers.

The pressure to be the tokenistic “example” and information-bearer for her school – all the while learning of the genocide of her family and culture herself and constantly dealing with racism – infuriated her.

“I was such an angry kid, because I had come to learn a lot more about the history and the genocide, this suffering and sacrifice of my family, but also the broader community. That made me angry,” she says.

“And then the way that kids would pick on me with racism made me angrier. 

“And the way that teachers didn’t listen to me when I told them what was happening made me the angriest.”

As a young adult, Marlee channelled the anger and frustration she felt into giving back to the community in various roles in the non-for-profit sector, including working as the co-CEO for the Aboriginal education charity AIME Mentoring.

In 2020, she published her first book My Tidda, My Sister: Stories of strength and resilience from Australia’s first women, where she spotlighted stories from important First Nations’ women of the past, present and future.

But her career change into sports media was fuelled by the pressure she felt and continues to feel as the young “spokesperson” for First Nations people amongst her friends, peers and community.

“In my personal life, I have become the person that people are turning to to understand what’s happening,” she says.

So she took a step back away from the spotlight. Her voice – a young, Indigenous woman’s voice – was being heard, but her mental health was paying the price.

Since making the change and becoming a sports presenter with the NRLW, work has become a point of refuge for Marlee, away from the pressure to be the educator, the example, the reference point that she always was in school and beyond.

But being one of the “statistically insignificant” Indigenous people that appear on television in Australia, Marlee now feels it is her duty to speak up.

“I am in a small percentage of people who are on TV who have stories like mine, who come from families like mine, and therefore it is my role and my duty to my community to talk to non-Indigenous people and explain what it (the Voice) means,” she says.

A simple message

The referendum has been announced to take place on October 14, where Australians will vote on the question: 

“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”

For Millennials and Gen Z, this will be their first ever vote to amend the constitution.

There has not been a successful referendum since 1977, and out of 44 referendums in Australia, just eight have carried.

A study from the Australian Electoral Study in 2022 asked: “If a referendum were held to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, would you support or oppose such a change to the Constitution?”

The results found 90 per cent of people aged 18-34 either supported or strongly supported the referendum.

However, the No campaign has made its mark in recent months. Polling from The Guardian shows overall support for the Voice has fallen below 50 per cent, as of early August 2023.

Results like this are fuelling Marlee’s recurring nightmare.

“I just don’t want us to have to figure out what life after a No vote looks like,” she says.

“It shouldn’t be about left and right because, at the end of the day, this is about our people surviving and prospering.

“This has nothing to do with politics. This is all to do with the survival of our first people.”

In a world where the attention economy is sparse, information is abundant, misinformation is rife and young people are looking for short, easy answers to large-scale issues, Marlee has a simple response.

“The Voice will not change a non-Indigenous person’s life. But it can change mine. It can change my community’s for the better,” she says

“It can mean that the horrible inequities that still exist can finally, maybe, be dissolved.”

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That’s according to 21-year-old youth leader Yasmin Poole, the latest guest on The Leadership Lessons, a podcast series launched by Women’s Agenda and supported by Salesforce.

“Often, young women are expected to sit down and listen, but there is so much scope in unpacking their lived experience,” Yasmin tells host Kate Mills on the podcast.

“It’s also about telling young women, you have the right, as much as anyone, to think about the future you would like to see and create.”

Yasmin is just 21, but her list of leadership credentials is so extensive it’s almost impossible to imagine how she’s managed to fit it all in since leaving high school not so many years ago.

Listen to the latest episode of The Leadership Lessons below, and go and subscribe at iTunes.

She’s the Chair of the Victorian Government’s Youth Congress that represents over a million young Australians, she’s led the global business development of 180 Degrees Consulting. She is Plan International’s Youth Ambassador, the newly appointed non-executive board director at Oz Harvest and has represented Australian youth at APEC and the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Impressively, she was the youngest member of the Australian Financial Review 100 Women of Influence in 2019, and Top 40 under 40 Most Influential Asian Australians.

It’s wild to think that someone with such breadth of influential leadership experience already under their belt, had once never considered that someone who looked like her, as a young Asian Australian woman, could be a leader.

“I always thought that leadership was older, largely white men, to be honest,” she admits.

In the podcast, Kate Mills asks Yasmin about her leadership style. Who has she modelled herself on and what skills are the most valuable?

Yasmin says for her, it comes down to challenging what conventional leadership has often looked like, and focusing on things like empathy, collaboration, and kindness.

In this way, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been influential, with Yasmin saying that her response to the COVID-19 crisis has been really incredible.

“I really resonate with when she says to lead with kindness,” Yasmin says. “I think that’s a really undervalued trait, unfortunately in politics.”

“To be kind. And to have the humility to know you don’t have to be the strong man and to know absolutely everything, but to bring in others who have that knowledge and experience.”

As a leader, Yasmin is usually the most confident when she’s not the loudest person in the room, and taking up the most air time.

“Actually, taking on a more facilitating approach, a more consensus-based model and really thinking about how we tease out what people are really thinking and feeling, especially those who may be quieter,” she says.

“The conventional form of leadership can often be about the loudest person, the firmest handshake, that dominating role. That never felt comfortable for me.”

As someone who has found herself representing Australia’s youth on more than one occasion, Yasmin is really concerned about the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.

“If you look at the COVID-19 response, we have Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt, and Brendan Murphy. It’s very much led by conventional, status quo leadership,” she said.

There’s an urgent need for the government to consult with young people, especially as they are being the hardest hit from the economic fallout.

“The downside about being led by one group, and that includes one age group, is that there is going to be blind spots,” Yasmin says.

“Young people were the first to be punished, they were the first to lose their jobs. If you look at the university reforms that have been proposed, they punish low-income young Australians disproportionately.

“The economic impacts will be felt by young people possibly throughout the course of their lives.”

Yasmin says young people can make waves through advocacy – you only need to look to the school climate strikers to see that – but institutional representation is incredibly important.

“That means a federal youth advisory board, that’s youth consultation, that’s having more young MPs to provide that perspective.”

“Right now, the economic recovery doesn’t have any youth representation. Young people have to be in these spaces.”

The Leadership Lessons podcast series, hosted by Kate Mills, is a set of interviews with brilliant female leaders across industries, sharing their perspective on the critical decade ahead.

Listen to the first episode with Julia Gillard here, and stay tuned for more episodes with Raji Ambikairajah, Pip Marlow, Kirstin Ferguson, and the list goes on.

The Leadership Lessons is supported by Salesforce.

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I lived in Italy’s poorest region, Calabria, which has shocking rates of youth unemployment and it’s home to the most powerful mafia mob in Europe, the ‘Ndrangheta’. Corruption and gender inequality are rampant.

My generation wanted to change all this.

We had ideas and attended meetings with kids as young as fourteen years old, we organised awareness events against the mafia and marches to stop state cuts to education, we had our own newspaper and cultural events.

But the concerns of my peers were trivialised, dismissed and ignored, while the issues only got worse. Frustrated and angry, we felt there was no space for us. Eventually we gave up.

But given I’m still in my twenties, I hope the world will soon be ready to listen to us young people, and the children of today, who are fighting hard to raise their voices.

Identity is everything when it comes to how you’re treated or seen by your society. Colour, race, status, gender – and age.

It is part of who we are, and it often defines our privileges as well as our disadvantages.

The humanitarian and wider NGO sector are making strides towards equality, tackling issues through several intersectional lenses that take into account people’s race, class, gender and other aspects of people’s identities.

But the one category that is common to all societies worldwide, and which is still lagging, is youth.

Many popular beliefs link wisdom to adulthood and ageing, while youth is portrayed as impulsive and foolish.

This attitude affects how society prioritises issues and attempts to solve them, on a global scale.

Children account for almost 30 percent of the world’s population, and yet adults rarely take note when they speak. Young people get opportunities to express their concerns about problems that affect them directly.

Children and young people are the most vulnerable risk category for international security issues, like gender inequality and climate change. Yet while young people pay the highest tolls, adults bury their perspectives and make the decisions for them.

When neglect is persistent and the consequences harsh, anger bottles up until it explodes in public demonstrations and protests which is why they’ve become almost a daily occurrence.

This is not the way forward.

Making space for young people to speak their mind and influence policies directly should not be seen as a revolutionary act.

In 2015, the United Nations stipulated a peace-building agenda called “Youth, Peace and Security”, which for the first time included young people as active change-makers rather than just victims.

Being a victim does not mean that you need to be treated as one. Hearing what young people have to say about their challenges, and possible solutions, is the most logical and effective approach.

The responsibility to consider their views and act upon them falls on governments, yet our leaders are lagging. So civil society must lead the way and we should consider the lead of the Australian humanitarian sector.

World Vision for example has implemented several youth empowerment programs, such as the Sydney’s Young Mob Leadership Program, enabling urban Indigenous youth to gain practical skills in public speaking and improving their confidence. These programs also offer important opportunities to learn more about Indigenous youth’s own culture and identity.

The response to recent climate strikes by school children is just one example of youth protests.  Commentators and politicians flung abuse.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed its concerns about their treatment, saying that those in authority showed disrespect for children’s right to express their views.

This week is the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. At a conference to celebrate the anniversary, children and young people from across Australia raised their voices to tell our leaders how our country is failing them.

If we keep acting on behalf of children, rather than with them, the results will never be good enough.

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