Here’s how to cheer-up school-leavers: compulsory national service

In my previous column I advocated for state governments, Victoria’s in particular, to urgently invest in programs that give children memorable experiences outside the classroom, perhaps through a revival of former premier John Brumby’s Year 9 “boot camp” idea from Labor’s unsuccessful 2010 election campaign. I foreshadowed I would also pitch an idea to engage young people post high school.

That idea is the introduction of national service.

National service would be compulsory but include a range of options including tutoring, disaster relief and helping fight climate change.Credit:Wikimedia/Norman Lindsay

Yes, you read that right. I’m running this one up the flagpole with little expectation of a resounding salute.

So why bother at all?

Because as with the Year 9 boot camp, this proposal recognises the pandemic’s crushing impact on young people, how lockdowns shrank their world just when their horizons should have been most expansive. Because in a slight contrast to boot camp, the case for national service also recognises the nation as a whole is crying out for help in ways I’ll gradually lay bare.

And because sometimes it’s useful to imagine a society radically different from the one we inhabit.

In fact, it’s a measure of how cynical and individualistic we’ve become that the call for national service is reflexively cast as conservative or “right wing”, or the natural province of eccentrics such as Bob Katter. The Queensland independent used the invasion of Ukraine to call for conscription in Australia, attributing that nation’s admirable resistance to Russian aggression to its re-introduction of compulsory military service in 2014.

There are worthy arguments for and against conscription. But in advocating for national service I’m not talking about compulsory army service.

Nor am I the only one talking about national service as one path out of pandemic-induced malaise. In April 2020 researchers from Australia’s top Group of Eight universities recommended a “funded national service” be established to engage young people in the process of social reconstruction. The suggestion is a part of the GO8’s self-commissioned “roadmap to recovery”, a document written in haste as it optimistically, and wrongly, assumed COVID’s worst was over.

The road map envisages national service as a form of environmental conservation akin to the Green Army, former prime minister Tony Abbott’s employment program that ran from 2014 to 2018 in which 11,000 young people took part. Perhaps the scheme could be called “Aussies All Together” the GO8 researchers suggest. (Yeah … nah.)

“The young have been particularly displaced by the social distancing policies and many will find it hard to gain a foothold in the economy,” says the report. “Such a program could offer meaning, purpose and social connectedness to those involved, and will contribute to Australia’s long-term national health and education strategy.”

Lead author Bernadette Hyland-Wood, a Queensland University PhD candidate in public policy and governance, said the scheme could be offered to people “of all socio-economic groups, not just people who are out of a job – really, everybody who would like to engage and not be home on a device.”

I might wryly add that being home on a device is increasing part of the university “experience”, as online lectures were becoming institutionalised even before the lockdowns.

During the January 2020 bushfires, before COVID hit, former army officer Mike Kelly – then a Labor MP –called for school-leavers to undertake a year of mandatory civil service in disaster response. He said that lengthening bushfire seasons as a result of climate change demanded a “mobilisation of will” akin to during World War II. A year earlier Senator Jacqui Lambie aired a similar proposal for young people to be called up for duty at emergency services units.

In the US, researchers at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution have proposed an expanded national service program to address the disconnection, derailment and “sharp social divisions” that COVID inflicted on young people. Such a scheme would include tutoring children who fell behind during lockdowns, building infrastructure, promoting racial justice, reaching out to society’s most marginalised, and aiding in conservation and disaster relief. The service would give more young people a pathway to careers and “into the middle class”.

Australia does not share the US tradition of national service encapsulated in its international Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, the at-home equivalent Bill Clinton launched in the 1990s. We have lingering national trauma from conscription during the Vietnam War, making the very idea of “national service” triggering for many.

But logic tells me a national service scheme needs to be compulsory to have impact; no loopholes through which the privileged could wriggle through with exemptions. A scheme should also include beefed up overseas programs, perhaps through bodies such as Australian Volunteers International or accredited international partners.

Do I see potential downsides and obstacles? They’re rushing at me downstream! Starting with cheap labour for governments inclined to keep under-funding vital services, not least the scheme itself, thus rendering the whole thing a half-arsed waste of time.

What I can’t see is a case for dismissing the idea without discussion. We’re in a collective battle against isolation, depression, scarcity (of all kinds), political polarisation, and ever-growing threats that neither markets nor governments alone can solve.

During the past three years people persistently argued for harnessing crisis into possibility, for building back better. Let’s hold on to that ambition.

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