‘I hope there’s an Indigenous prime minister in our lifetime’: High school competition winners say
Winners of the ‘If I was Prime Minister’ competition tell Anthony Albanese the housing and homelessness crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing their communities.
Aroha Parkinson has left the Top End just once in her life, but this doesn’t stop the 15-year-old from Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory from looking into the eyes of the Prime Minister and telling him that one day she intends to walk the halls of parliament.
“We haven’t had an Indigenous voice at the top,” said Aroha, the winner of the “If I was Prime Minister” competition. “And I want to be that voice.”
Her fellow competition winner, 15-year-old Queenslander Reuben Simpson, has dreams of being a fighter pilot and one day working for NASA.
Seated in the Prime Minister’s office and joined by Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, Reuben and Aroha are told by both Labor leaders to “keep hold of those dreams”.
Mr Albanese joked with Reuben that he might not be able to give him much advice on his chosen career path “unless playing Space Invaders” counted as relevant experience.
The “If I was Prime Minister” competition has been running since 2013 and launched in response to a Newspoll survey that found two-thirds of Australians didn’t believe they would see an Indigenous prime minister in their lifetime.
Both Reuben’s and Aroha’s essays on what they would do if they became prime minister focused on the homelessness epidemic in their respective communities and the housing crisis that was exasperated by soaring cost-of-living pressures.
“Homelessness is a really big issue in Cairns. I see so many people just on the streets even when I’m going to school, or just like walking down to Central’s and more should be done,” Aroha said.
Reuben said “everything is connected together”, from youth crime, to domestic violence and homelessness and that an effective solution needed to address all the issues at once. This would be achieved only “by listening to the people”, he said.
Despite being told by Ms Burney about the hours of a parliamentarian and “foregoing your privacy”, Aroha was not deterred. “I’m very aware that if someone like me wanted to be prime minister, obviously, as a woman and a First Nation person, it’s going to be hard. But yeah, I’m still going to try,” she said.
Both winners said they believed an Indigenous prime minister would make a significant difference in addressing the challenges facing Aboriginal communities. “We’ve just never had a face for Australia that is Indigenous,” Aroha said.
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