Book Review: Rethinking youth citizenship after the age of entitlement by Walsh, Lucas & Black, Rosalyn, London, Bloomsbury

Description

"Walsh and Black are Australian education scholars, who offer rethinking of citizenship that draws from the Australian context and their research with young people in Australia. To translate to international audiences, they provide comprehensive descriptions and explanations of Australian liberal democracy and politics with illustrative examples as to how these play out in Australian society, with a particular focus on young people. The context of ‘after the age of entitlement’ is a reference to a comment made by the Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey in 2014 that the ‘age of entitlement is over’ and the ‘age of opportunity’ had begun. Such sentiment speaks from the neoliberal agenda of ‘each to his own’, and ‘everyone to fend for themselves’, which is very easy to espouse when you are a comfortable white middle class or elite man. Ruthlessly, ‘neoliberals regard inequality of economic resources and political rights’ as ‘a necessary functional characteristic of their ideal market system’ (Mirowski, 2013). As Walsh and Black explain, Hockey's statement ‘suggests that citizens can – and should no longer depend on the largesse of the state and on the use of social and economic welfare as a means of economic distribution to facilitate social equity’ (p. 7). In these neoliberal times, young people are expected to ensure their own economic, political and social membership with diminished socioeconomic resources, as children and young people are the highest represented age demographic below the poverty line in Australia (see Davidson et al., 2020) and globally (see Ortiz-Ospina, 2017). To add further insult to injury, under resourced young people who are left to fend for themselves are frequently constructed in public discourse as ‘irresponsible’, ‘uninformed’ and ‘disengaged’. From the tensions of this contemporary context for young people, the authors problematise citizenship issues of membership, belonging, mobility and economics with reference to their own research and others and public debates in Australia with other nation comparisons intercepted throughout."