Twenty-Five Years On: What a Parliamentary Opening Ceremony Actually Teaches
The NSW Youth Parliament marked its 25th anniversary this month with an opening ceremony in the Legislative Council chamber — the oldest parliamentary chamber in Australia. Presiding over the ceremony was the Honourable Ben Franklin, President of the NSW Legislative Council.
On paper, opening ceremonies are formalities. What actually happened was a masterclass, delivered by adults holding real institutional power, on what representative democracy is actually for.
The welcome that set the tone
Gadigal man Craig Manton opened proceedings with a Welcome to Country, extending what he described as the safe passage his people have offered visitors on their land for thousands of years, and welcoming the young parliamentarians — many travelling from across the state — onto Gadigal Country. It's easy to treat a Welcome to Country as a ceremonial preamble. In a week built around teaching young people what genuine custodianship of an institution looks like, opening with the oldest continuous form of custodianship on the continent was, if anything, the thesis statement for everything that followed.
The permission that was explicitly given
Natalie Ward MLC, addressing the chamber on behalf of the Leader of the Opposition, Kelly Sloane, used her time to make an argument worth remembering: every "first" this state has ever had was told, in some form, that it wasn't yet their turn. She traced the line from 1925, when Millicent Preston Stanley became the first woman elected to the Legislative Assembly after it had sat for nearly seventy years without one, through the state's first woman to lead a major party in 1998, to its first female Premier in 2019. Each of them stood up anyway, she argued, and each made it easier for the next person to imagine themselves in that seat. The young parliamentarians were told directly they are "not guests in this institution" but "its future custodians," entitled to a view on housing, climate or mental health services without needing anyone's permission to hold it.
Persuasion as the actual skill being taught
NSW Premier Chris Minns used his address to make a more structural argument: that the chamber's most consequential historical decisions — the abolition of capital punishment, women's suffrage, the end of official discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexuality — often turned on a handful of undecided votes, swung not by party machinery but by a persuasive speech at the dispatch box.
His point wasn't "here's how government works."
It was "here's how an argument, built with evidence and delivered with conviction, changes what a room decides" — and that in an era with the sum of human knowledge in every pocket, that discipline is more valuable, not less. Ben Franklin, President of the Legislative Council, made a related point in his own opening remarks, describing democracy as sustained not by chambers or buildings but by people prepared to listen, to think, to disagree respectfully, and to persuade rather than shout.
What the room actually cared about
The ceremony closed with the formal introduction of ten youth bills for the week ahead: disability and community inclusion; student voice in curriculum; equitable community spaces; housing and homelessness; an AI governance framework; young people's autonomy, security and mental health; family and community violence in regional areas; sustainable transport and housing density; a specialised domestic violence response framework; and hate crime prevention. Nobody assigned these topics. They were chosen, researched and drafted by the participants themselves, months in advance — evidence that, given a real chamber and real stakes, young people bring real policy because the caring was already there and had nowhere formal to go.
The case made for lowering the voting age
Franklin went further than most, using part of his own remarks to argue openly for lowering the voting age to sixteen — on the basis that young people can drive, can pay tax the moment they hold a job, and should therefore have a say in decisions about their own future. He also, more personally, credited his time in Youth Parliament decades earlier with teaching him to sing and speak, and said the friendships he built there remain among the most important relationships in his life today. It's a genuinely contested policy position, and reasonable people land on different sides of the voting-age question. What's notable isn't whether the chamber agreed; it's that the President of the Legislative Council chose this platform, in front of a room that can't yet vote, to make the argument out loud rather than simply gesture at "youth voice" in the abstract.
Twenty-five years of infrastructure, not just goodwill
It's worth remembering what the anniversary was actually marking. Twenty-five years is long enough for the program to have outlasted several waves of technology entirely. That longevity doesn't happen on goodwill alone. Amelia Shaw, national president of the Y, used her address to note that roughly two thousand young people have passed through the program's doors over that time, sustained by consistent sponsorship from the NSW Office for Youth and Parliament itself. Someone had to keep writing the cheque, training the volunteers and defending the same infrastructure for a quarter of a century, through changes of government and culture, for this week to still be possible. Civic education programs don't survive on inspiration. They survive on unglamorous, recurring infrastructure — the kind that's easy to underfund precisely because its payoff shows up fifteen years later, in someone else's electorate.
Why the ceremony matters more than the debates
It would be easy to treat an opening ceremony as the least substantive part of a sitting week — the part before the "real" debating starts. But this ceremony is where the room was told, by the people who actually hold institutional power in that building, that the skills it was about to practise — persuasion, evidence, custodianship, the courage to stand up before you feel ready — aren't youth-parliament skills. They're the actual mechanics of the actual institution one floor down.
That's the argument for civic education done properly: not a simulation of democracy, but an early, genuine rehearsal of it.
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