Com­mon­wealth Young par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are hop­ing they will not even­tu­al­ly be­come like some dis­graced politi­cians in re­cent times. Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence dur­ing the 11th Com­mon­wealth Youth Par­lia­ment 2022, at the Red House yes­ter­day, one mem­ber, Shaki­ah Tylea Lewis, rep­re­sent­ing Turks and Caicos, said she will con­stant­ly re­mind her­self of her pur­pose, to try­ing not to lose sight of what is im­por­tant.

“It has to be my love for my coun­try. And, to say that I want to go in­to pol­i­tics with the mind­set of five years down the line, I’ll be dri­ving a (Mer­cedes) Benz and I wouldn’t be re­al­ly car­ing for the peo­ple who elect­ed me, then, why did I go in­to pol­i­tics? If you don’t have that pas­sion, that dri­ve for your job, it then be­comes work, and when it be­comes work, then you know you didn’t go in­to this for the right rea­sons,” Lewis said

De­shawn Cooke, from Ja­maica, added:

“We are youth right now and I'm not telling you that things are go­ing to re­main the same 20 or 30 years from now should I be­come a politi­cian, and what I have to do is not play hyp­ocrite, be­cause I am call­ing on politi­cians now to lis­ten to youth,”.

The young peo­ple al­so called for more youth in­volve­ment in par­lia­men­tary and po­lit­i­cal process­es.

“I think youth par­lia­ment should move from just be­ing a set of young peo­ple just speak­ing on is­sues but be­ing able to put Bills in­to place when the gov­ern­ment is mak­ing de­ci­sions re youth, they should in­volve the youth par­lia­men­tar­i­ans. And so, the de­ci­sions the youth make are de­ci­sions that will help oth­er youths,” said an­oth­er Ja­maican mem­ber, Jinel Gor­don.

“If we are not in­volv­ing the youth in the de­ci­sion mak­ing then why are we speak­ing about the fu­ture? How are you able to ad­just or keep in touch with sit­u­a­tions that the youths are go­ing through? I think that youth par­tic­i­pa­tion is im­por­tant in de­ci­sion-mak­ing be­cause it al­so helps them to grow over time and af­ter a while, the old­er par­lia­men­tar­i­ans will be gone, and it’s up to the next gen­er­a­tion to step up to the plate and step up the lega­cy...of the coun­try or a par­ty,” Gor­don added.

Cooke added that more sea­soned politi­cians should wel­come op­por­tu­ni­ties like these to have the youths more en­gaged and men­tor them.

“It’s one thing to have youth at the ta­ble, it’s an­oth­er thing to use them as some sort of to­kenism and it’s an­oth­er thing to ac­tu­al­ly lis­ten to the youth, and that is what I would love to see. Not just hav­ing a ta­ble, not just pro­vid­ing a ta­ble, but en­sur­ing that once they are around that ta­ble, you lis­ten to the per­spec­tive that they bring and use the ex­pe­ri­ence that you have gar­nered from your years of ser­vice to see how best you can put those two to­geth­er and have a phe­nom­e­nal par­lia­men­tary sys­tem or a phe­nom­e­nal gov­ern­ment,” he said.

When asked about Kil­isiti­na Moala’s im­pas­sioned con­tri­bu­tion about the top­ic of cli­mate change and its ef­fect on her home­land, Ton­ga, the young mem­bers echoed her sen­ti­ments.

“See­ing her break down showed me that youth are not re­al­ly in this just be­cause they want a seat at the ta­ble, but it’s be­cause they re­al­ly have a pas­sion for what they’re do­ing, and they’re in touch with the re­al­i­ties and the cri­sis that is go­ing on in the world and want to be the change,” Gor­don said.

Chris­t­ian Mar­ti­naz­zo, from Aus­tralia, which is lo­cat­ed a few thou­sand kilo­me­tres west of Ton­ga, said it was a pow­er­ful mo­ment.

“It was quite emo­tion­al even more so be­cause Ton­go is wide­ly con­sid­ered part of Aus­tralia's pa­cif­ic is­land com­mu­ni­ties. So, to see mem­bers of what we con­sid­er our fam­i­ly have that re­ac­tion was very pow­er­ful. I think the the­atrics that usu­al­ly hap­pens in pol­i­tics and in youth par­lia­ment, when you ac­tu­al­ly look down to the core, it’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty for us to voice an is­sue that is very per­son­al to us and mem­ber Moala did a very fan­tas­tic job rep­re­sent­ing her coun­try for it, and I think it’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty for mem­bers of small­er and de­vel­op­ing states to con­tin­ue that ad­vo­ca­cy for their states in what­ev­er medi­um is avail­able to them,” Mar­ti­naz­zo said.