Should I stay or should I go now?

Associate Editor

AMANDA DUCKER

GIVE us the best years of your life, not just the raggedy end of it — this is the imperative message to young Tasmanians, research commissioned by the Mercury for our Future Tasmania series shows.

Retaining a greater number of talented and ambitious young people is our greatest — and most exciting — demographic challenge.

With its freshly minted status as a cool and cultured capital with a fabulous and fun lifestyle, Hobart is in a stronger position now than a decade ago to lure under 40s.

That goal sits alongside a more ominous looming demographic challenge — a dramatic ageing curve in the state’s population that will really start to bite by 2030.

Demographer Bernard Salt, who conducted the research for Future Tasmania, says that losing people at 20 is a defining characteristic for our state — and an unfortunate one.

“It saps the state’s self-confidence and it diminishes sovereignty,” Mr Salt said.

And it is expensive.

“If you imagine running Tassie like a business, we are paying to raise them then tithing them on to other places, who get the tax benefit during their productive years.”

From every angle, Tasmania needed strategies to hold and attract 20 to 40yyear-olds, Mr Salt said.

“We need more healthy 28-year-olds come home.”

To win back this prized cohort — which costs the state little but contributes enormously to prosperity and vibrancy — the conversation needs to change.

Shifting the default mindset is essential, Mr Salt said — suggesting we challenge the lingering colonial-tinged mentality that fit, to ‘we must send them away’. And enough already of the “couldn’t you hack it on the mainland?” barbs when kids choose to come home, he added.

“The real problem in Tasmania is not lack of jobs or lack of digital transformation impacts — it is the eternal battle between the naysayer forces and the can-do forces,” Mr Salt said.

“The way you deal with naysayers is not to chase them into the shadows and force them to convert. You change them by winning their hearts and minds, appealing to their hopes and dreams.

“At the end of the day we all want prosperity, opportunity for our kids, social cohesion, interesting work, affordable housing and a clean environment.

“Those things are universal. If we can paint a positive vision of Tasmania that hits all those buttons then I don’t see why the majority of sensible Tasmanians wouldn’t say, ‘let’s give it a shot’.”

While Mona’s arrival was instrumental in positioning Hobart as a cool and cultured capital, the state needed to embark on more specific, proactive measures to increase dynamism and entrepreneurship, Mr Salt said.

He suggested: “Why not establish a business awards program for best new business started by someone under 30?”