When a guest speaker asked who in her Year 6 class wanted to be the Prime Minister of Australia, Mia Fitzgerald didn’t think twice before throwing her hand in the air.
Tackling the big issues is the main reason politics appeals to Mia, who that year decided she wanted to be a politician.
“The speaker laughed at how quickly my hand shot up and said ‘I haven’t seen that reaction before’,” Mia recalled.
“For me, it just felt like a real way of helping people.”
Mia, now a 17-year-old student at St Andrew’s Anglican College, is one of only 93 young people who have been selected from across the state to serve as a Youth Member for the Queensland Youth Parliament.
Just one student from each electorate is selected and Mia has been chosen as the representative for Noosa.
“When I received the email, I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
“My dream after finishing Year 12 is to study a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics in Canberra, so this news is really exciting.”
And while becoming the Prime Minister is not necessarily Mia’s end goal any more, she hopes to take it one step at a time and see where the opportunities lead.
“It can feel intimidating being around people who are older than I am. There’s this fear like ‘am I going to be taken seriously?’ But where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Mia said.
With a long-term dream of entering politics, Mia hopes to tackle the big issues like housing affordability in Noosa, in order to help vulnerable people, especially women and children, stay off the streets.
For her application, Mia said she presented the key problems in Noosa and the individual and government roles in solving them.
“The three areas I focused on were affordable housing, education and Noosa River management,” she said.
Of the three key problems she presented, Mia hopes her allocation to the Committee for Child Safety, Youth and Women will give her the opportunity to find real solutions to the issue of affordable housing.
“An example I’ve been researching is a successful project in Cooroy in which a spare block of land had demountable units built on it for families and people of all ages, unlike other affordable housing which is only available to over 55s,” Mia explained.
“Homelessness can be tackled, but we have to look at innovative ways to tackle it.”
Mia kicked off her 12-month term as a Queensland Youth Member with a residential stay over the Easter holidays in Brisbane where she met with her committee, all of whom are younger than 25 years old and have been part of Youth Parliament.
“I’m grateful to Sandy (Bolton MP, Member for Noosa), who is my mentor,” Mia said.
“She has been so encouraging and I look up to her as a wealth of information.”
