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MEL: I feel like, as a young person,
I have a voice when I'm talking to people
that are the same age as me.
JAMIE: Older people don't really give young people
a chance because we don't have life experience
or whatever they like to call it.
BRYCE: On a political scale, you're
not going to really have much of a voice
because you're just this teenager who goes to a TAFE.
JAMIE: I feel like I'm more heard
if I'm talking about something that I know well
because no one's going to really listen to you if you don't know
all the facts.
KARMEN: I don't believe I have a voice.
I believe it's because we're still
deciding on what we want in life.
MEL: I feel like I've been heard when I'm on a conversation
that I'm actually passionate about because it doesn't really
matter if you want to hear me or not.
You will.
BRYCE: So if I were to walk into a local council
actually on a topic that I'm interested in, whether it
be gay rights, gun rights, whatever you want,
and be heard, I think it'd be absolutely fantastic.
The challenge for me getting heard
is just finding the best place to actually say something.
Because you get all these people on social media, like Facebook,
going on these massive rants in their status, of blah,
blah, blah.
And they might have some really good points.
But no one's going to see it.
Their friends are going to see it,
and they'll go, oh, that's awesome.
And then the next minute, they'll
forget what they've said.
They'll forget that's ever even happened.
[CHANTING]
In a society where everything's meant to be equal,
you get so many things that aren't equal,
that are really obvious but everyone just skips over
and hides, such as marriage equality.
People want to get married.
They can't because they're gay.
OLIVIA: Something we all thought, why not?
Why isn't it legal?
It's just something that doesn't really
make sense to not legalise.
It's not going to affect anyone who doesn't believe in it,
only the people who do.
[MUSIC - "DON'T DREAM IT'S OVER"]
OLIVIA: The very first thing we did
was going to the marriage equality rally.
And we interviewed different people there
that looked really fun to interview.
And we interviewed Ali Hogg, which
is kind of the face of Melbourne's equal rights.
So she had a lot to offer for us.
[CHANTING]
BRYCE: Some of the things we learn about marriage equality
when we're trying to tackle it is
it's a very, very big global issue.
That as much as you can try and have a say on it,
it really kind of-- The voice dies
in the crowd that are for or against it.
[CHANTING]
BRYCE: We've talked to a person from the Safe Schools Coalition,
Joel, about Safe Schools, which is more of a local issue
tackling homophobia and transphobia within schools.
MEL: I think we changed our goal from marriage equality
down to safe schools because it was kind of an easier target.
And there's more that we could do
on a local level, rather than global.
BRYCE: If you get people who are homosexual or transgender
in schools accepted, you start getting generations,
as they come through the education system,
they accept this idea of yes, everyone is normal like that.
That could lead on to when they're older,
they're thinking about marriage.
They go, well, I don't care if a guy and a guy get married.
That's cool, because in school, there
was gays who walked around all the time
and I didn't give a crap.
KARMEN: One of the things our group did
was get the other VCAL class to complete a survey on what
their views are.
When we got the results from the surveys,
we saw that a lot of the students supported it.
JAMIE: As part of joining Safe Schools,
we've put up all these posters to get our message and out
point across to everyone who looks at them
and sees them in the hallways.
BRYCE: And we've met with our centre manager, Chris,
about persuading him to sign up to the Safe Schools,
which we successfully did.
And he's in the process of signing it up more formally
with the rest of the school body.
We felt good because he was actually listening to us.
He took the time out of his day to sit down and listen to us.
JAMIE: It's surprising how easy it
is to make a change, like signing up to Safe Schools.
BRYCE: And so getting heard, as a young person,
it's hard to do.
But when it happens, a lot of good things can come out of it.
And you feel really good about yourself.
OLIVIA: I kind of overcame-- I'm always kind of shy.
I don't like talking to people I don't know.
So we kind of swapped roles a bit.
And Bryce did more of the interviewing
because he's not very shy.
BRYCE: A challenge with group work
is really distributing the work evenly.
JAMIE: I think next time, we would
start with the local issue, instead
of starting with something so big.
MEL: I think my best advice would just
be to stay open minded about what responses
you get back from people that you might be interviewing,
because that will help you to better come up
with new ideas for your topic or what you could do about it.
KARMEN: If we could do some things different
it would probably be seeing more of each other in our own time.
BRYCE: This project can help because if you
get your voice out there and heard,
it really just clicks in your mind of hey,
even though I'm doing VCAL, I can still be heard.
I can still make a difference.
I can still do things in life, and people are not
going to look at me as a dumb ***.
MEL: I think the best part of this project
was just being able to do something,
even if it is as small as just in the school,
and to actually be heard by someone.