Brand Tasmania Newsletter, March, 2010, Issue 103

By Caroline Ball

Escaping has been a part of the Tasmanian psyche since the fantasy of freedom, fortune and a better life across Bass Strait haunted Britain’s convict exiles in the 1800s. The colonial bolters are long gone, but many young Tasmanians are just as set on leaving.

While Tasmania’s interstate arrivals have increased in the past five years, the State still has negative migration in the 20-34 age-group, which accounts for 39 per cent of all interstate movers in the nation, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In other words, Tasmania is losing one of its most precious resources, those born between 1980 and 1994 and known as Generation Y.

Professor Wendy Patton, Executive Dean of Education at the University of Queensland, believes universities play a large part in encouraging or discouraging young people to leave their home State. “These days, people who are thinking about going to university ask themselves: ‘Where is the best place for the course that I want to do?’ Students tend to shop around, look at a university’s reputation, and the employment and destination data that’s available to them. That all comes into the decision-making process.”

If a course isn’t available at home, it seems that Tasmania’s Gen Y has few reservations about leaving. Student Recruitment and Marketing Manager at the University of Tasmania (UTAS), Jo Bailey, said UTAS offered a broad range of courses across traditional disciplines, but lack of student and industry demand for some specialised courses makes it unsustainable to offer them.

For postgraduate student, Sam Stove, 23, the lack of a specialised study option was the sole reason for his move interstate. Mr Stove, who is studying a Master of Design Science in Audio and Acoustics at the University of Sydney, says he had always been set on pursuing a career in creative sound production. “The decision to move away from Tasmania was made before I’d even left school,” Mr Stove explained. “For starters, the course that I needed to do doesn’t even exist in Tasmania. Even if it did, the chances and opportunities to get creative professional work in this field would be significantly less there – if they happened at all.”

Paul Wallace, 24, moved to Victoria in 2003 for the same reason. “Marcus Oldham College [in Geelong] was the only university in Australia that offered a bachelor degree in business and agricultural management,” he said. If UTAS had offered a similar course he would have considered staying.

Conversely, UTAS attracts many students from rural and regional areas, both in Tasmania and interstate. “Certainly, at UTAS we offer some very distinctive science programs,” Ms Bailey said. “If you study science here you don’t get stuck in a lab – the whole State is a perfect natural lab in which to study.”

Other interstate students are attracted to UTAS because of specialised courses not available elsewhere in Australia, or even in the world. The three-year-old Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies (IASOS) offers undergraduate and post-graduate coursework and research into all areas pertaining to the southern polar region. As the only institute of its kind, IASOS attracts students and experts from all over the world.

About 10 per cent of the 25,000 students at UTAS come from other States. Ms Bailey believes they are attracted by the small size of the campus and its tight social circles, as well as the range of courses offered. However, some young Tasmanians are keen to leave this smallness behind. Sally Hamilton, 24, moved to Sydney in 2007 to study post-graduate law at the University of Sydney after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from UTAS in 2006. Ms Hamilton said she was looking for a change of scene. “I was getting a bit sick of the insular nature of Tasmania,” Ms Hamilton said. “I was happy there and I wasn’t running away from anything, but I must admit I was sick of it.”

Ms Hamilton chose the University of Sydney because of the reputation of its Law faculty. “I wasn't really thinking about job opportunities,” Ms Hamilton said. “It was more about the experience. I wanted to challenge myself and meet new people.”

Another expat, Ailsa Tremayne, said: “The thing I like best about Tasmania is also the thing I like least – you know everybody. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to escape that; and escape the friendship circle. Knowing that there was so much more out there, I felt I had to leave.”

Escaping the islands means a lifestyle overhaul – and this is something that can surprise expatriates. Heavy traffic, high rental costs and the difficulty of making new friends are big-city challenges. It took roughly two years for the interviewed expatriates to adjust to the change of lifestyle and properly settle into life in Sydney. The major pluses for both Ms Hamilton and Ms Tremayne were the cosmopolitan nature of the city, the academic opportunities offered and – of course – the proximity of Sydney’s famous beaches.

UTAS’s Senior Careers Counsellor, Gaon Mitchell, said: “A couple of the key issues are the lure of higher salaries on the mainland and a lack of decent opportunities [in Tasmania].” She said finding a job in Tasmania in the first year out of school or university could be difficult.

Gen Y expatriate Robert Calvert, 28, is now Senior Wool Buyer for the Schneider Group in Sydney. After leaving school in Launceston in 2001, he spent a year looking for a job in the broad rural sector, with no success. After consulting his brother who was already living in Melbourne and working in the wool industry, Mr Calvert applied for a traineeship with French wool-trading company Compagnie d'Importation de Laines (CIL). He moved to Victoria immediately upon securing the job and was transferred to Sydney 18 months later as a senior trader. After a further 18 months he secured his present position. “I have no idea what I would have done if I didn’t get that traineeship initially,” Mr Calvert said. “I would have had to keep looking for a job outside Tasmania because at that stage there were very limited job opportunities in the rural sector. I would have had to move away regardless.”

According to Ms Mitchell, there is a trend among UTAS students to apply for graduate positions with large companies that have offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. “Students will apply for all three,” Ms Mitchell says, “but take either the Sydney or Melbourne job for the money.”

And the attraction of higher remuneration should not be underestimated. According to the City of Sydney Council, the median income of a city dweller is $717 a week, compared with a Hobart average of $527 per week described by Oktravel.

Professor Salvatore Babones, Sociology Lecturer at the University of Sydney, said Gen Y was much more likely to leave home in search of bigger bucks than its predecessors. He believes that changes to housing and income taxation law in the 1970s were designed for the economic advantage of the baby boomers, the parents of Gen Y. “Australian policy naturally favours the baby boomers because they are the majority in power – and so of course it’s easy to get laws passed that will benefit this generation,” he said. “The baby boomers were the last generation to be coddled.”

As a result, the baby-boomers’ children have an unprecedented inherited stockpile. This gives them the freedom to travel and settle interstate without the cost of moving becoming a barrier to the pursuit of their career aspirations.

Professor Patton agrees. “It’s hard to separate [young professional interstate migration] from finance. Generation Y have lived in one of the biggest economic booms that Australia has known. Therefore, they have opportunities to move and to engage in things that might not have been available to previous generations,” she said.

The whole notion of interstate movement to work has also been made easier by cheaper flights.

Sydney-based marketing consultant Mark McCrindle argues that career aspirations are secondary for many in Gen Y. “The young people of this generation do not live to work – but rather they work to live,” McCrindle said. “A job merely provides the income to do what they want to do.”

So with glamorous, cosmpolitan cities offering a range of global opportunites, only an hour from home, how is Tasmania coping? When the national broadband rollout began in the State last year, the Premier, David Bartlett, said: “The reason I am so passionate about high-speed broadband is because of what it can do for Tasmanians. The applications are endless and so too are the types of clever jobs that this technology will create here in Tasmania. The jobs our kids used to move to Melbourne and Sydney for will be based right here is Tasmania. In fact, better jobs.”

According to Mr Bartlett, Government initiatives are creating more jobs for Tasmanians every day and this is being reflected in better employment rates than the national average. “In education, planning, water reform, irrigation, renewable energy and optic fibre we are positioning Tasmania to be an economic power house,” he said.

However, others warn that education reform and other infrastructure initiatives are not enough to stem the Gen Y outflow. Sustainable Infrastructure Australia’s Stewart Prins has argued that continued funding into Tasmania’s creative industries, initiated by the late Premier Jim Bacon in 1998, is the appropriate industry-stimulation to attract greater numbers from interstate. “By recreating the image of Tasmania in the mould of a Creative Class centre, the rhetoric becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy by attracting more talented people to live in the State, and, therefore, increasing diversity and stimulating further economic growth,” Mr Prins said.

While the path to retaining Gen Y may not be clearly cut, nearly every interviewed expatriate expressed a desire to return to the State within the next 10 years. “It’s such a beautiful environment to grow up in and a place everyone wants to get back to,” Mr Calvert said. “There’s just a certain sense of fulfilment in tasting what the rest of the world has to offer first.”

Caroline Ball is an expatriate Tasmanian studying in Sydney for a degree in journalism