Empowering Young Australians

Introductory Meetups

We're in the early stages of building our movement. Introductory meetups and networking events are being planned across the Central Coast and Hunter regions.

Stay tuned for announcements on our first events, including:

• Welcome and networking sessions
• Leadership and public speaking workshops
• Policy discussion forums
• Community engagement activities

Thursday, 10 July 2026 — Central Coast Branch Meetup

Venue: Papa V Pizza — Lake Haven Shopping Centre, Shop 38/43 Lake Haven Dr, Lake Haven

Time: 7:00 pm

Come along and meet fellow CYA members on the Central Coast. A great opportunity to connect, share ideas, and get involved.

• Speaker: Dave Thompson — the grocery subsidy scheme and the duopoly of Coles and Woolies
• Open floor: Adam will speak on the CYA mentors program and expressions of interest for a Scone field day

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events?

Join CYA

University-Based Clubs

CYA supports the creation of university-based clubs to bring civic engagement directly to campuses across New South Wales. These clubs will:

• Encourage greater youth participation in civic dialogue
• Provide on-campus opportunities for debate, policy discussion, and networking
• Build long-term engagement pathways for young Australians

Regional Branches

As CYA grows, local branches will be established with:

• Elected leadership teams
• Statewide coordination between branch representatives
• Regular events, workshops, and forums

CYA Central Coast

Our inaugural branch, serving young Australians across the Central Coast region of New South Wales. The Central Coast branch hosts regular meetups, networking events, and civic engagement activities.

Meetings held monthly.

• President: Xander McMillan
• Vice President: William Szypica-Au
• Secretary: Oliver Shepherd

Get Involved

Start a Club

Interested in starting a CYA club at your university or in your local area? Get in touch and we'll help you get started.

Express Interest

Chairman's Report — 29 June 2026

If the document doesn't load, you can open the PDF here.

Table of Blogs

• Debate over the Union Jack and the flag — Isaak Liam Duncan, 27 July 2026
• Labor’s Health Rebate Cuts for the Elderly — Isaak Liam Duncan, 8 July 2026
• Let’s Define Conservative — 1 June 2026

Debate over the Union Jack and the flag

Pushed the unions toward the Labor Party — by Isaak Liam Duncan, member of the CYA Central Coast branch. 27 July 2026

It appears that the unions have a clear disdain for Australian history, as evidenced by their audacity to put forward a debate about changing the national flag to the Labor Party.

The Union Jack represents our Christian heritage and cultural ties to the United Kingdom, England, and Scotland. It reflects our historical connections to England and Europe in general, which is predominantly Christian. Our nation should take pride in its flag, as a symbol of our heritage and culture. Patriotism towards one’s heritage is not inherently racist. As someone with indigenous ancestry, with my great-great-grandfather being the first Aboriginal to claim land in the Warragamba area, I acknowledge and respect indigenous culture as my own cultural heritage as well as my Scottish, Welsh, and Irish cultural heritage. Hence why I do not support erasing our history as a Western civilization to suit minorities. Our flag is a powerful symbol of Christianity, which provides our culture with transcendent values that other cultures don’t have because they do not have Christ as their moral foundation.

To deny our heritage, culture, and religion to appease certain minorities and different individual who clearly don’t accept our way of life and our lineage as a purely Western race, which gives them their freedom and safety and provides them with a better way of life than their own country can provide, is both ridiculous, treasonous, and above all racist in itself, and an insult to those who fought in the two world wars for the flag because essentially the flag is their identity.

It is the government’s responsibility to preserve our national culture and identity, rather than catering to certain minorities that reject Australia’s heritage. Denying the flag is what divides a country by denying its very roots.

What I find quite worrying is that our youth today are being presented with a false view of the British West and the West as a whole. As someone who has grown up with customs that have derived from Great Britain, Ireland, and Scotland and have been passed down from generation after generation, I find the claim that those three countries do not have an impact on our country to be inaccurate. For example, our customs as to how we dress, how we present ourselves in many ways, how we eat our food, how we speak our language, and how both men and women brought up with modesty all come from western civilization, because Christianity has essentially been behind the rubrics for our cultural and social order in our country in which allows the society we have today to be diverse but one in many ways. The ideal I speak of that the West has held for a long time and has worked is the acts of love, charity, self-giving love and self-giving sacrifice, stoicism, and patriotism, and a moral outlook on society that only comes purely from the Christian West.

When I first heard that the Union Jack doesn’t represent modern-day Australia, it was from high school students doing a segment on the ABC, and they came from many different backgrounds. They were asked to come up with a new flag for Australia, and when each group presented their work, each of them left out the Union Jack on their new flag. The argument being put forward is that the Union Jack represents the colonial influence of the British Empire. This argument is pushed by center-left-leaning unions, who are putting the idea in the wind to depart from the monarchy.

In the last century, the monarchy was a stable institution in a period when war threatened its survival. World War 1 was an attack on the monarchy. During the reign of King George V, Queen Mary of Teck was at the forefront, visiting veterans’ hospitals, and remained a stoic figure as monarchies were falling across Europe, ensuring the monarchy’s survival. When Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne, she helped provide stability to a culture after World War II. She brought her nation and the Commonwealth into the future, playing a vital part in Western culture’s new age, providing unity among nations, and inheriting 600 charities from her father, King George the 6th, one of which is well-known: the Red Cross, which provides disaster relief globally to this day. In their time, Prince Phillip set up the Prince Philip Trust Fund in 1977, helping youth build skills for life right across the world.

The main point is that the monarchy stands as one of the Christian symbols in the West and is influential to Australia’s democracy because it is part of our heritage as a country. The influence of the monarchy in today’s world is to serve as a unifying head and figure that no political figure can emulate well, and as a defender of the Christian faith.

In saying this, King Charles the 3rd, as of recent, has changed the title of Defender of the Faith to Protects the Space for Faith, meaning space for multi-faith, in turn somewhat denying Christianity’s prominent role in the country and throughout the Commonwealth. The agenda that is being pushed by left-leaning world figures and the progressive left at the moment is for the denial of the fabric that gives our Western culture and countries their identity, and replacing it with a warped sense of worldview where you have a country built on Christian heritage, yet you deny the prominence of the Christian faith as the fabric that gives the very freedom to those different cultures within one country and the Western world to have those free expressions of the different faiths they hold. By denying the light of Christ as the essential foundation of the Western world, you will land in a culture that is so divided and so lost, because it cannot grasp true wisdom, having denied that light of Christ as its essential foundation and his authority. After all, the West is a part of the kingdom of God. Monarchy in Britain has changed to suit a worldview that will only crush it, because it’s taking the path of a movement that is inherently against its existence. The monarchy should be standing its ground on Christianity’s prominence in Western civilization and not suiting minorities that don’t hold the ideal.

The people pushing for the removal of the Union Jack do not know its history; it is a symbol of Christianity. The three crosses on the flag represent the patron saints of each country: St. George of England, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. Andrew of Scotland. The flag features three crosses representing the three saints from the three countries, combined to represent the three cultures that play a part in the Christian West.

The main point is that the Union Jack represents our Christian heritage as a country and our cultural heritage that still stands in this country to this very day, and second, the monarchy plays a role that politicians can’t, particularly within Britain and across the West, as a defender of the Western Christian ideal. What I see being argued by the unions is a warped perception of the world, where we have been told to deny our heritage and depart from culture that was an essential part of creating the Australia we have today. What these students do not understand is that the flag doesn’t represent a group of people within a society; what it represents is us as one people in this country, because it represents a country’s way of life and the value of the individual who contributes in a patriotic way to our country and the freedom that this nation has given all people from many walks of life that many other countries haven’t — that’s what makes Australia a great nation.

The conclusion to this is that the Australian flag we have today represents the Christian south, and it’s our identity, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of our culture, our country, and the flag that represents it.

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Labor’s Health Rebate Cuts for the Elderly

by Isaak Liam Duncan, member of the CYA Central Coast branch. 8 July 2026

As of last week, I learned that the government intends to cut rebates for those sixty-five and over, effective April 1, 2027. The government’s reason for this is to divert funds to the building sector and to expand the health system in aged care. Naturally, older people pay more for their health than younger people, due to age and the fact that at that stage of life, the body tends to respond to issues differently, to the point where patients with private health have to pay out-of-pocket costs.

Australian Seniors’ private health reports that 45% of seniors are living with major health problems, such as dietary issues and chronic illnesses, and that the estimated amount seniors pay is at least $1,586 out of pocket on health cover. The cost of health cover has recently increased, with some people opting out of full cover as a result. This legislation deters older people from having full coverage at all, because rebates have now been reduced to the youth level, according to National Seniors Australia; and the federal government will use $3 billion to improve at-home health care coverage from private health care.

While the health system is under significant pressure from many factors, including shortages of doctors and ambulance staff and the rise in immigration that impacts the health system, this legislation is predicted to cause people to move to the public system, putting pressure on the public health system.

The government’s rationale for this decision is to increase funding for the aged care system. However, this approach is likely to discourage individuals from purchasing private health insurance, as premiums are projected to rise by $240 per year, according to reports from ABC and the Guardian.

What needs to be proposed is:

• This rebate remains the same for the elderly.
• Those with wealth above the middle class and lower class will not be eligible for Medicare.
• To improve the health care system, the government needs to redirect funds from non-health care areas to the private healthcare system instead of cutting the rebates.
• Fast-track those studying in the health field, incentivize and make it easier for people to become qualified doctors, and ensure that all areas of this degree bring doctors and surgeons up to first-world standards.
• Reduce the cost of university degrees by examining how medical degrees are structured and what changes are needed to fast-track them.

The main point is that these Medicare rebates come in handy for older people and the working middle class, who deserve them. By taking this rebate away, it does not help that age bracket to have extra money aside for other needs in their lives; it makes it harder for those who have worked hard to be on the cover. At a time when there is hardship throughout the country, I find this move problematic for both the private and public health systems.

↑ Back to Table of Blogs

Let’s Define Conservative

In a time when the term “conservative” carries differing interpretations, it merits closer examination.

Conservative (noun and adjective)

The word conservative derives from the Latin “conservare”, meaning “to preserve,” “to protect,” or “to keep intact.” Its original sense concerns preservation rather than resistance to change.

A conservative is a person who believes that the accumulated wisdom of experience deserves respect, that institutions should not be changed lightly, and that progress is most durable when it builds upon what already works.

A traditional conservative asks:
“How do we preserve the house?”

A radical conservative asks:
“What is threatening the house, and what must be done to stop it?”

For example, if termites are discovered in a home’s foundations, a naïve observer may assume that the termites and the house can coexist. The radical conservative rejects that assumption. If the termites continue to consume the structure, the house will eventually collapse. Therefore, preserving the house requires removing the source of the damage.

The goal is not destruction.
The goal is conservation.

The radical element lies in the willingness to eliminate the cause of decay, rather than manage or coexist with it. In this sense, radical conservatism is not defined by what it seeks to destroy, but by what it seeks to preserve.

Yet a further question must sometimes be asked: Is the house itself still worth preserving?

If the damage becomes too extensive for repair, the objective remains conservation—not of the damaged structure, but of the principles that justified its construction. A house may be rebuilt. Its foundations may be strengthened. Its design may be improved. And if the lessons of the past are carried forward, the new structure can be made more resilient than the one before it.

The purpose is not to preserve every feature exactly as it is. It is to preserve what is valuable, protect what is essential, and ensure that each generation passes on something stronger than what it received.

A genuine environmental ethic is, in this sense, inherently conservative: it seeks to preserve natural systems rather than exhaust them. The distinction is often not between caring and not caring, but between stewardship and exploitation under the language of stewardship.

Scrutiny is necessary to understand this difference. Preservation requires people who value what they seek to protect, understand it, defend it with reason, and remain open to debate.

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, justice is not an isolated principle but a shared condition:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

A society, therefore, cannot preserve its integrity if it allows its foundations to fracture in principle. Preservation depends not only on structures, but on the moral coherence that sustains them.

In this sense, conservatism is not the rejection of change, but the disciplined effort to ensure that change does not destroy what is essential.

↑ Back to Table of Blogs

Central Coast Conservative Alliance

CYA is a sub-association of the Central Coast Conservative Alliance. Visit their website for more information about conservative advocacy on the Central Coast.

Working with Children Check — Service NSW

Required for all CYA leaders working with participants under 18.

NSW Police Check

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NSW Parliament

Australian Parliament

How to Join

Becoming a CYA member is quick and easy. Follow these three steps:

In creating a CYA member account I am applying to be a Member of Concerned Young Australians (CYA) and agree to abide by the Rules and Regulations of the CYA Handbook of Membership.

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Questions? Contact us at [email protected]

Support Concerned Young Australians

Concerned Young Australians is a grassroots youth movement dedicated to developing the next generation of leaders through civic participation, leadership development, public speaking, policy writing and community engagement.

As a Volunteer-Led Organisation

Donations help us cover essential costs so we can keep our programs running and accessible to all young Australians:

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CYA mentors are experienced Australians who volunteer their time to guide, inspire and support our members in developing their civic knowledge, leadership skills and confidence.

What Does a CYA Mentor Do?

As a CYA mentor you may assist members with:

Mentoring can be in-person or online, and you set your own availability. There is no minimum time commitment — even one conversation can make a significant difference to a young person’s development.

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If you have any questions about the CYA mentoring program, please contact us at [email protected] and we will be happy to help.

Chairman's Reports

• Chairman's Report — 29 May 2026

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