Right now, young people are getting screwed.
Year after year, successive Labor and Liberal governments have been making life harder for
young people.
They have managed the economy in the interests of the few, instead of in the interests of
everyone.
And it is getting harder and harder for young people to get a job, as youth unemployment
is high, and it has doubled over the general unemployment rate.
The jobs that young people often do get are very highly insecure and often not well paid
at all.
Study is getting less and less affordable, because university and TAFE are getting more
expensive.
The dream of owning your own home is getting further and further out of reach, with Australian
house prices skyrocketing and incomes stagnant.
Yet the government is not doing anything about this.
In fact, if the government has its way the problem for young people will get much, much
worse.
If right now young people are getting screwed, if the government gets its plans through they
will be right royally stuffed.
Let's have a look at the current situation.
Youth unemployment is at nearly 13 per cent.
That is more than double the general national rate.
An Anglicare report that was recently released found that only one job is advertised for
every six low-skilled jobseekers, who are often young people who have not had the opportunity
to gain much work experience.
Getting a job can be even harder for people living in a regional area or for people from
non-English speaking backgrounds.
Young people in Melbourne have told me that if they put 'Mohammed' in their CV and they
send off their job application, they hear nothing; but when they change their name to
'David', the phone starts ringing.
And increasingly there are fewer entry level jobs available for young people, making it
harder for young people to get their foot in the door, to build their skills and experience,
to establish a career, to gain independence, and to plan and progress their lives.
The youth unemployment rate is always higher than the general unemployment rate, and in
some respects that makes sense; young people are, as a whole, doing other things, whereas
older people tend to be more likely to look for work.
What we also know, as a general historical trend, is that every time there is an economic
downturn, we strike hard times or there is a recession young people are hardest hit first.
The lines of the youth unemployment rate and the general unemployment rate diverge when
we reach hard times, and it becomes proportionately harder for young people to find work.
The youth unemployment rate for them skyrockets.
What we have also found historically over Australia's history is that those two lines,
after a year or so, tend to converge again and it becomes easier for young people to
find work.
Since the GFC that has not happened in Australia.
For young people the line has stayed higher.
Since the GFC it has become harder proportionately than at any other time in history for young
people to get back into work.
The entry-level jobs since the GFC are disappearing.
Those jobs that you might walk into straight out of school or that you might walk into
if you do not finish school are disappearing.
The jobs that this government wants young people to get just are not being created any
more in the way that they used to, and it is a national crisis.
So what is this government's response?
Rather than listening to expert advice on how to tackle youth unemployment or invest
in new industries that might create those jobs for the future, the Liberals have taken
it upon themselves to be every young Australian's tough parent, serving up some tough love by
telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and earn or learn.
Their first plan was to kick young people off Newstart, which is itself so low that
it is below the poverty line and is a barrier to people finding work, because you do not
have that money to invest in yourself—to get some training, to buy the new clothes
for the job interview, to even get a haircut.
Their first plan was to kick people off Newstart and make them wait six weeks before they can
receive this measly payment to try and support themselves.
Luckily, the Senate took a stand for young people and refused to pass this ridiculous
measure.
Yet, the Liberals are refusing to listen, saying they only want to make young people
wait four weeks before they can get Newstart.
Well, four weeks—the landlord does not care that you do not have money coming from the
government to pay the rent, the public transport does not care that you do not have money because
it is the government's fault.
But the government's approach is still to say, 'Well, we'll deal with the national youth
unemployment crisis by making life tougher for young people.'
At the same time the government wants to make learning more expensive, less accessible and
more exclusive by cutting support for students and deregulating our universities—a move
that experts have warned could see the creation of US-style $100,000 degrees.
So it is harder to earn by getting a job because, under this government and since the GFC, the
jobs are not there in the same way, it is more expensive to try and learn, and even
if you are lucky enough to get a job and to keep it and to earn an income, owning your
home is becoming a pipedream.
In 1990 house prices were approximately six times a young person's income.
In 2013 that had doubled to approximately 12 times a young person's income.
It is not the fault of smashed avocados that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable
for people.
Even if you find a job and even if you find a secure job—which is pretty tough to do
these days—the ratio of your income to house prices is just skyrocketing.
And that has happened under the watch of Liberal and Labor.
The old parties' policies of allowing negative gearing to happen and the capital gains tax
discount to continue turned housing into an unproductive investment class, and it caused
an explosion in house prices, meaning that overwhelmingly the only people who could afford
to buy a house are those who already have one.
The government should be making it easier for people to buy their first home not helping
people who already have one to buy their second, third or fourth.
The Grattan Institute found that under these and other government policies real wealth
held by older households from 2003 through to 2012 grew by $215,000, but for younger
households it went backwards.
In 1994 young households had nearly 10 percent of the country's wealth, but by 2014 that
had effectively halved to 5.5 per cent.
So over 20 years young people went from having 10 per cent of the country's wealth to having
about five per cent.
At the same time it dramatically increased for older generations.
This is why young people are getting screwed: successive governments have worked against
them, dealing them an increasingly bad hand and growing intergenerational inequality.
Governments have allowed the economy to run rampant and to screw young people.
The good news is that as a society we are becoming more and more aware of just how much
young people are getting screwed.
Academics, think tanks and civil society organisations are all pointing out how the odds are no longer
in young people's favour and how, under Liberal and Labor, we may be creating a situation
where we are leaving the economy and household budgets and the planet worse off for generations
that come after us rather than better.
But the bad news is that the government are refusing to look at the bigger picture and
are refusing to listen.
They are being the unreasonable parent instead of listening to their children or experts,
having blind faith that they know what is best—that is, to make people work for either
nothing or next to nothing.
If it were a lesson on safe sex, this is a government that would be pushing abstinence
not condoms.
If it were a lesson on good behaviour, this is a government that would be sending young
people to their rooms rather than talking the issue through.
Instead of working systematically to even the odds and deliver a better deal for young
people, on budget night this year the Liberals unveiled their master plan for getting young
people a job—this Prepare, Trial, Hire scheme.
What it really meant, though, was that earn or learn became burn and churn.
Essentially, this government's plan to tackle high youth unemployment and help young people
get a job is to lure them to work for below the minimum wage.
The Liberals' plan will not provide secure and meaningful work for the hundreds of thousands
of young people who are unemployed.
What will do is drive down wages for other workers and see employers burn and churn through
young people.
In fact, it could see people currently working in these roles kicked out in favour of free
money and labour, courtesy of the government.
Under the program being enabled by this bill, by not having to hire someone at the usual
wage employers could bank more per week than the young people who are supposedly going
to get a job.
In other words, this scheme will allow employers, on the public purse, to take home more money
than the young people who are going to be forced to work under it.
The Greens do not accept that to get young people into work they need to be paid as little
as $4 an hour, which is well below the minimum wage.
That is what this scheme is about.
Following the government's unveiling of this flagship program, the Secretary of the Australian
Council of Trade Unions said 'this internship program is a path to nowhere' and 'gives business
access to free, exploitable workers'.
He asked: Why would a business employ a minimum wage
or lower paid worker when the government is ready to supply them with free labour and
a $1000 handout?
He pointed out that these internships could include low-skilled work such as work in supermarkets,
which is not a plan to create real, lasting jobs.
It is simply substituting existing low-paid labour with even cheaper, government subsidised
labour rather than creating new jobs.
Let us be clear about this: internships, if they are structured correctly, can be a good
thing.
They can provide opportunities for young people to learn and build their skills.
We have had internships for a very long time.
Every political party in this place, I am sure, offers internships.
Community groups offer internships.
Organisations like community groups and political parties thrive on getting young people involved,
but when we do it—and I speak here on behalf of the Greens—we do not offer out hope to
people that this is some pathway to secure employment; it is about you and increasing
your skills.
You are not here doing government subsidised work where you are required to turn up at
a particular time and clock off at a particular time.
It is not a false job—because that is not what an internship is or should be.
But when you ask people, as the government is doing under this program, to clock on and
clock off and get the equivalent of $4 an hour while they hold out hope of a secure
job, and you pay employers $1,000 from the public purse to put them on and displace other
workers, that is not a scheme to create lasting employment.
The simple fact is this: this is a flawed plan dreamt up in isolation by a government
that thinks it knows best, but it will not help people find secure long-term work.
In fact, it could just see handouts to business to force young people to work for below the
minimum wage and potentially force people from a job who are currently working in these
roles.
There is nothing in this bill that provides protection for someone currently working in
a low-paid job from being forced out of that job by this new scheme so that government
subsidised cheap labour can come in instead.
We have to take action to help make life easier for young people.
That means tackling rising job insecurity and tackling housing unaffordability, but
this program will not do that.
If we were serious, we would be investing in education.
We would be investing in big job-creating projects that will provide secure work for
young people—like public transport and clean energy.
We would be making it easier for people to get into education and complete it and we
would end the unfair tax breaks that are pushing up the cost of housing and pricing young people
out of the market.
And we have to do it now because otherwise we run the risk of locking an entire generation
out of secure work and locking an entire generation out of owning their own home.