The Government’s plan to make job seekers aged under 30 wait six months before receiving Youth Allowance or Newstart has taken another hit, with Family First Senator, Bob Day, declaring war on the Budget measure. From The Australian:
FAMILY First senator Bob Day has vowed to lobby all crossbench senators to kill the government’s budget move to kick young people off the dole for six months, saying he is unwilling to negotiate on a compromise deal…
Senator Day says the entire policy must be dumped. “Not only will it not get my vote I am doing my darnedest to persuade all my crossbenchers and anyone else who will listen not to vote for it either,” he said. “I am lobbying on this as hard as I’ve lobbied on anything in my life, actively.”
The department of social services show that 113,000 people a year aged under 30 will be denied the Newstart and Youth Allowance payments for six months.
Liberal Democratic Party Senator, David Leyonhjelm, is reportedly backing Day’s position which, when combined with the opposition from the Palmer United Party and the Greens, means that the Budget measure has next to no chance of passing the Senate.
In the Budget Papers, the Government claimed that tougher welfare eligibility criteria for under-30s would “encourage young people with full work capacity to be earning, learning or participating in Work for the Dole”. Yet anyone with even a modest understanding of employment statistics would recognise that youth employment outcomes are poor not because they are lazy, but because the economy is too weak to generate sufficient jobs to offset the growing population – hence unemployment is rising (see below charts).
As noted by The Guardian’s Greg Jericho yesterday:
…there just aren’t enough jobs.
Despite what Senator Abetz might think, the key for the unemployed to become employed is not through applying for as many jobs as you can, but for there to be more jobs to apply for.
As a general rule, our adult civilian population grows by around 1.6% every year (although it has been slightly higher than that for most of the past eight years). If employment doesn’t grow faster than population, unemployment is likely to rise…
In the past year employment grew by just 1%, and it has now been 36 months since annual employment growth was above 1.6% – the second longest streak ever behind the 40 consecutive months between August 1990 and December 1993.
…when you have weak employment growth and a scarce number of jobs on offer, who suffers? Those who are least experienced and least qualified: the youth.
Absolutely. As noted last week, youth unemployment is running at nearly 14%, and rising fast:
Moreover, the number of jobs for Australia’s youth has been falling, down 6.2% since the GFC versus 10.4% growth for the rest of the labour market:
The Coalition has erred badly in seeking to punish the young unemployed for no other reason than them being born at the wrong time and experiencing the worst employment conditions since the fallout from the early-1990s recession.
It’s moves are all the more callous given its planned special incentive payments to employers that take on workers over the age of 50 who have been unemployed for more than six months – a measure that would crowd-out younger workers even more.
It also brings into focus the egregiousness of the Government’s open slather approach to working visas. As noted in last week’s research paper by Professors Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, most temporary visa holders “spend their time in the major cities”, [and] “they, along with students and other temporary visa holders, are proving to be ferocious competitors for the same entry-level jobs that Australian resident youth are seeking”, thus making the employment situation facing younger Australians even worse.
Thankfully, the opposition Senators seem to be attuned to some of the structural barriers facing Australia’s youth, which is a good thing given the Abbott Government’s obvious blindness.
