From Q&A via The Australian:
In a youth-focused episode of the ABC’s Q&A program, in which most of the panellists – and the audience – were high school students, the younger generation asked tough questions of their peers, Liberal Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and Labor’s health spokeswoman Catherine King.
“With millennial Australians being the first generation in our history to not out-earn our parents, as well as the skyrocketing prices of both housing and university, how can the Government effectively foster a future where we as young Australians can realise the same lives that our parents lived?” one questioner asked.
…“I like to look at this question from a glass half-full perspective,” Mr Frydenberg said. “The good news is the Australian economy is growing. We’ve grown under Liberal and Labor governments… we’re the envy of most countries in the world, so the pie is getting bigger.”
Several of the students disagreed.
“I think it’s great to see as a half glass full approach but we’ve got to address the other empty half of the glass,” Ms Speer said. “We’re facing some of the biggest problems. The disappearance of the intergenerational bargain. The idea that I can have a future that’s better than my parent’s is gone.
“I feel like our voices are not being listened to when it comes to climate change and all these issues that will affect our generation the most. I mean, look at Brexit. People in the highest age group or up there deciding the future of the rest of us.”
One student asked what hope those under 18 years-old have in the Victorian town of Mildura, which is “ignored” despite one of the worst rates of welfare in the country, ice addiction and youth suicide issues. “How do we stay with so few job opportunities?” she asked.
Mr Frydenberg pointed to the government’s PaTH program, which subsidises employers to hire young people, while Ms King said it has been a “long, long way” since the Nationals Party, which holds the state and federal seats in the area, has represented the interests of young people.
Just the usual clap trap from Frydenberg. A growing aggregate economy is useless if it makes everyone poorer:
And the PaTH program is pretty much an official youth slave labour operation as it displaces paid workers.
The truth is the Coalition has no answers for these Millennials. Indeed, it has specifically targeted them above all other groups to carry the burden of adjustment in the post-mining boom economy. That is the process by which the mining boom inflation is worked off so that non-mining tradables can rebound and grow investment as competitiveness improves. A real exchange rate adjustment in other words.
The Coalition aimed this process directly at youth by supporting low interest rates with no regulatory offset, failing to curb foreign realty buyers and driving mass immigration into an oversupplied economy, all designed to support capital over the salary earner, especially for entry level positions across the labour market:
There is an alternative way of managing this adjustment without turning it into a class war on youth. It entails spreading the deflation load across both the landed and salaried by deploying reform to boost productivity, containing credit and lowering demand for assets by reducing immigration. On that path, the currency falls much further and the adjustment is shared much more fairly across the whole community.
It’s great to see these kids having a go but if they knew how badly they are being shafted they’d have marched Frydenberg to the gallows. Right alongside The Greens and Labor.
Youth needs a political party.
