Jobs, income and uni fees: young Aussies do it tough on all fronts

Young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, according to RMIT researchers.

Ashlee Brown, 24, outside Centrelink in Rockingham last year. Picture: Theo Fakos

Young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic through lost income, lost jobs, higher house prices and a massive future tax bill, according to researchers at Melbourne’s RMIT University.

The study also says Scott Morrison’s JobSeeker, JobKeeper and JobMaker programs have done little to alleviate the “serious, damaging and potentially lifelong” costs now faced by most young people at the same time fees have been lifted significantly in some university courses.

“Young people have been more likely to lose their jobs, less likely to meet inclusion criteria for the more generous JobKeeper initiative, more likely to take up the self-funded early superannuation drawdown options, and potentially facing dramatically ­increased university fees from 2021,” the researchers argued.

“The illness and disease caused by COVID-19 has had relatively mild impacts on the health of young people and yet their participation in an economically debilitating, whole-of-society response to the pandemic has been crucial to protecting the health and lives of others.”

The analysis comes as the government faces criticism from welfare groups over its decision to permanently increase the $565-a-fortnight JobSeeker payment by $50 once the existing $150 coronavirus supplement, in place since March last year, stops in April.

JobKeeper wage subsidies, due to be phased out completely from April, also excluded typically young migrant workers and those who had been casual for less than 12 months. “Young people dominate highly casualised sectors such as accommodation and foods, ­retail, and arts and recreation, sectors incurring high numbers of pandemic-related job losses,” the paper says.

Australia’s jobless rate declined for the fourth month in a row in January, to 6.4 per cent from a peak of 7.5 per cent last year.

The youth unemployment rate was 13.9 per cent, 1.8 percentage points higher than January last year.

RMIT’s research, entitled Continuing the precedented: Financially disadvantaging young people in ‘unprecedented’ COVID-19 times”, argues the trends in 2020 were a continuation of recent experience for younger Australians, which ­included higher university fees, lower welfare payments and growth in “gig” or casual employment.

“Those circumstances contrast with the 1970s, which had secure employment, free university, reasonable student welfare payments and affordable housing,” the reports says, noting housing prices in the major cities had ­exhibited “two decades of sustained high growth”. The authors, Patrick O’Keeffe, Belinda Johnson and Kathryn Daley, suggest the government’s JobMaker program, which includes subsidies up to $200 a week for businesses that hire a previously unemployed person aged under 35, won’t generate many new jobs.

“This program is at core a subsidy scheme for business: young people get the jobs they would have gotten anyway, while business is given a financial subsidy for jobs they would have created anyway,” they state.