Unemployed or out of work?

The statistics reveal that we have half a million young Australians with no full-time job or full-time course of study. These are Bureau of Statistics figures. By August, the number had edged down to 492,000. But that means one in six of our young people, 17 per cent of the rising generation, have fallen off any career path into a more uncertain future.

Of them, 221,000 are working in part-time jobs, and half of them want full-time work. Another 98,000 are unemployed. And 173,000 are outside the labour force: two-thirds of them are women, and one assumes, mostly mothers. For some, falling off a career path will be the best thing that ever happened to them. In adversity, they will find themselves and come out stronger, more mature and motivated. But they are a minority.

It began in 1996, when the Coalition cut more than $1 billion a year from labour market programs, taking the axe to Working Nation, the network of training schemes set up by Mike Keating, former head of the Prime Minister's Department (no relation to former prime minister Paul). Even in 1993, Keating was thinking ahead to the time when Australia would be held back primarily by a shortage of skilled workers. Working Nation was designed to retrain the long-term unemployed with the skills the country would need when good times returned. But the Howard Government scrapped them.

Its own initiatives had little or no training content. It relabelled trainees as "new apprentices" and for years engaged in futile spin to hide the fact that trade apprenticeships were stuck at low levels as the trades workforce aged. It introduced work for the dole on the cheap as a program with no training; its participants saw little improvement in their job prospects. In this decade, skills shortages have spread, as Keating foresaw, and the Government has gradually introduced reforms to encourage trade apprenticeships, and employers have had to swallow their reluctance to hire. Between 2001 and 2006, the numbers entering trade apprenticeships swelled by two-thirds, from 36,000 to 60,000. But the pay is still lousy, the image is not the best, and half of those who start don't finish. Only 25,000 graduated last year. The problem is that federal spending has not targeted areas of skills shortage.

Rather, "training" supermarket checkout operators was given equal priority with training plumbers. Similarly, its spending on schools is not going where it is needed. This year $5.8 billion will go specifically to independent and Catholic schools, but only $2.5 billion specifically to government schools, where two-thirds of students go, and which have most of the problem children.

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