Abbott Government Putting the Boot Into Young Unemployed

DR JOHN FALZON: Let me put it to you this way, this game is as old as the hills and sadly has been played by both sides of politics but never this viciously. And the game consists of blaming people who are experiencing unemployment, blaming them when in fact the fault lies with the labour market. So the inference is it’s a matter of changing behaviour, what we need to change is the labour market so that people do has access to jobs. No one disagrees with the objective of increasing the level of employment participation but you know this is a bit like condemning someone for not being able to get up the ladder rather than building a ramp. This government has not only failed to build the ramp but has kicked away the ladder. You don’t help a young person into a job by making them poor and you don’t help them to become employable by driving them to despair. And that’s what these measures will do.
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It’s as if this government has decided okay let’s make life as miserable and horrendous as possible for these young people who are unemployed. Let us drive them to despair let us make them feel as if they are to blame for the sins of the labour market. You know there’s nothing smart, even from an economic rationalist perspective. There’s nothing smart about putting the boot into people who are experiencing disadvantage. This welfare bashing might be therapeutic for those who carry it out but it won’t deliver one job for anyone who is currently locked out of the labour market.
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Therein lays the policy contradiction. What this government is effectively doing is saying to young people we want to drive you to either depend on charity, we want to make you feel like you have to go to charity for assistance, or we want to put extra pressure on your family to support you. You know they are certainly not considering, or maybe they are considering, because they seem to be hell bent on increasing the level of inequality. Or worse still and this is a terrible thing to say, but one has to wonder, whether they are intending to reduce the level of youth unemployment by increasing the level of youth incarceration, because that is going to be one of the consequences of driving young people more deeply into poverty and more deeply into despair.