Serious question: what, exactly, motivates this government’s passionate loathing of young people?
The government’s new $2.8 billion cuts to higher education funding, a mix of higher upfront fees for students, harsher loan repayment requirements and cuts to university funding, have been downplayed by some in the media. A “steady-as-you-go package” one commentator called it, contrasting it positively with the previous reform package sprung on the sector by Christopher Pyne, that would have saved $4.2 billion; another journalist tweeted that average students would only pay $8 a week more in repayments (just a couple of soy lattes, right?). There’ll be no $100,000 degrees; the most expensive is a medical degree at a mere $75,000. Remarkable how much better a draconian package of cuts and fee rises sounds when compared to the original ambit claim.
Ironically, the cuts will be delivered in a budget purportedly focused on infrastructure, as if our higher education system isn’t some of the best value infrastructure in the economy.
We noted yesterday that the lack of meaningful housing affordability initiatives in the budget will perpetuate the status quo in which young people face an invidious choice of how to live anywhere near centres of economic opportunity. Get a good job that pays good money to afford a house, Joe Hockey lectured young people, except he didn’t mention it’s becoming impossible to afford to live anywhere near a “good job” in Sydney and Melbourne. Notice the recent shift in rhetoric from the government and Scott Morrison in particular: once housing affordability was going to be the centrepiece of next week’s budget, now, apparently, he’s solved it already. “We are already seeing signs the heat in our housing markets may be coming off, especially in the apartment market,” Morrison said last week — as if the regulator-driven slowing of the unsustainably rapid growth in prices in Sydney and Melbourne is somehow a fix for affordability — and as if it’s OK to continue to subsidise investors to compete with young people and low income earners for housing supply.
But these are hardly the only areas where our young people are targeted by the government. Who will lose out if the government’s submission that a “cautious approach” be taken to a minimum wage rise is adopted by the Fair Work Commission? Young people, who disproportionately make up those on the minimum wage. Who will lose out if penalty rates are cut in the wake of the Fair Work Commission decision supported by the government? Step forward young Australians, again.
Whether our young people are learning, earning or just trying to find somewhere to live, they’re going to cop it — unless they become a property investor straight out of school, presumably.
Meantime, our refusal to take climate change seriously and play any sort of global leadership role — indeed, we continue to proffer our coal to developing countries like a drug dealer searching for new customers — guarantees the economy of the future will be poorer, more expensive and more fragile than it should be, especially in regional Australia. If we don’t get them now, we’ll get young people in the hotter, drier, poorer future we’re creating for them. There’s no escape.
Why are young Australians treated as second class citizens when it comes to policy? Why can governments like this one relentlessly target them? Because there are no political consequences for doing so. Target housing investors, property lobby groups move into action. Target tax breaks for the wealthy, the aged Liberal Party base begins counting the numbers. Target unions, Labor and the ACTU launch a campaign. Target pensioners, seniors lobby group start writing letters to MPs. Target universities, the Group of Eight fire up. But young people only have their interests represented in Canberra to the extent that they coincide with those of other, well-organised interest groups. Otherwise, governments can act against them with impunity.
Young people have to rely on policy makers acting in the national interest, rather than juggling special interests. Good luck there.
I got an email from my superannuation fund this morning noting that I’ll be affected by the superannuation changes applying from July 1. Not much of a problem having more than $1.6 million.
I have two investment residential properties, and I’m not worried if the property values fall if the government does something about housing affordability.
But the Coalition’s disdain for doing anything about AGW is a real deal breaker.
Malcolm Turnbull has been a real disappointment.
Said it before and I’ll whinge again – it’s only part of the story to characterise this as an attack on “the youth”. More accurate to describe this as an attack on opportunity and class mobility. This is about knocking the ladder away after you’ve climbed it.
The “youth” whose parents can afford to prepay education and hand them the keys to their first investment property won’t be struggling as a result of these changes. In fact, they’ll increase their advantage over peers who have to work their way through Uni and start their adult life saddled with a huge HECS debt and the prospect of spending 65% of their take-home pay on a mortgage.
Don’t make this about young v old. It’s just the same old class warfare.
I agree
Absolutely true, Bobs. It’s straight-up class warfare. The reason it looks like an assault on the young is simply because social democracies traditionally subsidise people when they are young and poor, and then tax them increasingly as their incomes rises and they grow wealthier with age. Like the 2014 budget before it, but without the political suicide note attached, the 2017 budget will just be another upper class effort to dismantle our social democracy. The sad fact is that the wealthy have decided they simply don’t want to pay very much tax anymore, so social democracy just has to go – and the young and poor naturally cop it first. (Of course, there’s always a bit of red meat thrown in for the Liberal party base and business backers, hence the climate denialism/coal evangelism, for which everyone will cop it later, but that’s a sideshow to the main game.) The really appalling thing is that Labor won’t call out this class warfare, but will run with these silly ‘war on youth’ type tropes. The ALP gave up fighting the real war decades ago, which is why the right can bare stop themselves running wild and wrecking the joint whenever they get into government. For a glimpse of our future, I fear we have to look at Trump’s America.
Definitely right – but it’s an acceleration of a trend that started under the Howard Government and was only temporarily stopped in its tracks under Rudd. I was the first member of my immediate family to enrol in university on a Commonwealth Scholarship that paid me a modest allowance (better in real terms than today’s Austudy) and enabled me to graduate with honours and no debt. When I first taught I often saw students with backgrounds similar to mine – crashing through the class barriers – but for the last two decades they have become increasingly rare. Too many students who are not well-off give up or under-achieve because they are working “part-time” (up to 40 hours a week) as well as trying to study.
We need a national system of full scholarships with proper means-tested allowances to encourage talent.
Hear bloody hear.
What Bob’s Uncle said +1
Well, yes and no Bob.
Even if you don’t think it makes sense to treat youth as a separate category, it’s clear that many young people are evolving a set of political priorities quite different from older voters at the moment (note the big chunks of the youth vote that have gone to Melenchon, Corbyn and Sanders, especially Sanders), and I don’t think it’s difficult to understand why: slow growth, stagnating wages, debt, environmental catastrophe and the next big wave of automation will affect them more than anyone, and to a greater degree. It’s a tautology to say that their interests overlap (or intersect) with class etc. Women’s interests overlap in that way, too, but that’s not to say that certain policies don’t affect them disproportionately, or that the history of women’s liberation can be neatly subsumed into a class analysis. BK’s line about ‘loathing’ may be overstated, but I think he’s right to point out the criminal indifference of this government to the interests of younger voters.
I think about all those bright young people who are missing out on higher education due to the severity of costs. Bright young people whose brains could in some cases revolutionise this country. Shame on this government who are relentless in their pursuit of greed, greed and more greed.
I know generation theory was big when you Xers were young, but this Millenial is scratching his head wondering how this is an attack on the young, as such.
For starters, moving to a city for work isn’t something that only happens to teens and 20 somethings, nor is getting an education. Then you have the family, who have to pick up where the rest of society left off. As it becomes more necessary to get assistance from your family we get rich families that can have investment properties for their small children and poor families that can’t send their kids off to a nice uni.
It shouldn’t take a 20 something to point this out, mate.
A Budget aimed at “Infrastructure : and the Groin of the Intellect of succeeding battlers.”