As the big banks and backbench conservatives are grappling with a new political reality after budget 2017, young Australians find themselves in much the same position they’ve been in since 2014.
Just because this year’s budget isn’t as nakedly feral in its contempt for young people as Joe Hockey’s first effort doesn’t mean that contempt isn’t there any more. Rather than laying it out plain, the prospect of losing government has forced the Coalition to go about the business of dismantling our future crabwise. The budget is rich in measures that will steadily increase the downward pressure young Australians already feel on the backs of their necks. In that fundamental respect, it is no different to its predecessors.
The double punch of punitive welfare measures and no real solution to the ongoing youth unemployment crisis is proof enough we’re dealing with the same mob. While the proposed four-week waiting period for dole recipients has died a quiet death, it’s merely been replaced by another spin of the government’s screw-the-poor roulette wheel. Punishing people who miss job interviews and welfare appointments could only have been dreamt up by someone who’s never spent two hours on the phone to Centrelink trying to, say, change their appointment time. The infantilising “demerits” terminology deserves the scorn it’s already being met with.
Profiling Centrelink recipients for mandatory drug and alcohol testing and extending the trial of cashless debit cards, meanwhile, could have been dreamed up by The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy. Speaking to Fran Kelly this morning, Malcolm Turnbull’s “don’t do drugs” lecture sounded like the unintentionally hilarious 1930s public safety announcement Reefer Madness.
Besides the sanctimony and hypocrisy of it all (somehow I can’t picture government MPs who break tables while in high spirits being forced to pee into cups to keep their salaries), the correlation between poverty, mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse among young people means the new measures will drastically harm and endanger the people most in need of help. The horrendous rates of suicide among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote communities, no strangers to paternalistic welfare policies, are proof enough that punishing people in already-desperate circumstances is more likely to kill them than cure them.
Then there’s higher education. Having failed to deregulate course fees and complete the transformation of Australia’s universities into corporate degree factories, the government has settled for making students pay more for degrees that universities will have less money to provide. It is mightily difficult to imagine a future made better by droves of young people being turned off tertiary education by the cost of entry but that is a future we are all going to have to live with.
Lest current students feel left out of the party, the Hecs-Help repayment threshold will be lowered to $42,000 a year from July 2018. Simon Birmingham has justified the move by pointing to the example of New Zealand, a country where graduates start paying back their loans once they earn more than NZ$19,000 a year and where debts are starting to soar. Adding insult to injury, the changes are retrospective – students who signed up for degrees based on an understanding of when they would have to begin paying them back have had the rules changed on them. For young graduates already struggling to make ends meet in a hostile job market, it’s yet another expense to add to the pile.
The prospect of yet more debt would be slightly easier to bear if the government had had a proper crack at solving the housing affordability crisis. Instead, there’s a grim hilarity to the dismal offerings this budget contains: undoing an upper-class tax rort for people visiting their investment properties, and letting young couples salary-sacrifice into their super accounts to save for a deposit. Given that the government has just punched a hole in young people’s disposable income by lowering the Hecs threshold, exactly which young couples in this particular universe are thinking about ploughing money into their super right now is unclear.
But perhaps the scariest thing about the 2017 budget is what’s missing. For the third year running, Australia has no climate policy worth the name. Not even a whiff of one in the works. The largest line item in the budget’s environment section is an $86m investment in increasing gas production. Nothing on the rapidly dying Great Barrier Reef; no plans to capitalise on the booming renewable energy industry; no thought on how health and emergency services are going to cope with the dangers and demands of perpetually hotter summers.
Compounding the vapid lunacy of Australia’s climate inaction is the government’s ongoing refusal to consider any carbon pricing policy whatsoever – not even one that the Business Council of Australia can get behind. That blanket opposition goes beyond ideology; conservatives in other countries have accepted the need to mitigate climate change for years, and in any case the word “ideology” assumes a level of thought that is not present here.
Young Australians are unwilling signatories to a collective suicide note, all so those in government can spite the progressives and environmentalists they’ve held grudges against since their student politics days.
The combination of indifference, condescension and outright negligence that typifies this government’s attitude towards the young and the lives they will have to lead is a mindset that young Australians are sickeningly familiar with by now, and it runs rich through this budget.
