Students, young and unemployed people have borne the brunt of the economic crisis caused by efforts to stop the spread of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and more should be done to provide financial assistance to them, protesters gathered in Garema Place on Saturday said.
The small group of about 15 people, all wearing face masks, carried signs calling for cuts to JobSeeker and JobKeeper to be reversed.
Activist Grace Hill, a student at the Australian National University, told the crowd it was an outrage for the government to reduce the JobSeeker supplement while the effects of the pandemic were still being felt.
"What the government has done by increasing this payment in the first place is proven that, for the years and years they've said it was impossible to pay people on welfare any more money, that that was a lie. [The government has shown] that it has always been possible to lift people on welfare above the poverty line but there has been a political choice on the part of the Liberal party and Labor party for decades and decades to refuse to do this," Ms Hill said.
ACT Greens candidate for Kurrajong Adriana Boisen, 25, who is also studying at the Australian National University, told the protesters she had received the JobKeeper payment as a hospitality worker through the pandemic and young people were the most likely to have lost their jobs during this period.
"Make no mistake, the cutting of JobKeeper and JobSeeker is another part of the ongoing attack on young people," Ms Boisen said.
"At the same time as the government announcing [it would] spend $270 billion on missiles, we are being told that a social security payment above the poverty line is unrealistic. We are told that we need to be resilient. How resilient are we expected to be? We are facing a global pandemic, total ecological collapse, a housing crisis, an unemployment crisis, and two parties that have explicitly targeted poor people over the rich.
"No wonder we're also experiencing a youth mental health crisis."
ANU Students Association education officer Skanda Panditharatne said students had been hit from all sides during the pandemic, as the number of students accessing emergency support from the association increased.
"What we're seeing is lots of students potentially making the decision to not continue uni this semester even, because they need to be searching for work and doing whatever they can to make a living and keep going," Mr Panditharatne said.
Mr Panditharatne said many students had not qualified for JobKeeper. He also criticised the "opportunistic" move to increase out-of-pocket costs for humanities courses.
"I can't imagine what it would be like to be a high schooler right now, looking ahead to a world where you're going to struggle to find a job, when there's 11 applicants for every vacancy, when you know you'll be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt when you get out of uni," he said.
"It's a very, very scary time to be a student right now and this government is simply not helping."
