Youth Unemployment

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (15:29): Today, I would like to talk about a very important group in our community and it is a group we have not heard very much about throughout the COVID pandemic, apart from perhaps the discussion around schooling and education from a primary and high school point of view.

Really, young people are severely and significantly affected by the crisis we are currently facing, and it is them I fear for most in respect of the long-term problems they may face as a consequence of some of the actions that necessarily have been taken in order to protect the rest of the community. I fear that most certainly young people in Australia will be the long tail of a big recession going forward, to quote somebody I heard today.

From ABS data, we know that young people struggle significantly in terms of employment and secure employment. They feature highly in the unemployment data, and well before the pandemic was declared here in South Australia the numbers of young people unemployed in Australia had again risen, I believe to about 14.1 per cent. Remembering that the definition of employment is as little as an hour of work a week, the underemployment data is well in excess of 20 per cent for young people.

Moving forward, as these young people who work in some of the hardest hit sectors, such as retail, hospitality and tourism, we are going to see that tens of thousands of them have been laid off work, stood down and will not qualify for any kind of payment, be it JobSeeker, JobKeeper or job anything. They are suffering and they are struggling, and many of them are in a position that is unfamiliar to them.

In that position, going forward, where unemployment is going to continue to rise and underemployment is going to rise even worse, what we will see is a reflection of similar practices or similar patterns that occurred in the eighties, when I was a youth, when there were unemployment rates well in excess of 17 or 18 per cent, when interest rates were really, really high and we saw a rise in the underemployment rate during that period.

Then, when we had the GFC in the last decade, we again saw the unemployment and the underemployment rate rise. I encourage members to go and look at the ABS data and see what happens over time not just to unemployment but to underemployment of young people. The unemployment numbers will come down gradually because of the way it operates, but underemployment will remain high and will continue to climb for a long period of time.

At the same time that we put these restrictions in place, young people have had so many disruptive elements to their social patterns and their relationships. It is a misnomer that governments spruik that young people are so well connected on social media, that young people have the internet at their fingertips. I speak to so many people and have done over the past few weeks who are working in the youth sector who say the most at-risk group of young people are those in their late teens—young adults who are not able to access data, their households do not have access to good internet and they do not have devices they can use. These are the hidden victims of the COVID crisis.

The recovery for these young people moving forward must be planned now. This is not like saying we have this announcement seven weeks ago that we are going to put some money in and we are going to start to do some work. If we do that now, exponentially we are going to see that young people are going to fall off the cliff and we are going to see a whole generation of youth who are unable to secure work.

The truth is that in relation to young people we see a massive digital divide, we see a massive problem with them being able to access data, access devices, and we see enormous problems with them seeking employment going into the future. The announcement of devices for schoolchildren is going to do nothing for these young people because they are doing vocational education, they are doing other types of work and they are simply not able to access it.