Youth Allowance, always a fraught topic, is back in the news after
the Government was last week forced to start scaling back some of the changes Julia Gillard implemented as Education Minister in 2009. While these changes included some long overdue and very welcome reforms - the increase in the Parental Income test from $32 000 to $42 000, the lowering of the age of independence to 22 and the increase in the personal earning thresholds from $236 to $400 per fortnight chief among them - they also made it much more difficult to prove one's financial independence, requiring applicants to work 30 hours a week for 18 months before they would be considered for the benefit. While a reasonably onerous task for any young person - what with all the getting stoned and playing GTA we have chalked in for the next few months - the concern was in particular with the new distinctions drawn between urban, inner regional, outer regional and rural areas. More specifically the fact that areas designated "inner regional" were subject to the same requirements as those designated "urban", irrespective of whether they had a university in their town. So, the Coalition pitched up a bill to negate this, Labor accused it of being unconstitutional before announcing an investigation into the policy that will, almost assuredly, see it quietly dismantled in a few months time.
While a probable boon for regional students, for whom issues of equity and access always rear larger than their urban counterparts, it does block out the broader truth of Youth Allowance, namely that it's actually a kinda shit system for encouraging the further education of our young folk. As someone who spent two and a half years receiving this governmental blood money, I feel confident in saying that signing up for Youth Allowance is like wilfully signing up to what you know is going to be an abusive relationship. First you have to spend two years slaving away, working 30 hours a week to prove your worth and/or financial independence, and then, when you have finally proved your worth and/or financial independence, you immediately throw it all away on the promise that your new sugar daddy will provide you with everything you need. Except, in this case, your new sugar daddy treats you like crap, makes it impossible to keep them happy and pays you an amount that clocks in at around 50% of the poverty line, perhaps less; by some measures, it would be considered a quarter. Just to keep you desperate. But you need it, man, you NEED it. Without it, you don't eat. With it, you eat Mi Goreng. Washed down by 2L of Fruity Lexia. Because you're worth it.
In the 2009 budget report into student welfare, there was an almost throwaway line towards the end that read "The rate of Youth Allowance has not changed (apart from indexation increases) since it was introduced in 1998", before going on to note that the maximum one could receive on Youth Allowance was almost $100 less than one could receive for being unemployed. And lest we forget, indexation doesn't properly reflect changes in overheads such as rent, which have increased by so much over the intervening 13 years that the $80 a fortnight typically awarded as Rent Assistance would probably struggle to get you a timeshare on a park bench. But even this is, conceivably, fine. If one is to assume, as I imagine the student welfare system does, that students receive play money from their parents that should compensate for some of the shortfall. The only problem is, they don't.
Having travelled a bit and studied overseas with students from a number of different countries, I've found that Australians alone are oddly obsessed by this idea that financial independence is something best achieved at 18. It's almost a tacit agreement between parents and their children that the moment they a) go to uni, or b) leave the family home, they have complete and total responsibility for paying their way. This is often driven as much by the children as the parents - I've had plenty of friends over the years explain that they were foregoing medical treatment because they couldn't afford it and didn't want to ask for money from their family. As a result, students in Australia find themselves pinioned uncomfortably between a policy that expects one thing, and a culture that delivers another. The result is a student experience increasingly written in hardship, excessive work hours, financial stress and the ever present risk of picking up an STI.
While the odd bit of poverty is what being a young person is all about - you show me someone who's never eaten rice with soy sauce and called it a full meal and I'll show you someone who's never lived - there is perhaps something to be worried about in making the university experience so distinctly unappealing. Rupert Murdoch, in his 2009 Boyer Lecture, warned of the dangers of Australia's lack of educational zeal when it came to remaining competitive in a digital economy. Cosy on the back of our immense agricultural and mining resources, the argument ran, we have grown complacent and watched our educational ideals erode in the face of a utility-driven economic model. We strive for vocation, rather than education, and run the risk of turning our young folk into hard-working but unimaginative technocrats. While a bit rich coming from a man who has done more than any other human to degrade the intellectual aspirations of the Western world, it's hard to deny that he has a point. In many ways, we're a first world country running the economy of a developing nation. And we do it well, sure, but there are inherent limitations to founding a nation on the planting and digging up of things in the ground.
A friend of mine, a high school teacher in a WA country town, tells of being almost laughed out of class when she tried to encourage her students to pursue tertiary education. When the kids could earn $100 000 per year for being a cleaner on a mine site - an actual, advertised income - it was difficult to see why they would subject themselves to the logistical difficulties and financial hardships of a university education merely so they could spend three years in pursuit of a degree that would plunge them into debt and may or may not guarantee them a job at the other end. Which, when you phrase it like that, does make my eight and a half years spent essentially studying to be a news blogger at The Vine seem a little wasteful. Sigh. But this drive towards vocation is a problem, and it's one written in all levels of our tertiary system, from the steady collapse of our arts departments, through to the rescinding of benefits for Masters and PhD students through to study limits designed to preemptively force people into the workforce. Against this backdrop, the financial disincentives of a university education are but one strut to consider, but they're an important one, and one that deserves more recognition than it currently gets.
[NB. If
student unions prove their worth anywhere, it is here. Being a dispersed, distracted and disorganized constituency, students have long been studiously ignored by the political classes, who see them at best as potential future party hacks, at worst dole bludgers with a fancy name. But student unions are handy in these situations in that they actually push government to do things that students need i.e. give them more money. So next time you rag on a student union, think "Do
I want more money?".
Yeah.]