By Marina Cameron
Halleluiah! It seems we have been worrying needlessly about the impact of unemployment and cuts to public education on young people. According to an article in the September 6-7 Weekend Australian, the idea that today's youth are a disenchanted and despairing generation is just a figment of their parents' pessimistic imagination.
A recent Newspoll found that half of the respondents over 50 years old thought that job opportunities were poor, while only a quarter of teenagers did. Similarly, 20% of adults thought that education opportunities for youth were poor, while only 7% of teenagers did.
As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. For example, those who answered "yes" to whether job and education opportunities were "reasonably good" — which could mean anything from OK to not disastrous — were grouped under a "total good" category.
More important than the dubious statistical methods used in this poll, however, was the message behind this article which also includes a selection of quotes from young students at a TAFE college in North Sydney.
Apparently Australia's unemployment rate (8.7% in August and 27.5% for young people) is a "load of crap" and there's "plenty of good jobs out there". "For us, the future is good", but there are lots of young people out there who are "bums" and just aren't rising to the challenge of getting a "piece of paper" from an institution.
One student berated people he knew that "don't work, mainly because they only get maybe $20 over the dole and so what is the point of going to work". Another said that young people don't mind working unpaid overtime because it is an investment for the future.
The message is familiar: there's nothing wrong with the system itself, and if you work hard you can succeed.
Some young people will succeed, but this is an option open to fewer and fewer. The fact that young people are resigned to working harder for lower wages is little cause for optimism. The happy little soldiers will be far outnumbered by those young people whom the system fails.
This you can "do-it-yourself" attitude (which is also pushed in an accompanying article about young women and feminism), not only lets the government off the hook, it props up the idea that the system as a whole is working for its newer generations — a message contradicted by countless other studies of the question. Indeed, the article commends Newspoll for swimming against the tide of pessimistic findings on youth attitudes, including a 1995 national survey which found that the majority of young Australians expect a poorer quality of life in 2010 than now and predict the 21st century to be a "bad time of crisis and trouble" rather than "a new age of peace and prosperity".
It is true that a lot of studies and media coverage don't examine young people's achievements. Young people are often stereotyped and scapegoated as so-called criminals and bludgers. But, it is a travesty to deny the fact that young people are suffering as a result of the government's efforts to cut public spending and maximise business profits.
Australia has one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the world. One in four Australians will suffer a severe bout of depression before the age of 18. It doesn't help young people to ignore these warning signs. It is not good enough to say that young people are happy with the limitations and lower expectations enforced on them.
As many young people in high school, tertiary education and workplaces know, the most positive and optimistic approach is to fight the system that creates these problems in the first place.