Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

In her book Generation Less, Jennifer Rayner talks about the impact on young Australians of the economic policies that have been pursued under this government. As she points out, younger Australians have suffered rising underemployment rates. Their wealth, relative to older Australians, has fallen. They've suffered through experiencing higher student debt, a tougher housing market and a tougher labour market. It used to be that the typical university graduate could count on going into a full-time job. Many now find themselves going into part-time work. The educational debt and the housing debt that has been accrued by what she calls generation less has only increased.

Coronavirus has hit the labour market for young Australians, particularly hard. As a labour market snapshot by Jeff Borland—summarising his work with Michael Coelli at the University of Melbourne—points out, there's been a substantial deterioration in employment outcomes for young Australians, with their employment-to- population ratio falling by four percentage points in the decade to 2019, while the rate for people 25 and above has increased by one percentage point. They point out that it's a matter of the crowding out of the young, and that you see higher part-time employment and long-term unemployment rates for young Australians.

This is reflected in work overseas. Write-ups of research by Eduardo Porter and David Yaffe-Bellany note the impact on young Americans of scarring in the labour market, the impact of entering a labour market at a time of recession. The impact of scarring, according to research done by Treasury, headed by Daniel Andrews—then at Treasury and now at the OECD—can still be seen up to a decade later. Jesse Rothstein's research on US college graduates shows that, by 2018, those who landed jobs in 2010-11, following the 2008 financial crisis, had a lower employment rate than people the same age who graduated before the recession hit. That impact can see people stuck, increasingly, in insecure low-wage jobs.

We've also seen significant education shocks. Research by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin for the Centre for Economic Performance looks at the learning losses for disadvantaged pupils in British schools. Building on the work that's been done on the summer learning loss, with pupils lagging when they return to school after the three months summer break, they're suggesting that that could be significantly exacerbated for disadvantaged students. That holds true for university students whose universities are doing their best in the face of funding cuts from the government to maintain online learning, but students know that 'Zoom University' is no substitute for proper face-to-face tuition.

The risk for young Australians is very real, and yet we've seen from this government a series of policies which has acted to disadvantage young Australians. In their book What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19, editors Emma Dawson and Janet McCalman outline a whole series of interesting research findings, many relating to the impact on young Australians. In her chapter on population policy, Liz Allen says, 'The sad reality for too many young Australians is it takes the bank of mum or dad … to break into the housing market.'

The government has population projections which look heroic when it comes to considering the rollout of the vaccine. I ask the minister what the assumptions are about vaccine rollout that underlie the budget's population projections. Population projections under the budget have net overseas migration falling 71,600 in 2020-21, but only 21,600 in 2021-22. I ask the minister: did Treasury model different scenarios in this in the event that a vaccine wasn't in place by late 2021?

See this speech in context