$4 P/H is no future for youth

Resistance: Young Socialist Alliance (RYSA) has slammed the Turnbull-Morrison government's latest budget, as representing a bleak future for youth and students in Australia.

The budget outlines plans to force young people into internship programs for significantly below minimum wage, and projects a continuation of extensive university funding cuts.

This "plan" is weak on providing good jobs for young people, and strong on bullying youth into accepting less for their labour.

It will extend and reinforce the injustice of the internship system which already throws young people into precarious and unsustainable living conditions.

Resistance member ,Jacob Andrewartha, a teaching student at Victoria University as well as a childcare worker and student activist, spoke out against the budget, saying,

“This budget is rigged in favour of the rich in society, and fails the majority of young people who are already struggling to make ends meet.

“The innovation it refers to is inventing is more ways to rob students and youth and force us further below the poverty line.”

Alternatives to such policy exist.

Solutions such as a strong basic income which will stop the collapse of living standards; a jobs program that offers real work for real wages to young people; and a fully funded and free university system which can actually help innovate into the future.

The budget announcement coincides with the launch of Resistance's annual ‘Radical Ideas’ conference, to be held January 20th - 22nd 2017 in Victoria.

Conference organiser and Resistance National Co-Convener Mia Sanders said, "Radical Ideas is Australia’s largest socialist youth conference, and we need to be talking about alternatives now more than ever!

“Radical Ideas is all about young people getting together to talk about what a society organised for the needs of the majority of people would look like, and how we're going to get there.

"We discuss how the rich 1% of society use racism, sexism and homophobia to divide us, and how capitalism fails us, and the planet.

"Everyone interested in building an alternative to capitalism should save the date, 20th - 22nd of January, for Radical Ideas 2017!"