So young Australians, what we have here is kind of a good news-bad news situation.
The bad news is that your future economic prospects might not exactly be great. The good news is that you’ll live a long life to reflect on this situation, which you’ll be able to do thanks to your top-class education.
A report released by the Foundation For Young Australians, via The ABC, predicts a future of “unstable employment, lower pay and growing debt” for the current generation entering the work force.
The report, which you can peruse for yourself right here, addresses the question of whether or not the current generation will be better off than their parents, something that only 22% of young Australians surveyed believe to be the case.
The conclusions are pretty much a mixed bag, in that, while the current generation has many advantages over its parents, it also faces many more hurdles. For every potentiality good thing, there’s also a catch.
For example, young people today earn 6.8% more than their parents did at the same age; that said, the sharp rise in housing prices over the past few decades means that house prices are now 6.5 times average income, up from 3.2 in the ’80s.
If you’re reading this in an attempt to procrastinate while at a job you don’t like, then you may or may not take heart in the fact that young Australian workers can expect to have as many as 13 jobs over the course of a lifetime.
Also on the employment front, full time jobs appear to be harder to find, with 44% of young Australians in part-time jobs, up from 16% in the ’80s, and 30% qualifying as either “unemployed or underemployed.”
According to the report, education standards are improving, and young Australians are far more likely to finish school and gain tertiary qualifications than in the ’80s.
The bad news there is that your degree might be mostly decorative, with 25% of young people not using their qualifications in their jobs. That’s to say nothing of the fact that young people enter the workforce with an average of $24,000 more student debt than their parents.
Life expectancy is on the increase for young people, however, obesity rates are also on the rise, meaning that diabetes and strokes may put a much higher strain on the health system in years to come.
More worryingly still, mental health disorders account for almost 50% of the disease burden in young people, noting a very high suicide rate of 12 in 100,000 amongst 24-year-olds in 2012, and the fact that many young Australians do not access mental health services.
Last but not least, the report found that, where there were two working-age people for every non working-age person in 2012, that number will decrease to one and a half by 2050, theoretically putting a much greater strain on the workforce.
Is the news all bad?
It’s hard to say.
For instance, housing prices are currently on the rise, putting pressure on those looking to get into the market and buy their first home, but many people question whether the trend towards inflated house prices can viably continue in years to come.
Similar, a greater emphasis on preventative health – which is something very achievable, and something we should be pressuring the government and GPs to do – could greatly improve outcomes with regards to things like obesity.
As for the unfriendly job market and increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment currently facing young Australians … we’ve tried, but we can’t think of how the future is going to get a hell of a lot rosier.
We have no idea what the job market will look like in 20 years time, what professions will be viable, or even whether cleaning up robot poop will be a growth industry in Australia.
The point of all this, it seems, is that even if young Australians’ optimism for the future has started to fade, the report isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast set of predictions, but more a warning of things possibly to come if we stay on the same track.
Continue hoping for the best, and maybe invest your money in pooping robot stocks.
Photo: Robert Cianflone via Getty Images
