Well, the government’s legislation for their brand spanking new internship program hasn’t even passed Parliament but the eager beavers are so bloody sure it will pass that they’ve cracked along with it anyway.
You might vaguely remember through the accrued haze of nearly a year’s worth of excessive booze consumption that this was a point of contention at Budget time last year – with many people believing that the government’s internship scheme looked a lot like a super easy way for businesses to get around that pesky problem of paying young workers. Such an unnecessary imposition.
please sir… may i have some gruel (and reasonable monetary compensation)
Regardless, here’s the lowdown on what Treasurer Scott Morrison and Employment Minister Michaelia Cash are planning with this crazy scheme.
What is it?
The program is called PaTH, which stands for Prepare, Trial and Hire – because clearly nobody in the Department of Employment & Workplace Relations could be bothered coming up with something that starts with ‘A’. Maybe they can find an intern to think one up.
Here’s the vibe: the government is setting up a scheme by which people who currently receive Newstart will be ushered into internships, where they will work for 15-25 hours per week. In exchange for this work, they’ll get an extra $100 a week on top of their usual Newstart allowance. The businesses in question receive a $1000 upfront payment.
This was what people had a problem with – when you break it down, that could work out to be as little as $4 an hour. And when you look at some of the internships the government themselves are using as examples, the value seems a little… well, off.
Seriously, the examples of internships in the budget papers are for *waiting tables* and *working in a supermarket* pic.twitter.com/2Aj3zdwvgw
— _robcorr (@_robcorr) May 3, 2016
The internships last up to12 weeks. After that, the employer has a choice of letting them go, or hiring them. If they do hire them, the government gives the business a $10,000 wage subsidy.
Wait, you said it hadn’t passed through Parliament yet? As Rove McManus would say: WHAT THE?!
It has not. Scott Morrison told reporters today that he’s bloody confident it will though. “We are very confident of being able to take this through the Senate based on our record of getting things through the Senate.”
note: the government does not have a good record of getting things through the senate
They’re still giving it a red hot go, however. They can implement a large chunk of the program without passing any legislation at all, actually. What the legislation does is ensure that the fortnightly $200 payment does not get taxed as regular employment income. It also ensures that those who drop out of the program can go back onto their regular payments without having to reapply.
So, as per usual, the people who actually get fucked if the legislation doesn’t pass are the workers themselves. Rock / hard place / etc.
What’s the response?
Predictably, businesses and business lobby are all for it. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s a huge pool of labour available to many industries that don’t really have access to internships at the current time. Business Council chief Jennifer Westacott reckons it’ll give young people a foot in the door of jobs they otherwise wouldn’t have, as well as giving them the opportunity to develop skills.
Cash, for her part, reckons that it’ll help 120,000 young people aged 17 to 24 enter the workforce, “giving them the skills they need to get their foot in the door […] the opportunity to showcase their skills to an employer”.
The unions aren’t so keen. ACTU secretary Sally McManus says that it’s exploitative of the young workers and also impacts older workers and other workers in the affected sectors. “If employers can legally employ people on $3.22 an hour and the government pays, why would they hire a young person on the minimum wage?” she asks.
Labor MP Ed Husic is also baffled by the money that gets handed to businesses in the process – both in the form of the initial $1000 payment and the wage subsidy. “Providing subsidised labour to go into the private sector, it has never been done by Government before,” Husic says.
So, is the legislation going to pass?
We’ll have to see. Labor and The Greens, as well as a few crossbenchers, say they won’t vote for it. The annoying this, as above, is that the government will press ahead with implementing it anyway – it’ll just put a bunch of young workers in these internships in a much more financially precarious situation.
The long and short of it? It sucks being a young worker in a tough labour market with rampant underemployment. It sucks real bad.
Photo: Parks & Rec.
