Remember when an entitled white man somewhere said something along the lines of ‘millennials could afford to buy a house if they stopped spending so much money on avocado toast’?
While roasting him (and ourselves a little) was fun for that week, there’s an underlying condescending attitude in that statement that you’ll still hear in the news, from politicians and at all family gatherings. The assumption is that any genuine economic struggle millennials face today can be explained away by whipping out bank statements and pointing out how many times we went out for brunch that week.
But brunch is not the problem. Don’t you dare drag brunch into this.
The problem is that young people aren’t being adequately supported in an environment where there’s a lot stacked against us. Structural inequalities persist and young people aren’t always equipped with the tools needed to overcome them in the way that previous generations were. If Australians believe in a fair go, then we should see government policy that works to prioritise equity in our society and give support to those who need it, even if at the expense of others who don’t. This isn’t what we’ve seen.
The latest federal budget was released a few months back (everyone else is probably just getting over their hangovers from their budget night parties too, right? Right?!). The meatiest party of every federal budget analysis is always about the winners and losers. We can’t fund everything and we have to cut some things and so the budget is always a good indication of who the government is prioritising and who they aren’t.
By far the biggest thing to come out of the budget has been proposed changes to the current tax bracket system, which just recently passed through the Senate. Australia has a progressive tax system, meaning the more money you earn the more taxes you pay so, simply put, where your income sits in the tax brackets determines how much tax you pay. There are currently five brackets that look like this:
From the Australian Tax Office.
There are a lot of changes planned for the system and they will all come through in different phases. The most significant change is in Phase 3 set for 2024 whereby we reduce the current 5 bracket system into a 3 bracket system by creating a giant bracket for those earning between $41,000 to $200,000 a year.
Low to middle income earners will be reaping some benefits from these changes but by far the biggest winners from this will be high income earners who will be getting a big tax break when this all kicks in.
This doesn’t sound like equity to me. There are a lot of things that we could be doing with that extra revenue that will no longer be collected from high income earners once these changes kick in.
A big one that comes to mind if we’re talking about increasing societal equity and supporting young people is increasing Newstart.
Newstart is one of the major forms of support unemployed people in Australia have access to. Adequately supporting those who are having it tough between jobs while they look for work should be at the cornerstone of an equitable society. Young people in Australia face a significant disadvantage in this space with the unemployment rate for people aged between 15 to 24 sitting at 12.4 percent, more than double the national rate of 5.5 percent.
And yet Newstart hasn’t increased in real terms in the past 24 years even though most are in agreement with the fact that it just isn’t enough to support to disadvantaged and unemployed Australians. Calls to increase Newstart have been around since 2009 and several organisations ranging from Deloitte, KPMG, the Business Council of Australia have called for an increase. Polling suggests that 68 percent of people support an increase on Newstart and yet this year saw no increase in the allowance.
When questions around why Newstart had not been increased in the latest budget, comments like Julie Banks’ that she could live on less than $40 a day show that there continues to be an attitude of deprioritising and devaluing the legitimate struggles of young people. It’s all the condescending rhetoric of avocado toast, but without as much meme potential.
When columnists insist that we can’t afford to, or even need to, increase Newstart, it’s pretty unsettling to then see massive changes to our tax system that say ‘but we’re happy to give the rich guys a big tax break while we’re here’.
Estimates say that this year’s budget is going to to have a revenue growth of 9.8 percent, the highest increase we’ve seen in the past 17 years. Deloitte suggests that we could hit the long awaited budget surplus by 2019-2020, mainly because of better revenue collection rather than spending cuts.
And so is it still legitimate to say, oh we don’t have room in the budget to support young people?
If a budget is meant to be about showing where a government’s priorities lie by putting their money where their mouth is, then this government has shown their hand.
Amanda Chong is studying a masters at RMIT, and writes about human rights and intergenerational fairness.