The answer to getting young people into jobs is to ensure we have a properly funded TAFE. Instead, the government is continuing to fund a program that replaces Award jobs with $4 an hour interns and have cut $3 billion from TAFE!
Michaelia Cash has announced that the Morrison Government will hand $10 million of tax payers’ money to employer groups through the failed $4 per hour PaTH ‘internship’ program.
The money will go towards ‘industry pilots’ provided by employer groups to ready young people for $4 per hour placements which replace jobs paying proper minimum wages.
Minister Cash claims that the program gives young people much needed experience, however data from her own department shows that the program has struggled to find participants since its inception and mostly functions as a way for businesses to replace jobs paying award wages with unpaid workers supplied by the government.
Under the program, every employer who takes on an ‘intern’ gets a one-time payment of $1000 in addition to the government paying the interns’ ‘wages’, creating an obvious incentive for employers to replace properly paid workers with PaTH interns.
Is this what we want for our kids and grandkids?
Six years of this Federal Coalition Government has meant young people are inheriting a worse standard of living than their parents. Programs like this show the Government does not care.
