Time and time again, Australia is reminded of how “lucky” it is. Australia was so lucky it missed the worst of the global financial crisis. However, not all Australians have enjoyed this luck.

Globally the financial crisis has been “a profound economic ruction” for young people and Australian youth are no exception. While rates of youth unemployment did not reach epidemic levels as it did in Spain or Greece, youth unemployment in Australia resembles that of many countries that were greatly affected by the crisis.

Despite this, in the aftermath of the financial crisis the government has done little to improve the lives of young people, revealing a dearth of policy that explicitly addresses the needs of young Australians. At present, youth policy in Australia is not articulated or advanced by a strategic initiative nor is it driven by a designated minister for youth. Unlike defence or foreign affairs, there is no “white paper” for young people. Rather, youth issues and youth policy are subsumed by welfare policies and provision.

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Young people in this country are regarded as a welfare problem, not a resource. Successive federal budgets have sought to hinder young people most affected by the financial crisis with the introduction of more stringent welfare conditions (eg Newstart, PaTH).

When in the rare circumstances youth issues are not positioned as welfare issues, for example housing access and affordability, policy solutions are tantamount to some kind of intergenerational theft whereby young people are asked to rob their future selves or pay dearly for uncertain futures in the present.

The real generation war is not between baby boomers and their millennial offspring, rather it is one being waged by the government against young people.

The mooted changes to the higher education sector in the 2017 federal budget have opened up another front in this ongoing war against young people. In previous years, it has been unemployment and welfare benefits, and this year the fight is education. These changes – which will see a decline in government expenditure on education, higher student fees and a significantly lower threshold at which young people make repayments – put at risk the very people the government needs to be agile and innovative in the future.

Such changes will disincentivise young people from pursuing further education if the cost outweighs the reward. And higher education will only be costlier: student fees are set to rise by around 7.5% by 2021 under the proposed changes. However, the reward of employment following the completion of tertiary study cannot be guaranteed. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest the returns on further education are diminishing.

Graduate employment outcomes since the financial crisis have been significantly poorer, and in countries like Spain, this has already been the case.

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This will undermine the compact between governments and young people, in which young people attend university, paying high amounts for tertiary education in exchange for higher incomes and better jobs.

Further, lowering the repayment threshold, especially for those graduates who are unemployed or in lower-paying jobs, will be punitive just like the changes to youth unemployment benefits. It will be a “Hecs” on young people’s futures and put them at risk of poverty.

When Donald Horne wrote the Lucky Country, he was bemoaning the state of play in 1960s Australia – a country “run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas”. It was an Australia that was “OK in copying, deficient in innovation”. Although we hear less and less from the government about being agile and innovative, it may well be said that some of the themes in Horne’s book are not dissimilar to present-day challenges.

In order to continue being a lucky country, to avoid creating a generation of second-rate people, the government needs to prioritise, not problematise its young. Youth policy and programs should not be confined to the budget. The government needs a youth strategy which formulates dedicated youth policy to address the challenges of young people and their needs in the present and future.

If the government cannot fulfil its obligations to young people, then baby boomers and millennials need to remember this when they next go the ballot box. And before they do, they need to demand articulated plans and policies for young people.