Millennials struggling to get politics jobs might not sound like your problem. But if you want competent governance, it really is.

As long as I can remember, Millennials have been getting a bad rap.

We’ve been called lazy, entitled, shallow, disengaged. We lived our lives online, not engaging with the real world or our own friends. In particular, Millennials ‘never got involved with politics’. We were this garbage generation of self obsessed screen junkies. If the 1960s was all about campus protesting, the 2010s were all about clicktivism.

Of course, we know now this picture isn’t accurate.

Young people have begun voting in high numbers and — unlike our parents or older siblings — actually joining political parties again.

So, Millennials do want to get involved after all.

But even as a Millennial politics nerd who hangs out with lots of other Millennial politics nerds, the route to actually working in politics isn’t clear to me. I know there are a lot of smart, idealistic young people out there who’d like to work for politicians. I know because I went to university with a lot of them. Whenever we meet up now, a couple of years after graduation, the table ends up complaining about endlessly applying to politics or policy jobs with little by way of reward.

Here’s the basic formula for getting your start:

1. Read a lot of news.

2. Identify a politician you care about and want to work for.

3. Somehow get their attention.

Depending on your level of cynicism, it’s the last step that’s the hardest. In this episode, I spoke to Clement Nocos, a fellow Millennial politics nerd, who told us how he got a job with Canadian opposition leader Jagmeet Singh. Hint: he did it with a GQ interview, a healthy dose of good luck and several years of grind.

While he worked his way into a politics job, Clement supported himself delivering food to the people of Toronto, by bike, for a well known startup. We didn’t get into it in this interview, but I’d highly recommend a video he did for The Globe & Mail on being underemployed and overqualified.

All sorts of overqualified young people want to work in politics. But — even if they get hired — applications sometimes take 12 or 18 months to go through the system. In the meantime, they’re forced to take unpaid internships or work interim jobs just to get by. As we all know, only some people are in a position to survive unpaid work. People from lower income backgrounds don’t have the option.

Naturally, a lot of people give up.

They find work elsewhere, particularly with big consulting firms. They’re super smart, super qualified and super motivated. It’s no wonder consultancies have been replacing many functions of the public sector for the last decade or more. And you know what? That isn’t cheap.

In Australia last year, “the big four accounting firms — Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, and Ernst & Young — earned about $US1.7bn in consulting fees last year while the three top-tier strategy consulting firms — McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain — accrued­ about $US500m.” The FT reported in 2016 that, in the UK, “annual spending on consultants and temporary staff has gone up by between £400m and £600m during the past four years”.

One of the side effects of sustained neoliberal consensus over the past 40 years has been a boom for consulting firms. As the public sector has been both downsized and marketized, many civil service leaders have decided it would be easier to outsource the work. In many cases, this may lead to efficiency gains, at least in the short term. Consultants tend to work long hours, are often extremely well managed and have better access to staff with rare technical skills.

However, it also means the capacity to tackle complex policy problems isn’t internalized to the public sector. As new technology finds new applications, outsourcing their implementation to consulting firms means the public sector is ever more reliant on outsiders to operate their departments.

And what happens when problems arise that are not well suited to the private sector? As an excellent article in The Outline pointed out, natural disasters cannot be solved by philanthropic giving. (Neither, as the work of Elinor Ostrum showed us, should problems like this be tackled by profit making organisations). The author, Paul Blest, makes the reasonable suggestion that the best solution to a problem like natural disasters is to better fund public sector units that can deal with them.

Unfortunately, I fear that is only a partial solution. Even with better funding, those public sector units will struggle to tackle complex problems because they lack both the knowledge and staff they need.

All those smart Millennials out there who want to work in politics and policy and can’t will probably be fine. But, guess what, governments exist for a reason. They solve problems that only exist on long-term timelines. They solve problems that have no potential for profit. And, ideally, they come up with solutions that benefit the wider population rather than a narrow band of shareholders and managers. But without the staff, they won’t be able to do any of that. Only consulting firms will.

Millennial politics nerds trying to get politics jobs will be disappointed, sure, but they’ll do alright eventually. It’s everybody else that should be worried.

You know the drill:

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