Our favourite beat here at PEDESTRIAN.TV is covering the constant campaigns waged by the tabloids against Gen Y, who the editors overwhelmingly believe to be a pack of shiftless layabouts who spend all day sexting each other and drinking soy lattes on the taxpayer’s dime rather than working in a salt mine. They waste their time doing this instead of the important work shouldered by baby boomers, which is mostly posting racist memes on Facebook.

The Daily Telegraph in Sydney is running a yarn this morning about the new, terrifying epidemic of what they call NEETs – which stands for “not in employment, education or training”. The Tele quotes an OECD report which says there are 580,000 young people in that category in Australia, and claims that none of them are even slightly interested in working.

Obviously, to prove that more than half a million people are lazy degenerates, they did a front page splash of precisely two of them:

Two young NEETs, Ashleigh, 21, and Amy, 17, from Mt Druitt, would rather spend their days “chilling at maccas” and taking their old Holden Barina on “off-road tracks” than look for a job. Ashleigh told The Daily Telegraph she would “never get a job”. “I don’t want to work my whole life and just die … I want more than that,” she said from the car park of the Mt ­Druitt Centrelink office. “I would tell you it’s hard to get a job but to be honest I don’t even try. Centerlink pays my rent and that’s all I need.” Her friend Amy was recently kicked out of her trade college and has been unable to hold down a job. “They pay you nothing so why would I rock up,” she said. “I call in sick when I’m over it and then they just get rid of me. Not fair really because I just want to have a good time and chill but I don’t want to be fired.

Incredible that a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old living in one of the most economically-disadvantaged areas in Sydney might be somewhat disheartened by the shrinking opportunities around them. Chills me to the bone. The Maccas carparks in this country are overflowing with rowdy. jobless teens who – for all we know – probably also openly support the Islamic State.

“The number of NEETs has soared by 100,000 since the ­global financial crisis eight years ago,” says the Daily Tele, coming so, so close to identifying a potential structural failure in the global economy, but not quite being able to elevate it beyond a problem caused entirely by the citizens of Mt Druitt.

The comments on the article, as you might imagine, are good as hell:

There have it folks. Millennials, who find themselves saddled with record levels of student debt, facing an increasingly difficult job market in which graduate unemployment is increasingly high, starting salaries at record lows and a housing market which ensures they’ll all be living in mould-encrusted sharehouses until they’re 90… are just a pack of lazy dickheads.

Thank God for the Tele.

Source: Daily Telegraph.

Photo: Daily Telegraph.