Benefits and Doubt in the Illawarra

All photos by Carly Learson

Last week it was announced that unemployed people under 30 will be barred from unemployment benefits for six months out of every year. Young people should be earning or learning, said the Treasurer, and these changes are aimed at making sure this happens. We went to one of the regions of Australia with the highest youth unemployment rates to find out what options there are for young people, and try to work out how they'll survive.

Illawarra is a region the stretches from the south of Sydney to Kiama on the South Coast. It's two hours drive from Canberra, but a world away from Parliament House. It has beaches, a few shopping centres and the first McDonald’s to serve burgers with silver cutlery. It has a significant Indigenous and European migrant community, and its towns sprung up last century to support a once booming steel industry.

Then the steel industry collapsed. Today, there’s just BlueScope Steel, which employs 10 per cent of the region. Unemployment has been steadily climbing to well above the national average, and youth unemployment is at 20 percent. Many young people end up on Centrelink welfare payments like Newstart and Youth Allowance.

Living on “Cenno” gets you around $220 a fortnight if you’re young and living at home, but it’s a bit more if you've got a kid. Now the government wants to pay less by massively cracking down on youth welfare. The argument is that this will force kids to get off the couch and get a job. This might sound feasible until you look at places like the Illawarra, where young people are learning new skills but there’s a lack of jobs.

Some of the guys who are learning are in Windang, where they take classes in construction. Most of them are under 20 and have been surviving on youth allowance and packets of cheap pasta for several years. The typed of jobs they're after are generally trades – chippie, mechanic, landscaping. A couple are keen to work in the mines, but it's difficult to know which jobs are real and which are just scams.

There are few jobs in the Illawarra for adults with skills or degrees, and the 7am train to Sydney is famous for being jam-packed with daily commuters. Any local jobs (even the ones in supermarkets) are usually given to older people, so there’s little local opportunity for kids, unless their ambition is to become an apprentice hairdresser or meth dealer.

The short course at Windang includes learning bricklaying and building wooden toolboxes, although a fair bit of time is spent playing footie and smoking. There's not a huge demand for home renovations in the region, but they're happy to just get skills for their resumes.

Acquiring skills seems to be a motto in the world of long-term unemployment. This is partly because Centrelink payments are already dependent on doing training courses coordinated by organisations like Mission Australia. The Windang centre’s boss says they encourage young men to think outside trade jobs, but this is difficult since they're not aware of anything else (one said “I'm not smart enough to be a nurse”) and men are called poofters when they work in jobs like aged care. Inter-generational unemployment is also common in the Illawarra, meaning kids sometimes don’t have role models who work.

Jordan is one of the star students in the construction course. He’s 18 and grew up in Berkeley: a suburb with a reputation so bad it's enough to make prospective employers turn you down. “It’s hard to get a job. People see you’re from Berkeley and it’s just got a bad name,” he said. Jordan dropped out of high school in Year 10 after getting into a fight with a teacher in the schoolyard.

So, what’s going on for a high school drop out in the Illawarra? “I know you can get a job at Maccas. That’s the only job going on around here,” Jordan said. He applies for local jobs but is unsure about moving to Sydney or somewhere else with more work. “If you have a family that’s close to you, it’s hard to leave.” His role model is his mum, a single parent who works in a school.

Guys like Jordan also have to contend with the dole bludger stereotype, and says there are people who fit into it. “Yeah, I know a couple.” He said having no money makes people do things “that people shouldn’t have to do”, like selling drugs or breaking into houses. “People work their arses off for shit, and you go steal something that’s worth $9000 and sell it for $500 for crack. You wouldn’t want that shit to happen to you, but you do it to other people.”

Unemployment is also boring. “I dunno. You just wake up. There’s nothing to do, so you go looking for drugs. That’s about it. You look for drugs and it doesn’t happen because nobody is replying. It keeps you busy. And then you go to bed. Now I’m doing this course, it’s got me out of that and all that bullshit,” he said.

Dr Scott Burrows is one academic who's trying to figure out the reasons behind the Illawarra’s youth unemployment, including the impact of readily available drugs. “People develop all these problems because they’re out of a job, not the other way around,” he said. Lucas, who's one of the older guys at 24, said his drug abuse was due to depression and being really, really bored. “I didn’t really care if I lived or died,” he said. He's now in rehab after a few attempts at suicide.

Lucas’ pre-rehab daily routine was an exaggerated version of Jordan’s: wake up, smoke meth, steal shit and watch TV. He wouldn't even bother looking for jobs. He said getting a better life is easier said than done, and having no money in the bank makes you feel hopeless. “I felt like I couldn’t do nothing about it, but in reality you can. You just have to pull your head out of your arse,” he said. He's since gone on to star in a short film – an unpaid job.

Ryan is 20 years old and has a 3-year-old son who lives with his girlfriend's parents. He's already completed courses in bush regeneration and heavy machine operating in order to get his Centrelink payments. Despite this, Ryan has never had more than a casual job. “The employment agencies are supposed to help you look for work but they didn’t show me,” he said.

He’s already been given the option of Working For The Dole, which he tried for a while but wasn't too happy about. “Work For The Dole makes you work really hard for the pennies. I’ve worked at Salvos or in a kitchen for the homeless. I’d rather go and get training,” he said.

The guys all mentioned going for work trials – a scheme where employers get them to work for free, but there’s no guaranteed job at the end. It's hard to see these kids as living in an 'age of entitlement.' They're working for free and doing training courses for jobs that don’t sometimes don’t exist. Ryan gets $136 a week and wants to move out of his mother's house so he can look after his kid, but won't be able to afford a place until he gets a job.

Ten minutes from Windang is Warilla. It’s a suburb built mostly by migrants who came to Australia during the steel boom. Today, there’s a row of $1 million houses on Warilla’s shoreline, but there’s also lots of less showy houses full of unemployed kids like Jesse. Jesse is 24 and has been unemployed for six years. He’s now studying an accounting course, but spent pretty much all of 2013 moping around his parent’s house on the dole.

"I’d get up late at like 11 or 12. Have lunch or breakfast, or both at the same time. And then I’d just stay up all night watching movies and it got into a cycle of going to bed late and getting up late. That’s all I did for ages, unless I had a meeting with Mission Australia.” He said Mission and Centrelink meetings are a waste of time. “I’d go in, talk to my case worker, say the same thing as usual, and they’d say ‘alright, your next appointment is in a month’.”

A local caseworker from Mission said the system is overloaded, and that it’s tough dealing with people who don’t have hope or motivation. She empathises with young people in Illawarra because she was unemployed for years before getting her job at Mission. There's something bleak about an area where the local options for unskilled workers are the dole, gip rocking, drug dealing or being paid by the Government to find other people jobs that don’t exist.

Mission’s main job in Illawarra is getting people skills, as well as implementing Work For The Dole. Jesse said he’s worked in places that are hard to get to without a car. “They said I had to be out in Woonona at 7am, and it’s like: how do I get there? Train and bus?” (The first bus is at 6.30am and Woonona is an hour and a half away.) He said the threat of stacking cans might motivate some kids, but that no dole for under 30s will make life impossible for others. “It sounds quite ludicrous to me actually. If you’re not getting paid they can’t pay rent. How you gonna live?”

The most difficult thing for Jesse is the huge gap of nothing on his CV. “I have to try and sit there and explain it.” The list of jobs that he’s applied for recently is long: cafes, the bakery, tyre fitting mechanic, Woolworths, concrete labouring and fencing – jobs that anywhere else would be filled by school leavers but in the Illawarra are filled by ex-steel workers or older people. “I got to the stage of not wanting to apply for any jobs because I just kept on getting rejected,” he said.

Pretty much the only option available at the moment is to join the Army or move to Sydney, where jobs aren't all that easy to find when you’re a long-term unemployed kid from the coast. Jesse’s sister was also unemployed, but now catches the crowded morning train to Sydney to work in childcare for minimum wage. “She gets up at 5am and gets back at 8pm at night. She thinks it’s worth it,” Jesse said. He’d consider doing this too, if he had a job lined up, a car or somewhere to live in Sydney.

It's a cycle, he said. Young people go through periods of applying for jobs or doing classes, and then getting fed up with banging their head against a wall. Jesse said he knows people who go back and forth between crime, drugs and welfare, and cutting off Newstart will just make them more likely to choose the first two options.

The Illawarra local economy probably won’t be revived until this cycle is broken. One option is for the Government to subsidise local industry or move government offices to the Illawarra to stimulate its economy. This happened in the 1980s when the recession threatened to close the steel industry altogether. It saved the industry. There are youth employment quotas, but one activist says she had to beg the local council to take on just one young worker this year.

Maybe girls have a better ability to suck it up and do what’s needed to survive, even if it is getting up at 5am to get the train to a $15 an hour job in a shitty clothing shop in Bondi (the return train fare is $17.20). But there's also a large number of girls in the Illawarra who survive on parenting allowances - a less visible form of youth unemployment. Having a baby is also one of the ways you will be able to get out of the six month gap in Newstart.

In nearby Shellharbour some girls are taking a different approach by learning hairdressing and make-up at a private college - the school’s owner says 95 percent of her students get a job once they graduate. Jasmine, a 20-year-old student is pretty confident about her future. “If you have the right qualifications, you can work,” she said, as she massaged shampoo into a creepy doll’s head.

Jasmine said she’s lucky to be enrolled in the expensive private course. “My mother-in-law helped me out,” she said. Her only other option would have been TAFE and a long apprenticeship, which wouldn't have provided enough income to support her two kids. “It wouldn't be possible for me on my own. I’d be at home right now doing nothing and looking after my kids,” she said.

Follow Emilia on Twitter: @EmiliaKate