Independance Day (Jeremy)

Yesterday I made the long walk down to Centrelink. (Actually, it’s not a long walk, it’s just opposite the hallway from the Transition department, but my way makes it sound much more dramatic). For many, many a year I have dreamt of moving out of home but I just haven’t been able to maintain the sort of income required to actually make it a reality. I decided to take my chances down at Centrelink to see the people in question on the off chance that I was actually eligible to make some sort of a claim for payment should I decide to move in. Others call it groundwork, I call it “pamphlet collection”.

There are three main ways for students to qualify for Youth Allowance. Number one, they have earned the requisite amount within 18 months to qualify as Independant (which is roughly $17,000 but it increases with inflation every year), Number two, that their parent(s) earn under a certain income threshold, or, number three, that it takes ninety minutes or more to travel one way to the tertiary institution in question. Let’s nut this situation out a little more closely.

Being a typical student, I work in hospitality where the most highly-skilled and trained job going is as a barista. Most students, as part-timers in either this industry (or retail), are going to attract roughly $16 an hour, depending on your place of work. Twenty hours of work a week – take tax – leaves about $300 a week to live off, which is enough to scrape an existence. Might I note that it’s still below the Australian definition of the poverty line by a good hundred or so. Make no mistake of believing that it’s enough to maintain a student paradise; you are most definetely cooking all your own meals and using lab computers on $300 a week.

The more poignant side of things is the time allocation to work. Most full-time students will spend between 16 to 20 hours actually in class; the University recommends that in order to maximise their potential, students should match every minute in class with one of homework. That’s not an unfair estimation, in my opinion, of what is needed to achieve an H1 at Uni. That means that in order to get the best results they can at Uni, full-time students will need to study between about 36 and 40 hours a week.

I feel that it is a fair position for me to take to say that full-time students should be able to live independantly without sacrificing an enormous amount of ground to their dependant colleagues. I take this position for a number of reasons; one, that otherwise it serves as a deterrent to those not able to lean on their home for support against studying; two, that it relieves the burden on parents presumably ready for a break after eighteen years’ of parenting; three, that full-time study and part-time work should still be a feasible option for anyone; and four, that it is not healthy for twenty-five year old to be grudgingly living at home for anyone involved. Note that I do not call for a freeloading life of luxury; merely for the idea that indepence and full-time study should coexist.

Forty hours of study a week and twenty hours of work is an extremely difficult working week to hold for the duration of studies – and to still live a scraping existence is not a particularly pleasant icing to top the cake. Unfortunately neither society nor the Universities in question – to a large extent – seem to have grasped this to any great degree. Society seems to ignore the sort of financial support that students do need (be it addressed by looking at the minimum wage, HELP loans or social security) and the Uni puts no great pressure – barring our good friend in the Services departments – on the social norms or the faculties to recognise this. I am told that the Commerce faculty recommends no more than eight hours of paid work a week for each student. I can understand working your students hard but it is burying your head in the sand – and severing your feet and sticking them in the clouds for good measure – to even pretend that this is a feasible option for almost any student who lives out of home. The commerce department might know negative gearing back to front but general household budgeting obviously needs a little work.

I’ll hear back from Centrelink within the next two weeks. My Mum comes in a little bit over the parental income threshold; I have not managed to earn $17000 of taxable income (indeed, I had enough difficulty finding a job that was not cash-in-hand), which rounds out to a not-insubstantial sum of over $200 a week, and I am seeing about the time-to-travel issue. I still find it interesting that I could spend 150 minutes a day on public transport and not be eligible for help to move in.

Cheers guys
jez