Merina Maharjan moved to Australia from Nepal four years ago, and last July she moved to Hobart to study an Advanced Leadership course.
She has qualifications in accounting, but wasn’t able to find work in her chosen field before the pandemic. The 28 year old managed to find work as a cleaner, but that work has reduced since the pandemic began.
''It’s gotten worse, frankly, my shift hours have decreased by 80 to 90 per cent. For the last 3 months I think I’ve hardly worked, and if I did not have my partner with me, I would be struggling financially, really bad."
Rashik Shrestha is the general manager of Expert Education and Visa Services in Hobart, providing career counselling and visa assistance to international students.
Merina Maharjan has been able to get some work cleaning AirBnBs, but that work has dried up since the start of the pandemic. Source: SBS News/Sarah Maunder
"I found a lot of students struggling to get a job, in every sector, not a particular sector, in every sector it’s really hard for them to get a job.'' said Mr Shrestha.
''Things are really hard for international students at the moment, most of the students get their tuition fees from home, but even their parents are struggling with the fees, and because they’re losing their jobs here, whether stood down or losing them, the students are struggling with their living expenses.”
Colony47 is an independent organisation in Tasmania aiming to address issues of housing, education and employment. In the weeks after lockdown restrictions began in Tasmania, the Transition to Work program at Colony47 gained an extra 200 participants looking for work, who'd lost jobs due to the pandemic.
“A significant proportion were in those industries that closed down during the isolation period, but we’re not seeing the full extent of that either, because young people would have been supported in some parts by JobKeeper as well, and our Transition To Work is generally people that are on JobSeeker payments now through Centrelink.” said Danny Sutton, CEO of Colony47.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate for young people in Tasmania was 15.9 per cent, according to a March 2019 report by the Brotherhood of St Laurence.
Danny Sutton is the CEO of Colony47, a youth service in Hobart. Source: SBS News: Sarah Maunder
The national rate for youth unemployment at the time was 11.2 per cent.
Since the onset of the pandemic, an analysis of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Labour Force Survey, by economist Saul Eslake, showed young people aged between 15 and 24 made up 38.8 per cent of the jobs lost in Tasmania, despite that age group only making up 15 per cent of the state’s population.
A different report from the National Skills Commission called A Snapshot in Time analysed Australia’s labour market during the COVID-19 pandemic. It showed Australia’s youth unemployment rate rose from 11.6 per cent in March 2020, to 16.1 per cent in May.
Tania Hunt is the CEO of the Youth Network of Tasmania - the state’s main organisation representing young people.
“I think that we need to have a particular targeted focus on youth unemployment, we need to look at job creation for young Tasmanians, and importantly, we need to link young people with local employers in their communities, so that they can start to build connections and networks and understand where the opportunities are available to them, because I believe currently that is lacking." she said.
A statement from Tasmania’s minister for Education and Training, Jeremy Rockliff, says the state government is aware that COVID-19 has had an impact on youth unemployment.
Tania Hunt is the CEO of the Youth Network of Tasmania, representing the state's young people. Source: SBS News: Sarah Maunder
It says the government has a number on initiatives in place aimed at improving the training and employment outcomes for young people.
These include TasTAFE’s “Skill Up” campaign, providing free training for people who want to up-skill; the Skills Matching Service that helps connect job-ready workers with employers; and the Rapid Response Skills Initiative that provides $3,000 towards the cost of training for people who've been made redundant.
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