(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Students are skipping meals, stressing about making rent, and seriously struggling with their mental health, but old mate Albo seems more concerned with helping out the rich. The National Union of Students (NUS) recently released a report into student poverty and, spoiler alert, it’s all pretty grim.

Tens of thousands of students are living in poverty, unable to access welfare support like Youth Allowance because of thoughtless bureaucracy and age-based discrimination. One in seven students is regularly skipping meals and other necessities because of financial insecurity and the ever-increasing cost of living that the government is doing next to nothing about.

Zero per cent of rental properties across Australia are affordable to students living on Youth Allowance, and that’s if you can even get it. Seventy-nine per cent of students unable to access Youth Allowance said it negatively impacted their mental health.

You can imagine why we think Albo’s ongoing support for the stage three tax cuts is frankly insulting.

Currently students are pretty much locked out of the welfare system. If they suddenly lose their job — like perhaps when there is an unprecedented pandemic — or have to apply for placement in a regional area where they aren’t able to work, they are screwed.

Welfare is essential for students. We already have a full-time job — studying. Any work we do on top of that is simply to survive. And that’s not even considering the actual full-time work, or “placements”, that nursing, social work and teaching students have to do completely unpaid.

Surely these future, and often current, essential workers both need and deserve government support more than the bankers and businessmen who will profit from these tax cuts.

The pandemic showed how important our healthcare workers are, and now governments are realising it. The Victorian government just announced they are going to support free nursing degrees for the next two years. This announcement was great, but failed to realise the day-to-day reality of studying in these professions.

 “If I was on placement right now I’d be receiving no income, and it’s not just me. A lot of the health and education degrees have placements that they need to do to graduate,” River, a student interviewed as part of the report, told us.

“But there’s no support whatsoever for placements — so people living paycheque to paycheque are just screwed.”

According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, stage three tax cuts could cost up to $243 billion. With that money we could pay to lower the age of independence to allow greater youth welfare access ($5.3 billion), increase Youth Allowance ($5.7 billion), put dental and mental health on Medicare ($91.4 billion), and wipe student debt ($60.7 billion). Only then would we have made a healthy dent in that $243 billion estimate.

Clive Palmer will be $9000 better off under these tax cuts. We are literally signing away all of these social benefits to instead give the Clive Palmers of the world the equivalent of a year of someone’s uni fees.

Last month, Education Minister Jason Clare told the Australian Financial Review: “I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on your postcode.”

The thing is, the only way to help improve access and equity in education is to dismantle the structural barriers to education. If the government wants students to be able to move across the country or take time off work to go to university, it needs to provide the welfare support to make that possible.

Australia has the money to support young people through their education and combat the cost-of-living crisis. It’s time to lift all young people out of poverty, remove bureaucratic barriers preventing access to welfare, and make sure students have secure housing.

Choosing tax cuts for Clive Palmer and his mates over us is, like, not a vibe.