Once again, our federal government is seeing numbers where people exist

But there is one part of the pre-budget chatter that has particularly concerned me: the ReBoot program Frydenberg announced on March 18 that will receive $46.8 million over four years. ReBoot will be targeted to 5000 "disengaged" young people aged 15 to 24 through three months' of initiatives in a bid to assist them in overcoming barriers to finding work. Frydenberg spruiked the program as an "historic opportunity to get more people off welfare and into work."

"Historic" is an interesting word choice. It suggests that this particular program will be embraced as an important moment in history at some point in the future. Presumably, therefore, it is different from all the other apparently less important programs that are also designed to "get more people off welfare and into work," like the PaTH program, ParentsNext, Cashless Debit Card, Work for the Dole. Perhaps this program will actually treat people receiving social security payments with respect and like ... yeah, OK. I can't even finish that sentence with a straight face.

You see, once again, our federal government is seeing numbers where people exist.

Employment and Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert explained that this program will be directly targeting young people who didn't show a "positive attitude" or "reliability", as these traits are reportedly employers' highest priorities with regards to hiring decisions.

I'm curious as to how, and who, will be determining whether the teen has a positive attitude, and how they will differentiate between a lack of a "positive attitude" and a normal teenage attitude.

Reboot will provide hands-on learning, mentoring, and work experience, to ensure that the participants are "in a better position to engage with existing youth employment programs to continue their pathway to training or employment."

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Once again, the government is assuming that an individual's apparent ill-utilised potential stems from something that can be "fixed" by forcing them into learning and work programs, without addressing the reasons why the young person might be disengaged.

Frydenberg insisted that the program is about delivering "generational skilling for our young Australians, not generational scarring," but you can't just force programs on people already scarred like a coat of paint on a scarred wall, and say, "there, fixed it". The scars are still there, underneath. And the youth of today's scars are diverse and many.

Young people are stepping into a world ravaged by a pandemic, climate change impacts, soaring costs of living, the impossibility of housing prices, petrol being a luxury, oh and World War III brewing in Europe.

Even before the war in the Ukraine, the Youth Survey Report 2021 highlighted that the issues these young people are most stressed about are COVID-19 (47.5 per cent), the environment (38 per cent), and equity and discrimination (35.4 per cent). We have seen more disruptions to work and education in the last three years since World War II, and yet the government is targeting kids who aren't happy enough with more training?

The survey report showed that four in 10 young people were extremely or very concerned about mental health. 46 per cent rated coping with stress, and 36.8 per cent rated school or study problems as a personal area of concern in relation to their mental health.

These are real issues, and they are real people that deserve the respect of a government who understands that we can't just Band-aid the "youth problem" and hope it holds. The government can't treat them like children while burdening them with adult expectations.

There are many words I can think of to describe this program, but "historic" is not one of them. It is just another example of rebranding the tired old models of service delivery designed to line the pockets of the same old providers through an invite-only tender process.