You can kill someone and not do ten years, yet the Corona-recession has sentenced many young people to a decade of scrounging for jobs.

No positive spin can hide the fact that between February and May, the number of young people with full-time jobs fell by 10.1 per cent.

Most new jobs in Adelaide and across Australia are part-time or casual.

It was tough for young people before the virus hit. It’s catastrophic now.

Youth unemployment hit a 23-year high of 16.4 per cent in June, falling to 15.6 per cent in October,

But that’s still higher than the peak of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, whose effects are still with us.

As reported by the ABC (7 Dec, 2020), University of Melbourne Economics Professor Jeff Borland, said, “When you look at the whole labour market … there’s this divergence by age, and young people are a long way behind where they were in March.”

“Young people who have finished their education and are trying to transition to work are the ones being squeezed,” Mr Borland said.

The frightening long-term impact of this is a phenomenon called scarring.

“The fact you’ve had a harder time in the labour market today casts a long shadow. It means if you graduate during a recession, that affects your labour market outcomes and it can last for up to a decade,” Professor Boland said.

The best thing to prevent long-term scarring is for the Federal Government to create more jobs.

Programs like mentoring, which the Victorian Government introduced in its latest budget, was another tactic to keep young people connected to the labour market.