Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

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Harris (2001) claims that during the later Hawke regime, expansionary budgets were
introduced, and citing Watts (1999) 35 also claims that there was a ´willingness to spend´
on labour market programmes but this mostly went to Job Creation, such as the CEP. An
overview of how SYETP expenditure and placements varied across these periods, indeed
the life of the programme, can be gained from Table 2.6. This information, sourced from
Ross (1988), gives details of the fluctuations in spending allocated to SYETP and
numbers treated by the programme. It is clear the amount spent on SYETP doubled in
1983/4 compared to the prior year, yet the SYETP share of labour market programme
expenditure did not rise but fell slightly. To gauge the scale of SYETP programme
expenditure to the cost of unemployment benefit payments to youths: at June 1983
slightly more than 300,000 15-24 year olds were paid unemployment benefit, and
benefits to 15-24 year olds were roughly estimated to cost $990 million in 1982/3 (DEYA
(1983): xxix). In contrast, in the same year only $120 million was spent on SYETP. The
expenditure on SYETP was then not great relative to the general cost of supporting the
unemployed. This is despite the subsidy rate generally being higher than the benefit
amount (see Table 2.4).
35 Cited p 9, Harris (2001) referring to Watts, R. (1999) “The future of work: economists and employment
policy 1983-1999” conference paper presented at the National Social Policy Conference Sydney, Social
Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales.