PoliticalClaims.au

The Case for Criticism

The critics' concerns were legitimate:

• Interns genuinely received only $200 per fortnight from the program itself (with welfare on top), creating an effective hourly rate of approximately $4 per hour for internship work [1][3]
• Host businesses were not required to hire participants after internships ended, and the scheme provided opportunities for businesses to cycle through interns repeatedly [1]
• The Department of Employment admitted it could not guarantee interns would not work weekend shifts that would normally require penalty rates to paid workers, creating a mechanism for avoiding penalty rate costs [3]
• 7% of employers reported actual displacement of existing workers [1]
• The scheme fell well short of its employment outcomes target: an evaluation found that only 14% of job placements following internships represented genuinely "new" jobs; 55% would have been filled regardless, and 30% would have gone to the jobseeker anyway [1]

The Government's Legitimate Points

However, the government's defense also contained valid points:

• The $4/hour framing omitted the continuing welfare payments participants received, which made their actual income situation more complex than "$4/hour" suggested [4]
• 64.5% of the 59,000+ young people who participated in at least one element of the scheme found jobs [1], though this includes the full training/employment pathway, not just internships
• About 39% of internship participants were hired by their host business, suggesting the scheme did achieve its basic objective for some participants [1]
• The Australian Council of Social Services, while unions opposed it, welcomed PaTH as an improvement over the previous Work for the Dole scheme [1]
• Business groups (Business Council of Australia, Australian Industry Group, Council of Small Businesses) supported the initiative [1]

The Actual Problem

The core issue appears to be that the scheme had low effectiveness at scale. The evaluation showing that 86% of employment outcomes were not attributable to the scheme suggests systemic issues with the design. Whether interns were exploited depends on perspective: they had the same working conditions as any other unpaid worker at many companies, but the explicit government subsidy to businesses created a financially asymmetrical situation that gave employers incentives to use interns rather than hire regular workers.

Is this unique to Coalition? Youth employment schemes with wage subsidies are common across different governments and countries. The distinguishing feature was the low supplementary payment ($200 per fortnight) compared to minimum wage. Labor's alternative would have paid full minimum wage, which would have been more expensive but potentially more effective. This reflects genuine policy differences about the relative costs and benefits of different models - not Coalition-specific exploitation.