Imagine you are a young person in the Hunter.
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You have a large government tertiary education debt, yet because of the jobs crisis you can’t get work.
Or maybe you have a trade qualification, but again cannot get work.
You have to wait four weeks to access the dole and you’re on a waiting list for government housing, which could take up to 10 years.
This is the reality for the Hunter’s young people, who every day fall through the gaps in the social services system.
The industries that gave eager new workers a start, such as mining, have started to fail.
Just last month, more than 200 workers were laid off by Yancoal.
Those who turn to tertiary education have an uncertain future as the government discusses the privatisation of universities, which could push the cost of a degree up so much that graduates start their adult lives with huge debts.
Dale Foster’s story, the young man who appealed to the people of Maitland for work only to end up homeless, is sadly one tale of many.
A faceless mass of young people have fallen through the cracks of a system that has provided them with little to no emergency support and no future.
Of course it is not just the young. Last week the Mercury told the story of a Maitland man who took a redundancy pay out and ended up homeless, having to sleep in his car because he could not get work.
But if the young people can’t get a good start to life, how are they meant to build the future of Maitland?
Something needs to be done to create a safety net for this generation of people who have been left to slip through the cracks.