AUKUS homework and driving forklifts: governments’ love affair with child labour

We honestly don’t know which element of the news — revealed elsewhere in Crikey today — that defence has launched a “nuclear-powered submarine propulsion challenge” in Australian high schools makes us cringe the hardest.

Is it considering the face of the communications flack who came up with the program as it dawns on them it’s been launched during a week when the primary association with submarines is pure, abject terror? The transparent propaganda effort this represents? Imagining the weapons-grade earnestness of the anti-war poetry that emo kids will write in their journals after being subjected to it? Or the “wears a blazer to free dress day” spods for whom a government program aimed at inspiring kids to “discover how nuclear propulsion works” achieves its goals?

All that aside, by getting kids to “design their own engineering plans for submarine nuclear propulsion”, the program joins the glorious tradition of governments and business groups endorsing child labour. The number of school kids with jobs has skyrocketed, which will delight many in the political class, from the sounds.

There was, of course, the Australian Retail Association’s recent contention that the best way to fill 40,000 jobs in the sector wasn’t to improve pay and conditions or do better at stamping out the harassment retail workers often face, but to get more children in the workforce by loosening regulations around the working age. But they also wanted to allow pensioners to work, and you’d expect businesses to ask for that kind of thing. Ditto for the realisation that many businesses haven’t so much advocated for changes to child employment law as just ignored them entirely. It’s when governments put it forward that it really raises an eyebrow.

For example, the New South Wales government discussed burnishing their really, really, really impressive pitch to young people by suggesting children as young as 10 could do unpaid labour to pay off the $1000 COVID-19 fines they were being issued.

And then there’s the undisputed big dog of poorly received and swiftly abandoned policy pitches: Scott Morrison putting forward the possibility, during his last few months in the Lodge, of solving COVID-19-related supply chain issues by allowing 16-year-olds to drive forklifts in warehouses. You might wonder at the safety implications of getting kids to do such manual labour, but as Morrison’s approach to the football pitch revealed, child safety wasn’t necessarily his biggest priority.