PARTICIPATION in the labour market by Australia's youth is as low as it's been since at least 1978.
That's as far back as the figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics go.
But realistically, it's a safe bet that participation is a low as it's been since Arthur Phillip landed at Botany Bay with his 11 shiploads of convicts, guns and exotic news diseases in 1788.
The Bureau's figures show participation in the jobs market by 15 to 24-year-olds averaged 66.6 per cent over the year to March, a record low.
Five years earlier, in the year to March 2009, participation for this age group averaged 70.4 per cent, after mostly hovering around 70-72 per cent since the late 1970s.
The obvious explanation for the fall that the young are staying at school and university for longer these days.
It's an attractive explanation, but has a couple of catches.
First, you can be a full-time student and still be unemployed, as long as you are looking for a job - even a three-hour shift at a dress shop or cafe.
In fact, nearly half - 47 per cent, to be exact - of the unemployed in this age group are in full-time education.
So being a student doesn't stop you being unemployed.
The other catch is that there's a better explanation for falling participation.
The latest downturn in participation is around the time of the global financial crisis in 2008.
This type of thing has happened before, typically when the labour market turns its back on jobseekers, as it did in the latter half of the 1990s and the recession early that decade.
In the six years since 2008, the number of people with jobs grew at less than half the pace of the six years before.
So the latest downturn in participation, coinciding with unusually slow employment growth, is just history repeating.
And there's plenty of evidence that labour market weakness is affecting younger would-be workers.
The long-term unemployment is the number unemployed for a year or more as a percentage of the number active in the jobs market, either employed or jobseeking.
For 15 to 24s the long-term jobless rate averaged 2.5 per cent in the first quarter of this year.
That was the worst quarter in the available 13 years of data.
The figures also show the unemployed are spending an extra seven weeks longer without work than they did a year ago, 27 weeks this March versus 20 last March.
It's still not a patch on the 61 weeks the average jobseeker aged 55 or more has spent on society's rubbish heap, but it's significantly more than it was.
So all the evidence suggests the reason young people are becoming less engaged with the labour market is that it's simply a lot harder to find a job these days.
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