Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Minister for Workforce Participation) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Rankin suggests that we are talking about abolishing PES. That is the sort of reaction we would expect from the opposition. We are, of course, retaining PES. We see it as vitally important. But we see it as even more important that, after you have completed your course, you are helped to be placed into a position of work—indeed, you may be able to be placed immediately back into the workplace. In terms of your own morale, your sense of wellbeing, your ability to be rapidly vocationally rehabilitated, the most significant thing is to return to the place of work. It may be part time initially, if that is what your capacity only allows you in the first instance. We know that it keeps your employment statistics down if you skim people off and put them into endless back-to-back courses, particularly if you can call them full-time study, but we are not into simply churning people endlessly through TAFE courses; what we are about is giving Australians a real chance to be independent of welfare if they are of working age.

We know that work, first and foremost, has proven again and again to be the best way to assist individuals and their families back into a life where they are no longer stigmatised, alienated or indeed depressed because they cannot earn the sort of income that they wish to earn to fully participate in Australian society. We know that intergenerational welfare dependency is not a benign experience: children in a household where there is no breadwinner are four times more likely to become welfare dependent themselves and never know work. We are determined to break the cycle of intergenerational welfare dependency. Unfortunately in Australia there are over 700,000 people on disability support pensions who may never know the world of work. A lot of them have been grandfathered. We are determined that those who can return to the workplace will be assisted to do so, with vocational rehabilitation that focuses on their capacity to fully participate in the Australian economy. That is why your focus on and obsession with training, we think, is not in the best interests of all Australians.

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