Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to contribute to the debate on the Social Security Amendment (National Green Jobs Corps Supplement) Bill 2009. I am sure that there is not a person in this House who is opposed to any programs designed to assist young people gain skills and employment, but I am also sure that I am not alone in my disappointment that we have a government that is more interested in appearing to be tackling this most important issue than actually tackling the issue.

The bill before us will introduce a training supplement of $41.60 to participants in the government’s National Green Jobs Corps. This supplement is in addition to any income support payments that they currently receive. It is expected that the participants will gain the skills necessary to tackle a range of environmental projects within their communities. The program is aimed at young people who have been unemployed for a sustained period of time and is designed to simultaneously address two of the most pressing issues of the present day. The first is that of rising youth unemployment and the second is that of preparing for the opportunities and challenges posed by environmental issues, which require a new workforce trained with green skills.

I think this is interesting because, while this is one program, I do not see a whole lot of evidence of a really serious push to develop green jobs. The government has announced the creation of 50,000 new green jobs, but we have yet to see any substantive program details that can go anywhere near achieving 50,000 new green jobs. And it is interesting because over the last couple of years I have been doing some investigations into green jobs, and there is a great opportunity for Australia to invest in the technology, to invest in the training and to ensure that our young people do have a future in the new green technology and the green jobs that will follow.

There are lots of examples. I think that, at present, Germany employs an estimated 300,000 people in green jobs. This is a country that has made a great virtue of its move to solar power and yet it is not a country with the natural attributes that our country has. I find it incredibly disappointing that our progress is so slow—that we have driven so much new enterprise in green jobs, solar energy and renewable energies out of this country to other countries. We have some incredible people. I have visited the University of New South Wales and I note that the scientists who have worked there have developed some amazing technology in solar power. We have the brainpower; we have the young people, who need to feel included and need to be given the training, and that may be through university level education.

One of my colleagues on the other side of this parliament was talking the other day about the need to make sure that young people are streamed into the system at all levels, because they are all necessary. I have said many times in this place a brain surgeon cannot do a job without the nurse who is trained to assist, the technologists who build the plant and equipment, the designers who design it and the mechanics who understand the mechanical workings of the equipment in an operating theatre. None of this would come together if we did not have skills at varying levels that come to work in concert to produce great outcomes. In the last few days we have seen this amazing operation taking place in Victoria to separate conjoined twins. What an amazing thing that is, but, when you look around that operating theatre and you see all the different components that contribute to that success, you see that you need more than just the surgeon.

One of the things I felt very pleased about when we were in government was that the government did put a great deal of emphasis on providing traineeships and apprenticeships for young people so that there was not the sense that if for some reason you could not go to university you were not worth anything. I think we need to continue to work on dispelling that idea. Of course I am very keen to ensure that all young people can meet the very highest aspirations they have, and if that means going to university they should be given every encouragement. But no-one should be made to feel inferior if they do not go to university, because all of these skills are enormously important, not only to the nation but to the life satisfaction of every individual. We should value that.

I was recently reading a fascinating article about why California is still America’s future. It has little to do with the subject we are talking about today, but I thought what was fascinating about this article was an examination of the development of the new renewable energy technology in California and the opportunity for young people in that country, America, to participate at all levels of development. It was quite interesting to examine some of the relevant issues in that article, which was written by Michael Grunwald and appeared in Time magazine. He was interviewing Mr Dinwoodie, the chief technology officer of SunPower, a large solar development company. The article reads:

If you think solar is an eco-fantasy, you probably don’t live in California, where rooftop installations have doubled for two years in a row, to 50,000, heading to the state goal of 1 million by 2017. The San Francisco utility Pacific Gas & Electric, which recently bolted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over climate policy, has 40% of the nation’s solar roofs in its territory. SunPower now has more than 5,000 employees. It’s building massive power plants for utilities, as well as roof panels for big-box stores, complete subdivisions and individual homes. Prices are plummeting, and competition is fierce, most of it from California firms like BrightSource, Solar City, eSolar, Nanosolar and Solyndra. ‘The scramble is on, and California is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the country,’ says Dinwoodie. ‘That’s true of all energy issues.’

There was a bit of an analysis at the end of the article—some blocks of information. For example, California is responsible for 38 per cent of solar energy patent registrations in the United States, ‘mirroring fast-growing local demand for clean energy’. Rooftop solar installations in California have doubled for two years in a row. Then there is the high-tech area:

Firms that made their mark in microchips, software and the Web and are now pouring resources into green ventures like the digitized energy grid, ultra-high-def video-conferencing that shrinks the carbon footprint of business travel and advanced code that perfectly positions solar mirrors.

Then you have green vehicles:

California leads the nation in fuel-economy standards and registered hybrid, electric and natural-gas-fueled cars. Los Angeles and San Francisco are the top US hybrid markets.

In biotech:

The state remains the player to watch in such fields as genomic medicine and photosynthetic-algae technology, which experts say could produce far more fuel than corn, soy or sugarcane can in the same space.

I have visited the algae-to-oil program at Murdoch University. It is truly amazing, but I see really little support. That program has had some funding support from government, but I really do not see enough emphasis on this. Here we are talking about a CPRS, this great global vision, and while I recognise that an ETS can send important price signals to drive the new technology, I think there is far too much emphasis on a scheme that is going to be extremely difficult to put into place on a global basis. We are not driving the new technologies and the new opportunities nearly hard enough in this country so that every Australian can participate in reducing their carbon footprint.

That brings me back to the goal of this bill. It is just one small part in what should be a very major policy thrust. The goal of this particular bill is to equip Australian youth with green skills and training for ongoing employment. This particular program is not something new or original. It was implemented by the former Prime Minister, John Howard, in 1997, if my memory serves me correctly. We had two highly successful programs operating for over a decade, achieving just these objectives. So the people of Australia were quite right, I think, to raise an eyebrow when the National Green Jobs Corps was announced as a new policy centrepiece of the first ALP party conference after 13 years in opposition. The government proudly announced the creation, as I said, of 50,000 new green jobs, but we have since found out that the figure probably will not come to 5,000 and that most of the places are not new—and many are not even jobs in the real sense. That is a great pity, because we have these other opportunities beckoning and are doing little to prepare ourselves for the kind of future that we need to be preparing for. In any event, this grand announcement at the party conference was about publicity over policy. Again, it is very disappointing. It was about taking credit where credit is not due. It is truly symbolic, I think, of the style of governance that we are seeing, and that is disappointing.

Of the 50,000 new green jobs that the government has announced, 10,000 places have been allocated for the National Green Jobs Corps. If this program sounds familiar, it will also look familiar. For more than 10 years the coalition’s Green Corps successfully equipped young Australians with green skills by engaging them in community environment programs. The National Green Jobs Corps is essentially an amalgam of the Green Corps and Work for the Dole, as participants will receive a supplement but also continue to receive their Newstart, youth allowance or other payments, such as parenting payment. In May 2008 the government announced, in relation to the Green Corps:

The Green Corps Allowance will not continue. Job seekers participating in Green Corps projects will receive an income support payment, if eligible. Access to Green Corps projects will be widened to include job seekers of any working age.

In essence, the National Green Jobs Corps is a reversion to the Green Corps before these changes were made, with a few small tinkerings, excessive grandstanding and a good dose of repackaging. It would appear that the projects that will be undertaken under the banner of the National Green Jobs Corps will be largely the same as those that have been enriching Australian communities for the last 10 years. So the key differences are that instead of being targeted at 17- to 20-year-olds it is now targeted at 17- to 24-year-olds, participants in the Green Corps received an allowance of $240 a fortnight, and participants in the National Green Jobs Corps will receive their income support and a supplement.

I support the National Green Jobs Corps because I supported the Green Corps very strongly. In the 10 years from 1997, the Green Corps participants planted more than 15 million trees, erected more than 8,000 kilometres of fencing, removed 37,000 hectares of weeds, collected 9,500 kilograms of seeds, built or maintained 5,000 kilometres of walking trails and completed more than 5,000 animal or plant surveys. The program was really a win-win. The community and the environment benefited from the tireless work of dedicated and motivated young Australians who worked hard to improve the community for the benefit and enjoyment of all. I hope some of these young participants might get to hear of the debate in this place. I would like to commend them and congratulate them for the enormous work that they have done to their communities. As I said in many graduations, one day they may be able to come back with their children and their grandchildren and say, ‘I helped to preserve this piece of natural bush,’ or ‘I built these facilities as a young person.’ I think they did a fantastic job.

But it was not just the environment that was nurtured and supported in this program. What I often saw was young people coming in very shy, very unsure of themselves, and having difficulty talking to people in the public arena. I would come back after the program had finished, at the graduation, and these same young people would be up there giving fantastic presentations, having bonded with a group of other people, learnt how to work as part of a team and learnt new skills—real skills. They also learnt about the natural environment. They learnt about the threat to remnant vegetation and how difficult it is, as development encroaches, for our animals and insects and birds to live on these remnants and to have to cross from one section to another to find habitats and feeding places. So these young people learnt about the threat to our environment and about its sensitivity.

I went to places like Gingin Brook in my electorate, the home of my ancestors. The waterwheel that my great-grandfather built to irrigate the great Cheriton Estate in Gingin still turns today. It was built around 1843 and it turned 24 hours a day to irrigate a local farm. It has been moved into the centre of town, it stands today and it is still turning. So for me to go to Gingin Brook and see the work these young people have done to clean out the weed that was choking the brook and the work to replace introduced vegetation species with indigenous plants was just a treat. I could go on and on—all over my electorate work was being done. Sometimes it was collecting seed; sometimes it was cleaning our rivers and waterways; sometimes it was building walkways for people with a disability so they too could go into our bushland and enjoy the natural environment and have greater access to it; and sometimes it was building bird habitats and fences or weeding—as I said, there were many, many jobs. But what I also saw was a greater and deepening appreciation of the sensitivity of the environment in which we live and the great need to preserve this environment. And that is something that will last for those young people over a lifetime.

The other matter that was very noticeable was the way in which young people were encouraged to engage with the community. In communities like York, Gingin, Chittering and Northam, all over the electorate of Pearce, we have Landcare groups and environmental groups, people who volunteer their time to ensure the improvement and sustainability of our environment. These people gave their time freely and they assisted, aided and interacted with these young people in a way that gives you great hope for the future. So I also thank those many men and women who have worked for many years in the voluntary organisations throughout Pearce and have been mentors to some of these young people, inspiring them, guiding them and assisting them. We are a lucky country to have such people.

I think the National Green Jobs Corps is an important program. It is important that we continue this work. It is important that we provide maximum opportunities for our young people in this country to begin to feel part of the solution of reducing our carbon footprint and continuing to improve and look after the environment in which we live.

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