Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Look at us—this chamber is full of people with work ethic and, hopefully, worth ethic. I tell you what: a lot of the young people have got them both, and I think that bodes well for the future.

Finally, it is said that students will be enabled to develop work and organisational skills, including time management skills—indeed. Both my sons have had jobs and continue to work. One of them has excellent time management skills and the other one does not, so I think he needs some more work experience to develop those skills. But they are really important skills as we all know.

At page 24, the report quotes Dr Phil McKenzie from the Australian Council for Educational Research:

Working is a very positive experience in the main, as long as it is not an unreasonable number of hours or in an exploitative situation.

I reckon that sums up exactly what the students said about their experiences. They said they could handle the hours in the main as long as there were not too many. I think a lot of them said that about 20 hours were enough and that 15 hours were pretty reasonable. But also they wanted to be valued at work, and that leads me to some of the recommendations that this report makes. One of the main things that came out of the report for me was that employers—like everyone else in this world—enter into social relationships. In this case it is an economic as well as an employer-employee relationship, but in the end it is about valuing each other and what we do and, importantly in the work situation, about the customer.

Many employers that we spoke to were highly cognisant of the needs of young people in their dealings with young people and they were very fair. Some were not, but that was more out of ignorance than anything else. I suppose what the report is saying is: be aware of each other’s needs—from the student’s point of view, the needs of your employer. And you have got to communicate. Likewise, there is a responsibility on the employer to communicate with their employees—in this case, young people. We found that, essentially, some form of compact between the two is really important. If we can do that in a non-onerous way for employers, then I think that is really important. That is the same as a recommendation in here that some form of formal recognition of the employment record and the characteristics and the value of that employee for the employer would be very useful. So communication seems to be at the heart of this—it is at the heart of life, isn’t it? It is certainly at the heart of the workplace. When there are reasonable communications, then there is a good work experience, and I think that is really important.

We thank the schools very much, and I certainly thank my local schools. The committee were kind enough to come to Burnie, and we had the Burnie Chamber of Commerce on 21 April—a couple of days before a momentous event in world history, apart from Shakespeare’s birthday—

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