Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Slipper, I thank you for assisting me to be here to speak. The Social Security Legislation Amendment (Connecting People with Jobs) Bill 2010 puts in place the compliance component of the government’s Connecting People with Jobs proposal. This was an election commitment announced by the Prime Minister on 11 August 2010. I have talked to many training organisations that have had students finish their courses. But then they cannot place them easily, because it takes a fair bit of trust and courage by businesses to take on a youngster that has been unemployed for, maybe, a longer period of time. This is soul-destroying for the younger person who has just finished a good hands-on training program or course but then has to find a job requiring those skills. This often means they have to move away from their support base and travel to other areas. This is an emerging issue within the job market.

The Connecting People with Jobs proposal is an active regional labour market strategy establishing a trial relocation assistance package aimed at connecting job seekers with employment opportunities elsewhere in Australia. The trial is proposed to run over two years from 1 January 2011 and offers additional support to up to 2,000 job seekers who have been unemployed for more than 12 months to relocate to take up an identified ongoing full-time job or apprenticeship. It provides reimbursement of up to $6,000 for actual expenses incurred in relocating to regional areas, or $3,000 for relocation to metropolitan areas. Families with dependent children will have access to an additional $3,000.

To be eligible to participate in this trial, job seekers must come from areas with unemployment rates higher than the national unemployment rate. Job seekers who receive relocation assistance and subsequently leave that position within six months from commencement without reasonable excuse will not be paid unemployment benefits for 12 weeks—up from the current eight weeks—for leaving employment voluntarily. Amendments to social security legislation are required to implement this increased non-payment period.

Employers who employ job seekers who receive relocation assistance will receive a subsidy of up to $2,500 in recognition of the additional support and assistance individuals will receive in the early stages of their employment. This program has a lot of potential and can be of great benefit to the rural sector, which has seasonal shortages. There is an opportunity now for some of the job companies to develop teams of agricultural workers to move around and go to where the work is. Getting young workers who have been unemployed for a long period of time to be job ready is quite a task and needs special programs to equip them not only for work away from the support systems but also to work in groups and in teams.

We have many of those needs in Tasmania in the rural sector, where there is always a need to organise job seekers and working people into organised teams and organised ways, and also to have a period so that those people know where their work is. There are enormous amounts of work in this area getting the fruit off the vines and pruning, but we need to organise it so that it is much easier and better. Getting vegies up, lifting the potatoes, working in the contractors area, using the spud lifters, cutting the cauliflower, cutting the broccoli and getting the sprouts off takes a lot of people. A lot of women are involved in this casual work throughout Tasmania and those crews need to be able to move around and be better organised. We need to pull this together in a much more organised way than we do at the present time. Lots of cherries have been planted in Tasmania, maybe in anticipation that the New Zealanders are going to flood us with apples. In those areas it takes a lot of people to get the fruit off at certain times. But we need to have people who are trained that can continually come around and have a full year of work in an organised way. This can be organised if we take enough effort and put enough time and thought into it. It also means that we need to make sure that modern management practices are used on the employer’s side. I am thinking about fencing contractors and fencers as well. Of course, we have done these things in the past with the shearing industry. For 100 years itinerant workers have taken the wool off the sheep’s back by moving around and working throughout our great nation.

Having an organised structure gives dignity to working people so that they can use their skills, organise their year’s work and know when it is going to happen. Being able to work in that sort of situation is still not organised as well as it could be at this present stage. I am hopeful that programs like the one here may be able to be seen as a way of interface between the employer, the employees and the job seekers. We may need to look at those sometime in the future.

Only recently I was in my electorate in Gagebrook at a graduation of young people who had finished a course of working in environmental considerations and horticulture at a wildlife park where they had gained considerable skills. Just about all of them turned up for the graduation ceremony. But the talk there between employers, who had given them some work experience and work, was about getting that next transfer to a broader spectrum of employers. That was the issue on the table and it needs to be addressed.

I have also experienced the issues in child care in this area. Women who work in the vegetable pick-up areas need child care when the work is available, just as on the coast they need child care when the fleet comes in and when they are splitting the fish, opening scallops et cetera. Getting the right models to fit modern work is one of the challenges that confronts us, and a bill like this is endeavouring to deal with that by connecting employers to employees and job seekers.

So I think the opportunity we have here is good. I understand this program is over several years and that it will be monitored in that time. I think that is a good thing. I think there are a number of pluses and a lot of things we can gain from it. This program of course shows very much the government’s commitment to social inclusion, which is important in all regional development and regional development policy that exists in our country, ensuring that isolated communities can develop some self-help schemes to help put things in place.

So I really support this program. I hope that we can make it work and I look forward to being able to look at broader aspects of this process of connecting job seekers and employers and those that are seeking a skills base. I certainly give my full support to this bill.

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