Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to add my support to the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Family Participation Measures) Bill 2011. This bill introduces amendments to the Social Security Act 1991 and the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 with the aim of helping teenage parents and jobless families in particular. It identifies some 10 disadvantaged locations across Australia where trials will be undertaken to see how teenagers or families without work can be assisted and supported into a new experience of jobs and, in the case of the teenagers, year 12 equivalent and ongoing education.

One of the 10 disadvantaged locations chosen is in my electorate of Murray in my Goulburn Valley communities. There we have a number of teenage parents and parents who have been jobless into the second and third—and in one case the fourth—generation. It is very difficult for a family or a young teenage parent to break the cycle of poverty, social isolation and disadvantage when she has a very difficult time raising children and when she may only be 14 or 15 years old. Gaining work in small or larger communities is not a case of what you can do but who you know. A lot of the employment that is available, particularly in regional centres, is advertised by word of mouth, by networks of friends and by family members. If you have been unemployed for generations in your family, you simply do not have those networks where the job in the shop or hospitality or the apprenticeship in the trade is made known to you.

So it is very important that we look at different ways to engage these young parents who have not achieved year 12. They need to be given a fresh start in life and new ways to deal with all of the challenges that they will face, first as parents but then as people who should be supported to become independent in their lives. When I was Minister for Workforce Participation, the coalition introduced a new measure for parenting payments that required those whose youngest child had reached six to look for a job of at least 15 hours per week. We were aware that, in requiring that of these parents, we had to make sure they had access to child care, that they were not going to have to travel too far to get that work and that they were skilled in the area of work that they were attempting to break into. There is a whole lot of special challenges for families where parents may never have worked and have no role models of people who were in employment before.

One of the issues that we confront in the Goulburn Valley is the fact that standard Australian English is not necessarily spoken in all of our families. In our Indigenous families, Aboriginal English is commonly spoken and this language is not readily accepted in some places of employment. We have a lot of non-English-speaking background families as well who came as migrants a generation before or who have come more recently as refugees. Those families, especially the teenage mothers of young children, need special language skills support.

I am very concerned that in the pilot to be undertaken in my electorate we encourage the participants to not see themselves as targeted and stigmatised as failures and therefore as special cases for potential punishment, meaning that if their new requirements are not met their income support payments will be suspended. We want them to understand that this is an opportunity of a lifetime—that they are going to be given, hopefully, additional support to identify where their key life interests are; and, in the case of teenage parents, that they are able to go back to a form of education that fits their family responsibilities, given the age of their children and their own personal circumstances in terms of where they live, whether they are mobile and whether they can get to a TAFE or a community learning centre. We want to make sure that these young teenagers embrace this program and do not think they are being pursued but step forward and say, 'This is an opportunity.'

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