Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

(   The Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014 claims to address the current crisis facing our unemployed youth. However, the bill unfortunately raises more questions than it answers. Today's labour market is tightening. In February 2014 our unemployment rate hit six per cent for the first time in recent memory. The Abbott government has promised one million new jobs, but that is little more than a mirage on the horizon.

In these circumstances, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find employment, particularly for Australia's youth. Figures released by the Brotherhood of St Laurence in February show that 12.4 per cent of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 were out of work in January of this year. The figures are even higher in Melbourne's west, where over 13 per cent of young people are not able to find work in the current job market—more than double the official unemployment rate. This is to say nothing of the ambitious young people who are underemployed or stuck in temporary work, unable to find the security of a permanent job. The first steps in starting a career are hard enough without a marketplace that will not give you a chance. It places these young people in an extremely vulnerable position, forcing them to trade away their work entitlements for any chance at employment. Youth unemployment rates are reaching crisis levels, and they look unlikely to ease any time soon in Melbourne's west.

There are tough times facing the manufacturing industry in my electorate. With 2½ thousand jobs gone at the Toyota plant in Altona and with more than 1,000 jobs at risk of disappearing at the BAE Systems shipyards in Williamstown, the traditional career path taken by many young people in Melbourne's west, into to a world of manufacturing, will no longer be available. Jobs at the businesses who supply these two companies will also disappear, making opportunities scarce for those trying to enter the working world. The jobs marketplace for the youth of Melbourne's west is not a promising one.

We need to do all that we can to get these young people into work. Through the right training, work experience, incentives and, most importantly, the right level of government support, Labor believe that we can help these young people to find jobs that are right for them. Labor support work and training programs as a pathway to get these young people into the workforce.

Work and training programs that are aimed at improving our environment will have an additional benefit, for we all know that the natural beauty that we find in our parks, reserves and beaches adds something immeasurable to the enjoyment of our life. They are places to gather with friends and family, to get active, to celebrate the most important events in our lives and to share our lives with others. Looking after these public places, which add so much to our lives, is essential for the soul of our nation. It is also a moral imperative. The words of Antoine de Saint Exupery are often quoted, yet they still ring as true today as they ever did: 'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.' So it is our obligation to care for our natural environment so that our descendants may enjoy it as much as we do.

The previous Labor government took these words to heart. It introduced a raft of both immediate and long-term measures to protect our nation's environment. It added new national parks to the World Heritage List, including the Ningaloo Reef, and it added the Koongarra area to Kakadu National Park, so that these parks would have domestic and international protections. Most significantly, the previous Labor government created the most comprehensive system of national marine parks in the world, covering thousands of miles of Australian coastline and sea, with the same protections given to our national parks.

Protecting the environment is a core Labor value. Unfortunately, however, this trait is not shared by our colleagues across the floor in the coalition. The Abbott government's environmental record after only six months in office is abysmal. It has disallowed the classification of the Murray River from the Darling to the sea as an 'endangered community'. It has abandoned efforts to have Queensland's Cape York added to the World Heritage List. It has approved every request for a development in one of Australia's brightest jewels, the Great Barrier Reef, despite UNESCO threatening to list the reef as being 'in danger'. It has secretly rolled back the marine system created under Labor by undoing the management plans that gave the system effect. This is a government that has approached the World Heritage Committee and asked it to delist 74,000 hectares of protected forests. This is a Prime Minister who has claimed: 'We have quite enough national parks. We have quite enough locked up forests already.' This is a government that cannot be trusted to look after our natural environment.

However, the Green Army Program in the bill under consideration is one of the few programs introduced by the Abbott government that could actually go some way to protecting the environment, even in Melbourne's west. Many of our parks, beaches and reserves would benefit from a team of young people to care for and maintain these valuable community areas. Indeed, many of the parks in Melbourne's west are already lucky enough to benefit from the support of the community. I applaud the work of voluntary organisations such as Friends of Lower Kororoit Creek and their president, Geoff Mitchelmore, as well as our Landcare volunteers who work throughout Melbourne's west. They work tirelessly to ensure that our parks and gardens are kept beautiful.

An employment program that provides even more resources for these public places to be cared for and provides our youth with training and work opportunities would clearly provide great benefit to my community. After all, programs like this are a part of Labor's heritage. The Landcare and Environment Action Program, LEAP, was introduced by the Keating government in 1992. It provided work opportunities for young people and fostered good environmental outcomes. This bill proposes to create a similar employment program, although this is hard to see from the grandiose statements of the environment minister. He is at pains to convince us that this is an environmental program, mainly because the government does not have any other coherent environmental policy. In his second reading speech, he touts the Green Army as, 'a central component of the government's cleaner environment plan,' and claims that it will, 'deliver tangible benefits for the environment'. In the explanatory memorandum too, the Green Army's credentials are vaunted. It is described as making, 'a real difference to the environment and local communities through projects such as restoring and protecting habitat, weeding, planting, cleaning up creeks and rivers and restoring cultural heritage places'.

But let me be clear: the bill under consideration before us is for an employment program. It is primarily designed not to look after the environment but to get young people back into work. This is clear from the program's explicit focus on young people between the ages of 17 to 24, even though there are people of all ages who have the time and passion to get involved in conservation work. It is clear from the environment minister's frequent references to the Green Army as a workforce, which is even contained in the explanatory memorandum to the bill before us today. There is nothing wrong with this. A program designed with skill can achieve the aims of both creating employment opportunities and caring for the environment. Labor has been proud to support this form of employment program throughout its various iterations, from the Landcare and Environment Action Program I mentioned before to bills like the one before us today.

As an employment program, the Green Army should give to its workers the rights and protections bestowed on all employees under Australian employment law. It is this aspect of the bill under consideration that is most concerning to me, for the bill before us explicitly excludes the Green Army workers from many of the protections awarded to Commonwealth employees. It excludes Green Army members from the definition of 'worker' under the Work Health and Safety Act. It excludes Green Army members from the definition of 'employee' under the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act. Most importantly, it excludes Green Army members from the definition of 'employee' under the Fair Work Act.

Cutting out Green Army workers from these three crucial areas of employment protection has a significant impact on the legal rights of these workers. If excluded by the Work, Health and Safety Act, the registered training organisations running the Green Army program will not be required to follow the occupational health and safety requirements in relation to Green Army workers. Similarly, being excluded from the ambit of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act means that, in the event of injury during the Green Army program, Green Army workers will not be covered by Commonwealth compensation. This could potentially lead to the unjust situation where the supervisors of Green Army programs would be covered in the event of workplace injury, but the Green Army members they organise would not.

Of most concern is the exclusion of Green Army workers from the ambit of the Fair Work Act. The Fair Work Act provides crucial protections to workers. It protects them from unfair dismissal, allows them to request time off and ensures that they will be paid a minimum wage. If this bill is passed, however, none of these statutory protections will be available to Green Army workers. This would have significant implications for the rights of workers undertaking the program—the workers who, let us not forget, are young, inexperienced, eager for work and desperate to get a foot into the door of the employment market, and many of whom will be passionate about the environment and keen to do something that has an impact on the world but will not understand what the loss of these important workplace rights will entail.

This is a significant limitation on the rights of a particularly vulnerable group of people in our society, yet there is no detail contained in the bill on the implications of changes to workers' rights, benefits and protections. There is no detail given about the alternative wages that will be offered to Green Army workers. This is a significant issue that requires clarification. Unfortunately, the Green Army seems to be headed by Sergeant Schultz, in the form of the environment minister, who knows nothing about the details of these plans.

More discussion and analysis is required before we can be sure that the level of protection given to the Green Army workers is justifiable. For example, who sets the wage that workers will be receiving? Is it the government or the private service provider who is 'responsible for the disbursement of Green Army allowances', according to the explanatory memorandum? According to what criteria will these wages be justified? Will a 17-year-old Green Army worker be paid the same wages as a graduate with an environment degree? After all, the Abbott government is aiming to attract a large pool of graduates to the Green Army program.

This is not the only area where a startling lack of detail accompanies the government's claims. We only need to look to the Abbott government's promises about the training opportunities afforded by the Green Army program to see more sweeping statements and no precise detail. The Abbott government seems keen to highlight the training opportunities offered by the Green Army program. The explanatory memorandum frequently mentions the 'hands-on, practical skills, training and experience' that these young people will encounter. In the second reading speech too, the environment minister mentions that 'Green Army participants will have the opportunity to develop job-ready skills and to undertake training'. But what are these job-ready skills that these programs will teach? Will academic training programs be offered to workers, or will manual skills development be the focus? Which industries will the government be preparing these workers to enter? How much training will workers receive for their work?

It is even unclear whether training will be offered to every worker in the Green Army program. The draft statement of requirements outlines that 'the training component of the programme will be negotiated with each participant as part of the participant agreement'. It gives no guarantees that training will be offered to all participants in the program. It places the onus of negotiating this training on the people in the most vulnerable bargaining position—young people who are desperate for work. It is hard to believe such an unequal bargaining position will result in the best training outcomes for Green Army workers.

Another concern raised by the bill is its potential to displace existing workers. There are many hard-working environmental workers across our communities who fulfil important roles honed with years of experience. Many of these workers may not make much more than the minimum wage. Yet, with an army of workers on training allowances, the potential for these workers to be displaced is significant. How will the government ensure that the jobs of these workers will not be lost, or that in a time of shrinking budgets the skills of these workers will not have been cast off for Green Army trainees who are being paid below the minimum wage? How will the government design the program to prevent this from happening?

This bill poses far more questions than it answers. Unfortunately, it will be our young people who suffer the most from this lack of detail. The youth of Australia—and particularly the youth of Melbourne's west—are facing tough employment conditions. They will need help in navigating the continuing slide of the employment market to find secure, stable work. An employment program like the one this bill describes can help transition young people into this secure, stable work. It can do so while caring for the parks, rivers and beaches that are so important to us all, but it should not exclude our young people from basic employment protections with a vague sweep of its arm.

The government needs to justify why it is taking these employment protections away. It needs to outline what the consequences of this lack of protection will be, how it will mitigate these consequences and what the offsetting benefits are to the participants in these programs. It needs to specify what sort of wages and training benefits the Green Army program will offer to participants. It needs to detail the procedures in place to ensure that this program will not take away jobs from those already undertaking environmental works in our communities.

The Abbott government has failed to provide the level of detail in this bill. It needs to stop acting like an opposition who cannot think past three-second sound bites and provide some detail about how the Green Army program will support and protect workers in practice.

See this speech in context