Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to pledge my support for the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014. The reason for this is very simple: it was a proven winner on a number of fronts when it was introduced as the Howard government's successful Green Corps program. The coalition government is delivering a key election commitment to establish the Green Army, starting from July this year. The Green Army will build on the former Green Corps program that was established in 1996 to employ young people on environmental projects to preserve and restore our natural and cultural environment.

The Green Army will offer young Australians aged from 17 to 24 the opportunity to support local environment and heritage conservation projects while gaining hands-on practical skills and work experience in conservation management. The experience and training received will count towards a qualification in land management, park management, landscaping or horticulture. The Green Army will make a real difference to the environment and to local communities through projects such as restoring and protecting habitat, weeding, planting, cleaning up creeks and rivers, and restoring cultural heritage places.

This voluntary initiative is both an environmental and a training program. It will help young people increase their skills base, gain practical experience and enhance their job readiness. It also complements the government's Direct Action Plan on climate change. The Direct Action Plan gives the community the ability to address our environmental challenges and to reduce our emissions at the lowest possible cost.

I support this bill because it provides a common-sense pathway of exposure to those still to decide whether they want to pursue further education in environmental disciplines. I am especially looking forward to rolling out this initiative in my electorate, as the community there has a high unemployment rate, particularly amongst our youth. I support this bill because it seeks to help the long-term unemployed to find and keep a job. In my electorate, we have an issue with youth unemployment and this bill focuses on that as an area of concern.

At the start of this year, the Newcastle Herald published a study by the Centre of Full Employment and Equity, a think tank backed by the University of Newcastle. It named 14 Hunter suburbs as 'red alert'—high-risk localities for predicted unemployment rise. One of the report's co-authors, Professor Scott Baum from Griffith University, said parts of the Hunter—including Raymond Terrace, which is in my electorate—had been identified because of a low proportion of skilled workers, high rates of casual labour, low education levels among residents and a high concentration of workers in declining industries. He also said that it would hit particularly hard in areas where there is already high unemployment and a high concentration of employment in industries like mining, retail and manufacturing—the types of jobs they predicted to be more at risk or in decline.

It is true that currently my electorate is experiencing a high rate of youth unemployment. While estimates of the exact figure for youth unemployment in my electorate vary widely, the Brotherhood of St Laurence recently launched a campaign to bring attention to the crisis of youth unemployment in Australia. According to their 'My chance, our future' youth employment campaign, the figure has risen across the country and sits at around 12.2 per cent nationally. That is up from 8.8 per cent in 2008. They include my electorate in the Hunter statistics. They estimate that the unemployment rate among 15- to 24-year-olds sits at around 9.5 per cent. The ABS statistics claim that it sits at 7.1 per cent. Any way you look at it, it is not a figure to be celebrated.

We need to get these young people out of a life of welfare dependency and into the workforce. As I told the Newcastle Herald recently, there is no silver bullet to fix soaring teen unemployment rates in the Hunter. Over the past two to three years, there has been a general downturn in business confidence and people have not yet seen the light at the end of the tunnel. After six years of bad management and spiralling debts, the government have a massive workload ahead of us. We have to get the economy back on track and get people into jobs and out of unemployment queues.

The Hunter is like most regional areas. When business is doing it tough, jobs become scarcer and apprenticeships dry up—and are treated as alternative cheap labour, which in turn affects our national skill base. That is why we are working hard to deliver new policies that encourage job growth and private investment. One of those policies of course is to kill off the carbon tax. Let us be frank about it: the carbon tax killed jobs, not just in my electorate but right across Australia. Businesses in the Hunter have told me that the carbon tax was an added pressure to their operations they could ill afford. It resulted in job losses.

This year, we have seen many industrial companies in my electorate reconfigure their employment structures. In the past fortnight we have seen OneSteel announce plans to shed 100 jobs, Downer EDI announce plans to cut 200 jobs and Chain Valley Colliery confirm plans to cut 73 jobs. Falling commodity prices, lower business confidence and job cuts in mining and car manufacturing have a flow-on effect on youths searching for apprenticeships or indeed full-time jobs. The coalition have introduced legislation to repeal the costly carbon tax and the monstrous mining tax. We know from speaking to our constituents that this will boost business confidence. We will keep working towards cutting red tape for small business to assist the economy to grow.

The Newcastle Herald also reported on a future constituent of mine—when I say 'future constituent', I mean that she has not yet reached voting age—Tabatha Tyne. The 17-year-old Ms Tyne has spent a lot of the last four months on the hunt for a part-time job. A former vice-captain of Raymond Terrace High School, she graduated last year and is a member of the volunteer youth reference group that provides early intervention mental health services to people aged 12 to 25. During her final years at school, Ms Tyne completed a TAFE course in community services and is now studying full-time for a certificate IV in youth work at TAFE. She plans to undertake a further diploma so she can be a youth worker. Ms Tyne travels from her Raymond Terrace home into Newcastle two days a week for her studies. She has been looking for a job in retail since finishing school. She is clearly a determined young woman, a hard worker, motivated and goal driven. However, she also falls into the youth unemployment category. For now she relies on a fortnightly youth allowance payment. She believes this is due to a lack of job experience.

Job experience is what the Green Army Program will offer the young and unemployed. I believe we can, through programs like this, arm young Australians with the skills to get and keep jobs. It will not only actively improve hundreds of sites across the country but allow local young people to get training and learn to work as part of a team. I am hoping that joining the Green Army will become a rite of passage for hundreds of young people in the years ahead. Joining the Green Army will teach many young people about teamwork and local ownership—and about the value of belonging to something greater than themselves.

In the lead-up to the election last year, we had already earmarked a project in the Paterson electorate at Lemon Tree Passage. Nine young people will receive training in environmental rehabilitation at the Tilligerry Peninsula as part of the 170,000 Green Army project. This project consists of the rehabilitation of up to five kilometres of foreshore pathways, boardwalks and walking paths. The work will consist of pathway upgrades, bush regeneration works and the renewal of the seven walking bridges in the area. The benefits of the scheme extend to the community. The existing pathways are extremely popular but are degrading to a point where they are no longer meeting safety requirements. Now the residents will be able to enjoy walking the area as a leisurely Sunday stroll rather than as an intense work-out. This project will also help reduce the burden on the Port Stephens council in fixing and upgrading council infrastructure.

Tilligerry Peninsula has a large population of an endangered species: it is recognised as valuable koala habitat. The bush regeneration will assist in providing safer areas for the koalas to live in and allow better access for visitors to view the koalas. The workers on this project will receive training and experience in pathway construction, carpentry, landscaping and bush regeneration as well as occupational health and safety and first aid training. The participants will also receive a $400-a-week training wage and a TAFE accredited training wage upon completion of the program.

I want to see this program grow and thrive like its previous version, the Green Corps program. Over the life of the Howard government's Green Corps program, its participants produced incredible results and the benefits are still evident today. The participants planted more than 14 million trees, erected more than 8,000 kilometres of fencing, cleared more than 50,000 hectares of weeds and constructed more than 5,000 kilometres of walking track or boardwalks. In my electorate, a Green Corps team removed over a tonne of rubbish from an almost two-kilometre long walkway at the Grahamstown canal. They also reduced the amount of lantana beside the walkway and planted thousands of trees and native grasses.

There are four other sites in my electorate which received Green Corps grants under the Howard government. An example from the second round of the grant scheme was the Hunter Regional Organisation of Councils. This Green Corps project focused on revegetating the roadside corridors adjacent to the New England Highway in towns like Branxton, Lochinvar, Greta and Rutherford. The main focus of the project was to create corridors of green along major road reserves, restoration of native vegetation and habitats and the reversal of land degradation. The third round included a project for the historic Tocal Homestead on the CB Alexander Agricultural College at Paterson. This project involved the regeneration of riverine rainforest and wetlands, construction of post and rail fences and building conservation. In round 6, this college received another project grant when the Green Corps were called in to regenerate more of the riverine rainforest and wetland ecosystems at Tocal in the lower Paterson Valley. Tocal holds a large land mass and its campus spans broadacre land.

Finally, in round 9, the Green Corps were called by the Tilligerry Habitat Association to the restio wetland area. This project was designed to prepare wetlands for public visitation. As such, this job required boardwalk and path construction, mulching, pruning, planting and water management. These projects all led to the participants gaining skills that they would not have attained had they just been claiming the dole.

These projects also led to one of my constituents winning Paterson Corporate Citizen of the Year in 2006. Shane Bailey was a team leader in Green Corps projects. He won the award on the basis of his work mentoring young people. Mr Bailey worked with the Green Corps teams who were undertaking six-month projects in the Port Stephens area. He was an inspiration to these young people by providing career advice and also by acting as a referee for the youths when they had gained the experience and skills and were applying for jobs. To him it was more than a job; it was about the people. So I awarded him the honour due to his enthusiasm for training others in the environmental industry and for his ability to relate to his team members. He is a shining example of what can be achieved through the Green Corps program and, in turn, the revamped Green Army.

When the former, Labor government took office, this important initiative was torn apart and then it was terminated in 2012. Young people no longer had the opportunity to gain practical skills and improve their local environment. The government is strongly committed to kick-starting the economy and offering the community the ability to address our environmental challenges and to reduce our emissions. I call on the Labor Party and all members of the parliament to support the Social Security Legislation (Green Army Programme) Amendment Bill 2014 for the benefit that it will provide to our environment, for the benefit it will provide to our young people and for the positive effect it will have on our community as a whole. I commend this bill to the House without any reservation.

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