Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

My support is unconditional for the Green Army initiative, which has been a coalition flagship in the environment area for a number of years now. Finally, with the coalition in government, it is coming to fruition. Regardless of where you come from in Australia, the Green Army is an exceptional option for young Australians—whether they be in a gap year, graduates or currently unemployed—to get involved in local environmental projects of merit. For my area of Bowman, I speak with particular passion because virtually all of my 60 kilometres of waterfront is mangrove. In fact, it is pretty hard to find a patch of Redlands waterfront that is not mangrove. Together with the beautiful North Stradbroke Island, there are seemingly limitless opportunities to protect, preserve and, in fact, enhance some of the environmental assets that we have in Bowman, being a Moreton Bay fringe electorate.

You just have to drive down any major road in a part of Australia where there is a significant nature corridor to know that there is almost limitless work to be done on this great continent when it comes to environmental improvement and enhancement. At the same time, we do not seem to be able to match need with expertise, so many young Australians—hundreds of thousands of them—are at the moment without meaningful work opportunities or a chance to train, a chance to upskill or a chance to work together in small teams and achieve something of worth. The Green Army does that. Building over three years to 15,000 participants, it will be the largest standing environmental army in Australia's history.

I am excited about it for a few reasons. The first one is that this is very much locally driven. Sure, there will be a service provider responsible for organising projects, as well as a group that will typically identify the projects—commonly, councils and the like. But what is really important is that communities can get together, actually rank the environmental tasks into some form of priority and start working on them in a limited time frame—over a number of weeks—and ensure that those jobs are done. What we do not have is a tailing-off of this program into an extended Work for the Dole arrangement, because this is very different to that and I need to emphasise that.

The Green Army needs to be one of a number of options that young Australians have. It will never be compulsory. It is obviously going to grow quickly each year up to 2018. I commend the minister for having gained the extra resources to ensure that the Green Army continues. The challenge, and I put it out to every electorate, is to find the highest quality projects that you can.

Critics of this program will be saying that there is no point just mobilising people if they are not doing something of environmental benefit, but there is plenty of environmental potential in every electorate, even urban ones, where of course the environment is most under threat. In my electorate, there will be revegetation of sand dunes on North Stradbroke Island. There will be enhancements in our mangrove and intertidal areas. There are problems with noxious weeds and non-local flora all throughout the Redlands. All of these are perfectly suited to being Green Army projects.

To young Australians contemplating doing this: it does not have to be for a year. As I have said, these are medium-term projects where you are working in a small team with a supervisor who is paid the horticultural award for that role. Councils have told me some of their concerns are around transport. Many participants will not be able to get to remote locations in my electorate easily, where public transport is limited, so there will have to be a little bit of ingenuity and flexibility to make sure that these projects run without a hitch and, obviously, that people can be attending regularly. If you talk to young Australians, many of them say, 'I am interested in doing this kind of work and I would love to give it a go.' So these projects have to be flexible enough to allow people to move in and out of them, short enough that they can actually see some kind of gain and benefit over the time that they are engaged and variable enough so that they are not just doing one thing—the same thing—for months on end.

My objective for these Green Army projects is that young locals will come out of them with a new skill and a new qualification. In many cases at the moment, they are sent down to employment network providers. Their eyes glaze over as they search on computers for the next training program to do. The Green Army changes that because there is real, practical application. There will be a real sense of, 'Not only did I gain a skill but it actually made a difference here.' Be that building a walkway, repairing some erosion or getting a better understanding of how some of these waterways work, that has to be all upside, doesn't it?

In a nation where labour is so valuable—we are a small-population economy with a very high average GDP and a large, natural expanse that is often very, very rain deprived and vulnerable—there is no better place to apply Green Army initiatives than right here in Australia. I am speaking for South-East Queensland, where we have incredibly fast population growth, probably only rivalled by parts of outer Sydney. At the same time, we have these environmental belts that locals have fought hard to protect, only to see them effectively fenced off but not being maintained. They become a bushfire risk, they are covered in lantana and other noxious weeds, and they are not a place where you would want to take your family to go bushwalking or for a picnic. The Green Army can change that.

So, on North Stradbroke Island, where 3,000 of my locals live, for the first time there are additional employment opportunities outside of mining and the very good work being done by Straddie Camping. Here is a chance for young Australians falling out of interest with formal education to have this cadetship, this environmental connection and these time-limited projects that they can really make their own. That is what is really exciting. And, because they are teams of 10, you can run one or two of them instead of building one up so that it becomes so large that either it is unmanageable or the human resources are not well deployed.

Make no mistake: it will be challenging all over this nation to be running over 1,000 of these tiny projects, but I have faith in the local people, local employment providers and local councils to come up with the best possible projects and see them through to fruition. I know that there has been some nitpicking from the other side about workplace health and safety, and it is an important issue. But the programs are to be supervised predominantly by councils, who are already well aware of those limitations and those concerns.

In conclusion, please do not mix up the Green Army with Work for the Dole programs. They are very, very different. I believe there is a great deal of pride around Work for the Dole, but in essence it is a hard-stop measure that is a requirement if you have been unemployed for more than a certain period of time. The Green Army is very different to that. I would love to see university graduates, university students and even people studying for a trade taking a few weeks to be involved in a Green Army project. I will be encouraging all of my young Australians between the ages of 17 to 24 to get involved. I look forward to the day, once these projects are up and running, when older Australians—those over the age of 24—will also get involved.

It is an exciting moment, seeing Green Army projects rolling out. For a long time, Green Corps projects set up by the Howard government delivered significant environmental benefits but never really achieved the scale that we are attempting here. It is a real feather in the cap of the coalition that, rather than going out on our own on climate schemes that in the end leave us cold and broke, there is a real sense of practical action in local communities. If you really care about your environment, there is no better way of getting involved than by encouraging people you know who are eligible to get involved in one of these projects as part of a team of 10. It makes perfect sense. They should be available.

I have made the point about matching need with expertise. We pay income replacement to between 360,000 and 400,000 young Australians who are not involved in full-time work, study or training. It is inconceivable that billions of dollars are paid every year more as an entitlement than as a mutual-respect arrangement, where that transfer purchases a social outcome. If we can move to the point where young Australians are actually earning that money by being involved in the development of public good, which is a cleaner environment, that would be a great step in and of itself. If there is one thing that this government achieves in the next election term, I would like it to be the removal of the 'do nothing and have no chance' option. That is the notion that payments are purely entitlements and that nothing comes back the other way—that the payment is your pay. But that is not what it is. When we pay welfare to look after those who are in the greatest need, we want it to be a hand up, to give people the chance of a future career.

Keep in mind that it is easy to look down on 18- to 24-year-olds and say they are not doing enough or that they are not active enough, but many of them are transitioning through life, having lost interest in formal education, prior to having a family. That is the perfect time to give these young Australians every chance of acquiring skills, developing confidence and having a capability. It is only through these things that opportunity comes. If we deprive young Australians of opportunity, then we will carry them as a welfare burden for life, and that is not what we want. What we want is to give them the best possible opportunity as soon as they disengage from formal education and training to get them back into something practical that they love and enjoy.

Without going into too much detail or digressing too far from Green Army projects, what I am hoping is that there is flexibility in the program. I do not want to see two or three projects that are exactly the same—picking up sticks and pulling weeds, for example. We need projects within a reasonable geographic spread that provide a range of skills. They could involve learning how to use small plants or some basic carpentry skills or concreting skills, as well as the obvious skills in environmental rehabilitation. That may mean spending a little bit more on good training and supervision and making sure that our trainers can actually impart those skills. If we do that, and people leave the Green Army with a formal qualification, then we have only made life and opportunity far better, not just for them but for their families, and a better life for their young children who in turn one day will become adults and income earners themselves. I commend this bill strongly.

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