Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not want to bring the House to outrage at five to nine at night, but this bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015, really does continue in the long list of acts of policy bastardry that I have seen in this place towards young people by this government. Where they started from was: cutting young people off unemployment benefits for six months—six months! They made that outrageous bit of policy—that outrageous bit of policy bastardry—and now they wheel in here and they say, 'Oh, we listened and we learned, and now it is just down to a month.'

Like everybody, I can cast my mind back to 1989 when I left school, when I was a young person, and I went out there to the job market. I was thinking about this as I sat there and listened to those opposite, and I thought about just how tough it was to leave school at that time in South Australia. It was a very tough labour market.

If you look at the Brotherhood of St Laurence's youth unemployment snapshot of 2014, they go back that far—they have got all the figures from that point. And they are not that different from today, particularly in northern Adelaide, and particularly in places like where I grew up at Kapunda.

I worked at a heap of jobs. I worked at the Gawler racecourse. I worked at the Kapunda trotting track. I picked fruit—grapes, apricots and peaches—up in the Riverland. The member for Riverina, who is at the table, would like that. I worked on farms. I was a cleaner. I was a trolley collector. I was the world's worst industrial hose salesman. I did all these jobs. I was in and out of work the whole time. And I just remember how precarious it actually was. It was really precarious. And I am grateful that I never had to go on unemployment benefits in that whole time, but it was nice knowing it was there and I had many friends who did have to rely on it. So when I think back to those times, I think about just how tough it was.

Unemployment, particularly high youth unemployment, does not just affect the individual. It affects their friends and their families. It affects other workers. When I was a union official in the early nineties in South Australia, I saw workers who would put up with all sorts of abuses from their employers—sometimes just their line managers—in supermarkets and retail stores because they were so scared about being made unemployed. When I later went and worked in Darwin it was completely different because unemployment up there was so low that workers had a particularly different attitude. So high unemployment is a bitter thing to inflict on a community. And it affects everybody—particularly working class communities.

Now the government rolls in here and starts talking about young people and about getting the balance right, when they are not going to give young people any income for four weeks. So, as you can imagine, if you are in and out of precarious employment—and employment has only got more precarious in the last 25 years—and then they talk about extending the youth allowance from 22 to 24, saving them some money but hacking 2½ grand a year out of a young person's income, potentially—$48 a week—this makes all the difference. These are acts of absolute policy bastardry.

If you look at the statistics from my area, in Adelaide's north, from the Skills for All website, and you look at the 2015 figures, they are 8.3 per cent for total unemployment and 17.9 per cent for youth unemployment in Adelaide's north, and of course in the Barossa-Yorke-Mid North area they are 6.8 per cent and 15.8 per cent. So these figures are still very high. We know that that is so, no matter how hard many young people look for work. And the experience of many is to just send out their resume over and over again. With many employers, you cannot just rock up at the door and impress someone because what they will tell you is to go and apply through the internet, because everything is put through HR systems, or to go to the local employment agency. So, as to the days when you might have been able to rock up and hawk your resume around and impress someone by knocking on doors, that avenue is being closed to young people.

What we have here is a system where a lot of the jobs are being removed from the system—a lot of the entry-level jobs are being removed. A lot of the demands for people to be trained and work-ready are going up, not down—sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker! I thought the member for Solomon was going to make a speech when she stood up just then!

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