Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Assistant Minister for Employment) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hume for his comments. He certainly brings great skills to our side of politics and has a strong knowledge of the commercial realities of the Australian economy and the importance of ensuring that we maximise the productive capacity of our young people. We have a broad range of measures under the new Job Active program and under the Youth Employment Strategy that are going to assist young people.

I will start with something that is important in engaging young people. One of the new things that we are doing, over and above the things that I mentioned in my earlier contributions today, is that we are going to be focusing on the Job Active system and the interaction between young people and their employment providers. We are going to talk to young people in their language. We are going to allow them to use IT; we are going to allow them to use text, SMS and electronic means of communication to communicate with their employment service providers. The new Australian JobSearch website will be much more elaborate. It will be much more focused on being better for job seekers and better for employers. It will be easier for employers to post vacancies. It will be easier for young people to search. They will be able to determine where the jobs are virtually by looking at home, without having to go out and walk the streets. There is no substitute for going out and talking to employers if you are a job seeker, but to be able to do some of this job searching more efficiently and more effectively through better IT systems will be an important element that I think will appeal to many young people and increase their interest in getting work. Under the Job Active system, as I said earlier, we have very much a focus on results so that the employment service providers must get that young person a job. They cannot put the young person in the too-hard basket, because, unless they get that young person a job, they will not be getting the remuneration they need to make a profit and keep their doors open.

Supporting the Job Active system, we have a range of measures. I talked about the Transition to Work program—$212 million, offering a range of support through a wraparound means of delivery such as mentoring and coaching, literacy and numeracy skills development, communication skills development, teamwork skills development and access to work experience. We have the wider national work experience program, over and above Transition to Work. We also have $106 million for assisting vulnerable job seekers, and this is very important. There are a range of measures under the assisting vulnerable job seekers program. We have $55.2 million for innovative youth program trials. They will be a range of trials delivered by community-based organisations which will approach the problem of youth unemployment from different perspectives. We are looking for innovation. There are many examples of small projects out there in communities that are highly successful. We are looking at ways we can scale up those successful projects. We are looking for new ideas, potentially, to approach the difficult problem of youth unemployment from a different perspective.

We have $8.9 million of funding in the budget to assist parents into employment. It is so vitally important that we assist young parents. We want to break the cycle of intergenerational unemployment. We have $19.4 million to support young people with a mental illness. Many, many employers can be hesitant in some cases to put on someone with a mental illness. We have to give young people with a mental illness support to get into work and we have to give employers support to take on people with a mental illness, because it is vitally important that we maximise, as I said, the productive capacity of all Australians.

We have $22.1 million to assist refugees and young migrants into work. Many refugees and young migrants face very substantial barriers getting into the workplace. This innovative strategy assisting vulnerable job seekers is approaching the problem from a different direction. It is using much of the expertise that is out there in the community—government partnering with community groups to upscale programs they already have in place and allowing community groups to perhaps put in place a new innovative program that has not been done before. These are exciting opportunities. They aim to assist young people from welfare into work and they are looking at those young people, who might fall through the gaps, with the vulnerable job seekers program, which is going to be one that will open up a range of doors for many young people.

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