Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to have the opportunity to speak today on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 because it gives me a chance to express how angry I am on behalf of my constituents in Hotham that the government is going ahead with this raft of measures that are nothing other than an unbridled attack on the young people of this country.

I am angry on behalf of the young people who live in my electorate and those around Australia. But it goes well beyond that because the legislation that is under review by the House today is a broader conversation about what kind of country we want to live in and how we are going help support young people to adapt to economic change that is underway in this country. The measures that are in the bill go right to the heart of these difficult questions about how we can express in a true economic sense the egalitarianism that we all talk about so much in our conversations with one another.

I will go through the critical measures in the bill so that those in the gallery and the kids who are watching are able to understand some of the proposals that are before us. There are four that I want to focus on in particular. The first is the change that is being suggested in this legislation where people who apply for working age payments, excluding the widow's allowance, will have to wait for one week before any payment is made to them. Essentially, anyone who needs the support of the state in some way or another is being told that they will survive for one full week without income. The second is there is a new requirement for young people under the age of 25, who will now have to wait four weeks before they receive any income support from the state. So young people doing it tough without work will receive no funding at all for one month. The third is the extension of youth allowance, which applies today to Australians under the age of 22, reflecting the general view that there is some level of additional support for young people from family. Under this legislation, the age at which youth allowance applies instead of something like Newstart—that is, unemployment benefits—is being raised from 22 to 24. It is a significantly lower payment, so now everyone in this country who is between 22 and 24 and unemployed is going to see a real cut to their payments. The fourth is indexation changes. Essentially, the impact of this is that incomes will be held down because the point at which income support will kick in is being suppressed, a move that will do nothing more than simply suppress the incomes of Australians who are doing it tough while the rest of the nation grows more wealthy.

I think this legislation—of all the issues that we discuss in this House—makes fully transparent some of the values that underlie the decisions that are made by this government. They are values that tell us that people who are on welfare who have some support of the state should be made to suffer because they have no incomes of their own. That is the effect of some of these provisions which will directly put more Australians into poverty. It is legislation that surely could only have been written by someone who believes that inequality in this country does not matter. Again, I would say the clear, direct impact of this legislation is that many more thousands of Australians will end up living in poverty, some in incredibly deep poverty. It is a reminder for us of what this government wants Australia to look like. That is a place where the generations of people who have fought for better social protections for people who are doing it tough are having them stripped back slowly and surely. We have seen that not only in the legislation that we are discussing today but also in many other proposals that have been put forward by this government, whether it is changes to the indexation rate of pension that will see pensioners worse off over time or whether it is a GP tax, where people in this country, no matter how sick, will have to pay to go to the doctor—clearly a move that will put people on lower incomes in an already worse position.

I reflect at times on what could possibly be driving the government to put forward legislation like this which will so severely damage the quality of life for people in this country who need the government's help. I have to conclude it is one of only two things: either the government is a group of not very nice people, or they just do not get it. They are just not living in the same Australia that I, and most of my constituents, live in. I am going to give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume that it must be the latter, because I know many people on the other side of the House, and I know them to be good people. I have to infer that they have designed this legislation for a very different group of young people than the ones that I represent in my community of Hotham.

For some young people in Australia provisions like denying them any income for a month may seem workable. It may seem workable when you are talking about a young person who has lots of family support; maybe a young people who lives at home with their parents; a young person who can raid the fridge if they need something to eat; a young person who can borrow their mum and dad's car; a young person who can borrow 50 bucks if their parents feel like lending them a bit of cash. It is a very different proposition for those young people to be without income for a month, compared to the young people that I represent. Many of the young people I represent do not live in a household like that. Many of them do not have families that support them. Some families just cannot afford it themselves. They themselves are struggling. Many of them may also be in a situation where they need the support of government.

Let us reflect on some of the comments and indicators that we have heard from those on the other side of the House. The comments of the Treasurer really lead me to believe that this is where this has come from. We know that in the past the Treasurer has made ridiculous comments like suggesting that poor people in this country do not drive cars, which is obviously factually incorrect and also offensive. We had another example relatively recently where the Treasurer said that if people could not afford a house, they should go out and get a better job—as if there are low-income people all over this country who just had not thought of that. It is another indication of how seriously this government does not get it. It is another indication that they are living in what seems to be a very different country to the people I am representing in Hotham.

As you can probably sense, I am very upset about a lot of the proposals in this legislation. One of things that for me makes all this so much worse is that all these measures are being enacted in a time of rising unemployment for young people in this country. In fact, when you look at the numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics we have seen that youth joblessness has reached its highest point now since 1998. There are 15 per cent of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are looking for work and cannot find it. One in five, between 15 and 19 are unemployed.

Those are the macro national figures. We know of course that these figures look very different when we look at different parts of the country. In rural and regional areas of Australia—Cairns and northern Victoria come to mind—youth unemployment is north of 20 per cent. So one in five people in that broad age range are looking for work and cannot find it. It is an area of extraordinary national concern, and one for which we have seen absolutely zero leadership from those on the other side of the House. Instead they go to these draconian measures which imply that, if young people are unemployed, we can bully them into the workforce by taking away the unemployment support that they receive.

Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta, I know that you are probably aware there are lots of welfare organisations which are trying to elevate this issue on the national agenda. The Brotherhood of St. Laurence has done some fantastic work looking at areas of national concern for youth unemployment and brought forward some serious proposals that deserve real national attention. We have even heard, amongst other business organisations, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry—which is not known for its speaking out generally on poverty issues—point this out as an area of national concern. If the government is not going to listen to us, perhaps they will listen to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

One of the reasons that youth unemployment is such a concern is because we know that the impacts of being unemployed early in life can actually have repercussions for decades. Youth unemployment is not a short-term issue that is going to just affect this country for five or six years. If we allow this situation to continue, if we allow young people to start their working life without the opportunities they need to get off to a great start, then we are going to pay for that as a nation. There are issues of concern because of the people affected, but this youth unemployment problem has much broader social and economic implications for us.

There are lots of studies that have been done in very famous universities around the world which look at what effect unemployment early in life has on people. We know that young people who have this experience end up with something we call 'wage scars'. If we look at two young people in exactly the same position and track them throughout their lives, we find that the person who experienced long periods of unemployment early in their life will be at a much lower wage when they are in their 40s and 50s compared to the person that managed to get lucky and find a job early in their life. There is lots of literature about why we see that scarring effect.

One of the most distressing things you find, when you look into the literature of the long-term implications of youth unemployment, is the mental health and physical health impacts that people experience in their 40s and 50s. If the government is not willing to come to the party and have a serious conversation about this youth unemployment problem for the sake of the young people affected, then they should be thinking about what our society is going to look like in 30 or 40 years' time, when we potentially have a generation of young people who have not gotten the help and support they need and instead have been attacked by having their income taken away for a month.

There are some reasons I have talked about concerns for youth unemployment but there is one more I want to touch on before I complete my comments. I am worried about youth unemployment because, when we look at the way our economy is changing in Australia at the very highest level, we are looking into a period where the challenge of getting young people off to a great start in life is growing, not diminishing. We are seeing that technology and globalisation are changing our economy very quickly and very dramatically.

There was a study published by Oxford University in 2013 which suggested that, within 20 years, 40 per cent of the jobs that exist today will have been replaced by machines. The OECD did a similar study looking at the impact of globalisation, finding that, within a similar time period, 20 per cent of jobs will be replaced by globalisation, effectively offshoring to other countries.

When we look at the jobs that are being outsourced and the jobs where people are being replaced by machines, they are the kind of entry-level jobs that young people for generation after generation have used to get their foot in the door, to get their start in the workforce. I am thinking about, for example, law firms taking on article clerks. In their first years at the law firm, article clerks would do very routine tasks. They would look through documents, look for key words in documents. You could imagine, all of this now is being done today by computers. I am thinking of young people who might have, a generation ago, got a job in a call centre. Of course, we know now so many of those jobs are being offshored into other countries.

It is important that we do not just lament this economic change because clearly Australia is getting a lot of benefit from it. We are growing more and more wealthy. We are one of the richest countries in the world. But we do need to think about how we have to change the way that we support young people in order to ensure that they are not victims of what is happening here and that they get to benefit from this increasing prosperity that we are so lucky to see in our country.

We hear stories about people in this country who have played national leadership roles, who have had great success. Paul Keating, for example, never finished high school; Lindsay Fox was the same. These were men who went out and got their start in life, took some risks and ended up being very successful. But we are not going to see this happen anymore. Young people are only going to be able to get ahead if they stick with school, if they get a skill and if they get a good start into the workforce. I really want to have a conversation in this parliament about how we can make sure that young people get that opportunity that they need.

One thing I am very confident about is that we are not going to see that transition happen for young people when we focus instead on punishing them for what is a changing economic environment and bad luck in many instances. Young people are usually unemployed because there are no job opportunities for their level of skill and no job opportunities in the place where they live. The idea that the key response of this government is to take away any income from those young people for a month absolutely beggars belief. As I say, it reflects the type of nation that these people want to live in and their really very false understanding of what life is like out there for young Australians.

See this speech in context