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

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. It is good to see this very important topic considered today. Laid bare obviously are the different perspectives on this issue from the two major parties. While the previous address was somewhat vague about the detail of the bill, it is probably an appropriate time at the start of my comments to go through precisely what this bill is doing—rather than vague critiques about how young people deserve a quality of life through instantaneous payment of welfare.

Let's be very clear that there is a very mixed group of people seeking work and it is a really challenging environment. Between 16 and 25, some of the toughest social issues face us in our life cycle and getting a job must be one of those at the top or very close to it. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in supporting people to find satisfactory work. The one thing I want to make sure we never do is just say, 'There is simply not enough jobs out there to go around so let's give up.' We are never going to give up. We are going to make it as positive, as encouraging as possible to skill our population and make sure they can do the work this nation needs.

The last thing we want to be doing is basically expropriating profits overseas by importing foreigners to do the work we are not prepared to do. And if anyone says there is not work for young Australians out there, I will take you to a local orchard or abattoir where there is a 'staff wanted' sign up 12 months of the year. There is work there but it is just not in the places where we choose to do it and not in the places where we want to live. Let's be absolutely clear that we have a challenge of mismatch, not a lack of employment. Let's be honest, the more skilled you are, the more capable you will be at getting a well-paid job. It seems completely self-evident, except if a Treasurer says it then it is offensive. If a poor man says it, it is just as true. We all strive to be skilled, to have skills like tools in a tool box to give us capability. From basic capability comes opportunity as Noel Pearson famously said.

With all of those blithe statements that you have heard from both sides of the chamber, the reality is that some people will not acquire those skills for a huge range of reasons. It is actually pretty hard for the state to separate all that out, to identify the people who are gainfully and willingly seeking work from those who are persistent evaders who simply do not want to work from those who have mental and other health and family issues that make it almost impossible to work their way through the thicket of life to engage with work.

The state does not have spies in every house. We do not have time for one bureaucrat to follow every job seeker, so we have to have basic rules that serve the nation well. Within those rules you need flexibility so that at some time a minister can make a determination to change the laws quickly, which this bill allows for; so that a department can provide an emergency relief fund of over $8 million to assist thousands of people who potentially may need emergency payments over that first month of job seeking, which this bill allows. We will stream young job seekers into A, B and C recognising their ascending levels of complexity in finding work, and we will exempt those stream B and C people from the one-month wait, which this bill allows. We recognise that some people have health issues making it impossible to work or they are in the second or third trimester of pregnancy and should not be subjected to this delay, as this bill allows. We also recognise that any times people have already lost a job through no fault of their own and then fall back upon the welfare system. But if they have already served a one-month waiting period, they should not have to do it again in the same year, which this bill allows.

How many more exemptions can we put into legislation to ensure that those who should not be affected are not? We all know young people. We can all say we do not know about how life works but we have all been through it. We know that fundamentally one has a choice. If you are fit of mind and body, you can train, study or work. What this legislation says is that at any time, if you are facing a one-month wait and you choose instead to return to school to complete it or seek out training or, better still, go off to university, you should be exempted from any one-month waiting period. This bill does that.

We are reaching a point where it has become so perplexingly obvious that this works to identify the people doing the right thing and exempt them and then says to everyone else, 'Do your level best.' As a nation, there is not much more that we can ask. As a nation, we cannot say much more to a young person than: 'When you reach the age where you can work, we ask that you spend the first four weeks of that time meeting a jobactive provider, designing a resume, agreeing to a job plan and a strategy for the kind of work you would like to do and creating your profile on a website to make it easier for employers to find you and to make it easier for you to make an application. Then we ask of you, in that 28-day period, to turn up to a job interview, do your best and tell us what you've got. And then, after that period, you can, if nothing else has worked, access the nation's welfare system.'

We do have a problem. You would think, by listening to the other side, that we have no problem. You would think, by listening to the Labor Party, that the only problem we have is that we are not guaranteeing the quality of life of young people by throwing welfare at them on the day they ask for it. The entire system has waiting periods. When was the last time you went to an emergency department? When was the last time you went to a general practice? When was the last time you sat anywhere waiting for a service? There are legitimate waiting periods that play a role. This waiting period says: give it your level best. Let us just keep in mind that we have 6.5 million young Australians living at home in this period. They have every reason, with the support of a loving home, to go out and do their best to engage the real economy.

Australia holds a gold medal—not for the things that I am proud of. Australia, together with New Zealand and Ireland, has the greatest proportion of households that have no-one working in them. We have the greatest proportion of households in any community—should you fly over one when you are returning to your cities later tomorrow night from parliament—where simply everyone in that household under that roof receives welfare. Is that a legitimate challenge to a government? Are we not elected with the responsibility to change that? With the depth of evidence that we have around connection to employment and health outcomes, surely the next dollar spent is better spent connecting people to a job, placing under a roof in every town and city in this country at least one person earning a wage, at least one person who gets out of bed in the morning, at least one person who jumps in a car and drives to work, at least one person who brings home a salary, puts it on the table and says to their dependants: 'This is how a country works. This is how tax is paid, and from that come the services that we all know are there when we need them.'

But it is only this side of politics that does that simple bit of calculation, that tiny bit of calculus that you simply cannot make a promise that you cannot fund. You simply cannot deliver a service if you do not have an income to do it. We have half of this parliament who think it is utterly okay to slide into perilous debt, which is effectively borrowing money from China and the Middle East to pay for what we cannot fund ourselves. Do you think that is done for free? Do you think they say, 'We won't call that one in one day'? It has to be paid by someone. The money has to come from somewhere. That is not a debate that we can have in a mature environment, even in this place, because there is a simple and fundamental belief on the other side that you do not need to run balanced budgets, because it is a problem for the next generation—it is a problem for our kids. We have talked long and hard about this idea of intergenerational theft by running a debt now because we presume our welfare needs are greater than our kids', and we just clock it up.

That stops with the election of this government. We will start to live within our means. It does not mean you do not still run a deficit budget if that is where you are caught, but you are slowly, slowly whittling away the living beyond your means. Every person up there in the galleries understands it. They all have their credit cards. They all pay them off. They all have their home loans. They all pay them off. But we have this preposterous claim by an opposition that we can simply keep spending.

We slid from zero debt to GDP to 17 or 18 per cent of GDP. And then we cast these glances across and laugh at the Greece-EU experience as if that is not some European manifestation of what we debate here in a slightly more moderate context. You have Greece with no concept of living within their means and an EU that fundamentally paid for them to do it until now and can no longer afford to do so. That is why we bring bills into this place like the one we debate today.

It is not as if 100 members of this parliament on one side sit around dreaming of ways to reduce welfare. That is not why I went into public life. I went into public life to try to make that dollar work as well as it possibly could and make sure it ends up in the pocket of the person who most desperately needs it. A perfectly fit, perfectly healthy, 16- to 25-year-old living in my town and my city should go out and look for a job if they are physically, mentally and socially able to. If they are not, all of the exemptions are built into this bill, and none of those dishonest speeches you are hearing from the other side will even address that. It is laid out for them in bullet points, but not a single speech over there talks about those exemptions.

You would expect a mature opposition to say, 'There are pages of detail here, and we appreciate that there is some effort to provide exemptions to the most needy,' but they might respectfully disagree on the way the exemptions are structured. Let us have that debate. That is why we pay us the big bucks down here: to come up with better legislation. But no, we do not. We hear this blind story about 'income scarring' and how people deserve a quality of life from the minute they are old enough. It is the old notion that the welfare officer from the CES goes to the grade 12 class and says: 'Make sure you know where the welfare office is. Make sure you fill out your forms. Make sure you go shopping for every entitlement you deserve.'

That is not a nation that I want to be part of. I want a welfare safety net, but I do not want it to be the reason for living. The whole point is getting people back to work. In my electorate, we have started that process. In my electorate, we have engaged up to 500 small businesses by saying: 'Will you take a young Australian? In this waiting period, can they work shoulder to shoulder with your workers? Can they turn up when everyone else turns up? Can they take their lunch break when everyone else takes their lunch break? And can they be there, cheek by jowl, with people doing a job? Through no fault of their own, they have often lived in a household where nobody worked, where no-one ever has worked, where no-one has any hope of work. The first step is reducing the barriers to at least developing the lifestyle skills and a cultural awareness of what it is like to work.' It is so important. That is why we talk about it down here. It is why we agonise over how hard it is to draw some of the most complex young lives into employment, but we know that the big picture makes it worth that fight.

In my electorate I have men's sheds that are opening their doors to 50-year-old-plus gentlemen who have said, 'I can never work again,' but they say: 'Come down and learn some new skills. Come down and become certified and credentialed on these power tools.' Ultimately, what these men's sheds intend to do is to accept work from needy families where there is repair and maintenance on their households. Men's sheds can potentially provide an outreaching service from the men's shed. It is all well and good to sit around and have a coffee and do some wood turning and metalwork, but let's actually go out and find a widow, a pensioner, a person who has had a partner go into hospital or a single mum and help then with repairs around the home—the thing the love the most.

And suddenly you are unlocking the potential of work for the dole recipients who say: 'There's nothing to do. There is no job I can do.' There are thousands of hours of work to be done. It is about having the wit to connect. It is about taking senior skilled Australians and saying, 'You can be a paid supervisor of these work for the dole recipients.' It is about connecting need and expertise. It is not about giving up. It is not about walking around to your 18-40-year-olds and saying: 'They're a nasty government. All they want to do is take your welfare off you. All they want to do is remove your income' like it is some birthright—it is not. It is a privilege. A payment we enjoy in this country that very few others can call on is a privilege.

If there is one battle that will absolutely delineate the two parties we have here, it is that we regard welfare as a privilege that is earned by reciprocity and by acting within social norms. Aboriginal communities got it. They did not even invent paid welfare. In Northern Queensland it was Noel Pearson who said, 'If you are beating up your wife, if you are destroying your house, if you are not paying your welfare, if you are ending up in front of a court or if you are not sending your children to school why should we pay you welfare?' Pearson got it. This mob does not. That is a fundamental understanding that in return for welfare payments you do your best. We are saying here to go to 20 job interviews. Spend that month with a plan to work, not a plan to not work. It is a simple black-and-white comparison between this government and that opposition.

This government is not on a roll as we go into the parliamentary break for no reason. They are not on the skids for no reason. They are in this diabolical situation politically because they have not picked up the big questions and they have not answered them correctly. On this one they oppose a simple measure that says to young people: go out and give it your best shot for 28 days. Then, potentially, the welfare system is open to you if there is no other alternative. They had a simple yes/no question. They got it wrong and they will pay for it at the next election.

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