Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I am certainly pleased to follow the member for Cunningham in this debate, because I agree with the sentiments that she has just expressed, and I know that she has put an extraordinary amount of work over the years into working with young people. Indeed, I have served on committees with her and I am aware that she would be acutely familiar with the plight of young people in this country, and therefore she comes to this debate with a great deal of experience.

Let's be absolutely clear about the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015: it would not be here were it not for the fact that the government's previous proposal, which would have meant that young people would have been left without any government assistance for six months, simply would never get through the parliament. It was not going to get through the parliament, because not only our side of politics—the Labor Party—but just about every crossbencher in the Senate opposed it, because it was grossly unfair and unjust. When that legislation was introduced in 2014, it signalled a very clear intention of the Abbott government to try to take away support from some of the most vulnerable people in our community, some of whom are clearly young people. When it could not get that legislation through, it then rebadged it and reframed it in a watered-down version of what is still considered by many to be heartless and unfair legislation—and that is what this bill actually is all about.

There is also a common theme to the Abbott government. It is a theme of the government wanting to wash its hands of responsibility and transfer the social and financial burdens onto others. We saw it with respect to the freezing of the financial assistance grants to councils: you cut $1 billion from the councils because you know full well that they will in turn have to find the money one way or another or cut their own services to their communities, but you transfer the problem to them. Again, we saw it with the cutting of the pensioner concessions, $1.3 billion in funding to the states, for exactly the same reason: you know full well that someone will pick up the pieces further down the line when the federal government washes its hands of the responsibility. Then we saw it with respect to the government wanting to introduce a GP tax, where indeed the same would apply: if you increase the GP tax then you make the community pay for the services they require. When it could not get that through, it came in through the back door: it froze the support payment to the GPs, knowing full well that in time they would pass on their increased costs to patients through the patient fee that they would then charge. Those are just some of the examples, and we have not even got to the cuts made to health and education.

It is clear that this government wants to transfer its responsibilities to the broader community, and again we saw it only this week when the federal government's green paper talked about cutting funding to public schools in this country, something that would never have been contemplated up until this week but is clearly on this government's agenda. Whilst the federal government and the Prime Minister have denied that they want to cut funding for primary and secondary public schools in this country, the truth of the matter is that that green paper signals a very clear intent of this government.

This particular legislation has within it two very unfair measures. The first is that it will make young people wait up to four weeks before being eligible for any government assistance. Currently the wait, I believe, is one week, so they go from one week to four weeks. The second is that under this proposal, as was the case in last year's proposal, young people will be transferred from Newstart to youth allowance. That means a loss of $48 per week for those young people. Right through to the age of 25, unemployed people will be eligible only for youth allowance, not Newstart.

Newstart at the moment pays around $260 a week, or less than $37 a day. Youth allowance drops that payment to $213 a week, or about $30 a day. Compare that with the minimum wage of $641 or the average wage in this country of $1,476 a week. The government is asking people to try and survive on $213 a week when the minimum wage is three times that. I ask members opposite who have come into this place to support this legislation whether they truly believe that they could live on $30 a day—to pay for their food, their clothing, their housing, their health needs, their transport and so on. I doubt whether they could. The reality is that most people cannot unless they get additional support from one place or another. What the Abbott government is effectively doing is deserting young people—because it has no sense of social justice and no understanding of the growing social inequity in this country.

Even more disappointingly, this is a government which is always looking at ways of balancing its budget on the back of those who are doing it the hardest but which rarely looks at trying to secure additional income from the higher income earners of Australia. As other speakers on this side have already made clear, not all young people who are out of work have family support to rely on or to fall back on—which is what this legislation is pushing them to do. Some young people, for very good reason, have moved away from home, sometimes chasing a job which, when they got to their destination, simply did not live up to their expectations or to the promises that were made to them when they moved away from home. In other cases there might be family breakdown. I have personally dealt with families in my electorate where that has occurred, where the young person has moved away from home and communication between the young person and the family has indeed broken down. Then there are young people who, even if they could get support from their family, come from families that are already struggling to make ends meet. Making things tougher for the young person does not help the family situation at all. Lastly, I am aware of young people who have moved away from home and who find themselves in a difficult situation but who, out of pride, will suffer in silence and not turn to anyone else to assist them.

When a young person cannot make ends meet, that young person may become homeless. If so, they might start, in some cases, couch surfing and the like—turning to friends to support them even if it is just for a place to sleep overnight. Regrettably, some of them end up, out of desperation, finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, while others turn to charitable groups to help them. Whatever the case, the bottom line is that the community wears the cost.

We know that unemployment in this country is rising. It is projected to grow to around 6.5 per cent, which is higher than it has been for years. Even worse, we know that youth unemployment rates are much higher, in many places two or three times the headline unemployment rate. There are reasons for that, but what is disappointing is that, knowing that unemployment is rising and knowing that unemployment for young people is much worse, the Abbott government has cut some $2 billion over the last two budgets from apprenticeship and skills programs—the very programs which were meant to help young people, to train them up and give them some kind of a chance for a start in life. The Abbott government believes this is not important and has cut $2 billion from those programs.

Then we have the cuts to TAFE and the universities. When you make such cuts and you ask young people to go out and train themselves, the effect is to make the training courses much dearer. So you are asking someone who does not have a job, who is trying to get a job, to go and train themselves—but you cut the funding to the institutions that are providing the courses, knowing full well that they will in turn push the cost of those courses to unemployed young people even higher.

One of the ironies of this government's rhetoric is this. I can recall, months ago, the minister coming into this place and talking about the wonders of the Green Army program—how that was going to employ thousands of young people and how it was going to give them a chance and a start in life. But what do we see in this year's budget? A cut of $73 million to the Green Army program. The rhetoric having served its purpose months ago, the Green Army program is being quietly pushed to one side—again, knowing full well that that program might have given at least some young people a break.

Most of the unemployed young people we are dealing with come from low-income households. They do not come from the high end of town; they come from the low-socioeconomic areas. The statistics bear that out. So we are hitting hard young people who do not necessarily have a family with the capacity to support them. The underlying narrative to this government's rhetoric and, may I say, to the rhetoric of many of the speakers from the government benches who have come in to support this legislation, is that the unemployed are not trying hard enough to get a job, particularly the young unemployed—that it is their fault that they are unemployed. Government speakers have implied that in their contributions.

The reality is quite different from that. The reality is that there are simply not enough jobs for the unemployed of this country. For young people, it is even more difficult. For young people, when there is a job advertised, the first thing a prospective employer asks is, 'What experience do you have?' If the young person has no experience, they do not get the job—and, if they do not get the job, they do not get experience. It becomes a vicious cycle and so they are not given the breaks that they need.

The truth of the matter is for many young people this bill is going to be bad news and, whilst it might only sound like a four-week break, a four-week break to them is $1000 which many of them simply do not have in their pockets. Only this week I received an email from the mother of a young person in my electorate—a 23-year-old—and the email in my view sums up the reality facing the young people of Australia. The first point she makes is that, whilst working for the dole is a reasonable idea, it rarely leads to paid work at the end of it. This young man has six level-two certificates from TAFE in various trades. He has paid for an additional course out of his own pocket to get a forklift licence. In 18 months he has applied for nearly 400 jobs. His job provider, again not surprisingly, has not been able to find this person a job, because the truth is there is no work out there. One employer offered him a job for six months on the basis that he works for nothing—in other words, 'You can do work experience with me for six months.' When a young person said, 'I cannot survive on nothing for six months,' he was told by this employer that, like so many other young people of today, he was simply not prepared to work. What kind of attitude is that? This young person, who has made every effort, in every sense of the word, and is desperately wanting to get a job but he cannot. He should not be further abused by having his payments cut or accused of being someone who is simply not trying.

There are a couple of other matters that I want to very quickly touch on before I conclude my remarks. In recent years we have seen governments, both at federal and state level, privatise a whole range of government departments and, as a result of that, we have seen the loss of opportunities in apprenticeships in particular that were previously provided by these government departments. We have also seen a number of major industries collapse in this country; I refer in particular to the auto industry. In my region Holden in particular was one of the major employers of apprentices in South Australia. With the closure of Holden, all of those opportunities for young people will be lost, and that is a real concern for people in Adelaide broadly. The last point I would make, and it is one that has been made by other speakers, is that, in their desperation, young people wanting to get jobs are being seduced into paying for very expensive training courses by unscrupulous RTOs with a promise of a job at the end, when in fact there will be none. These are young people who do not have the money in the first place, but out of desperation they scramble the money together, in one way or another, only to find out that they have just blown money they did not have. This is unfair legislation, which the side of the house will not support it and we do not support for very good reasons.

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