Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The member for North Sydney likes that! That means 1.1 million Australians cannot get the hours that they want. The RBA's statement on monetary policy also talked about their underlying concerns about the labour market. Part-time work accounted for all the increases. Growth in part-time jobs was more likely to be driven by weakness in the labour demand than by changes in employee preferences. That means people are forced into part-time work when they really would prefer not to be in part-time work. The RBA also talk, along the same lines as I have been, about their concern about this serious underemployment challenge we have in the economy.

As I said, we welcome the attention paid to this issue of youth unemployment, but we do have our concerns about the program. We are worried about exploitation and about undercutting of wages. We are worried people could churn through participants, leaving them with little prospect of a job at the end. We are worried about young Australians working for less than the minimum wage. We are worried about replacing existing jobs with these jobs paid at the cheaper rate. We are worried about people in sectors like the hospitality sector being replaced by interns so that companies do not have to pay the penalty rates. There is no firm definition of an intern or what they will be doing—whether they will be working or observing, with all of the health and safety implications of that. There are a whole range of issues that we are genuinely concerned about. We all want to get to a good outcome here, but we are very concerned about what this means for the labour market and particularly for young people's place in it.

There are quite a few deficiencies in the policy, and the most important parallel we can draw is probably to the Work for the Dole program. When the Work for the Dole program is explained to people in the abstract, it seems like a good idea, but, when you delve into the detail of Work for the Dole, you find that 90 per cent of participants do not actually get a job at the end of it—which is the main stated aim, at least, of the program. So we need to be very careful, when it comes to things that sound okay on the surface like 'try before you buy' and these sorts of slogans that people use about young people in the labour market, that we actually understand what they mean and whether they have the capacity to work. If we are really genuine about fixing this problem with youth unemployment as a way of beginning to address some of the broader concerns around unemployment in our community, we need to make sure that what we are talking about will actually work.

That is why we want this bill to receive the proper consideration by Senate colleagues in the committee process. We do want to take the time to get it right. It is a pressing issue—it is an urgent issue, but that does not mean that we should rush in and get it wrong and undercut wages and all of those sorts of things that trouble us greatly. I know they trouble the member for Wakefield, who is in the chamber, greatly and all of us on this side of the parliament. We want to get it right. We want to ensure we do get that value for money. We want to make sure that young people, who are already doing it tough enough in the labour market, are not exploited. We want to make sure that, at the end of it, they have developed real skills that are useful in the workplace. We want to make sure that they have the capacity to get real jobs at the end of it.

There is arguably no more important task in this place than to create the conditions where young people can get ahead and prosper if they work hard and do the right thing. I am pleased to see the attention paid to this issue. I am deeply sceptical and deeply concerned about some of the ways that the government is proposing to go about it, but we will learn more about it in the committee process and we will continue to play a constructive role as we go forward.

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