Linda Burney (Barton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not disagree with the sentiments of the Minister for Small Business. Labor believes in employment and youth employment as away of breaking disadvantage. There is no question about that. However, the youth unemployment figures are not reflected when you average out employment figures here in Australia, as is often done by the government. Spruiking unemployment figures is a smokescreen for the extreme level of youth unemployment in many regions across this country, including the Central Coast and the Hunter. I know the figures for these areas very well. Employment is an important pathway out of entrenched disadvantage. There is no question about that. Where Labor parts ways and the reason that the member for Chifley has moved these amendments is the nature of this program. Please do not pretend that it is anything other than an election thought-bubble. We all watched it. We all saw it. There was no detail then and there seems to be even less detail now.

The member for Chifley has highlighted a number of questions that we would like answered. I have come out of the New South Wales parliament, where, strangely, ministers did answer the questions raised in debate by the opposition. That is why you have three people sitting over there in those chairs, working away, I am assuming, to provide you with the answers to the questions that we are raising. That is what I am used to. It is sadly not what I see in this parliament. The issue that I am very much wanting to know about, particularly with my shadow portfolio responsibilities of human services, is where this program intersects in a real way with Centrelink and the administration of Centrelink. There must be a connection somewhere if the participants are recipients of, I am assuming, mostly Newstart. This concerns me deeply when I look at some of the real issues with Centrelink, particularly the lack of access to information and the extreme waiting times for people who are trying to get some information about their situation. I was in the Northern Territory on the weekend, and people there were waiting between three and six hours to get some sort of response from Centrelink. The IT system is nothing short of clunky. The casualisation of the staff is extreme. It seems to me that these issues need to be considered in the administration of this program. In fact, it is unclear to me how this program is going to be administered, where it is going to be administered from and what government agencies will have the responsibility for ensuring its overall implementation.

I will be a little more specific. The questions I raise are very much a microcosm of what the member for Chifley raised. I would like to know where the checks and balances are for this program. I have seen on countless occasions initiatives being undertaken, without real thought as to what the actual consequences were going to be, and how the checks and balances were to be put in place. I want to know how many interns one firm can have. I want to see and have explained to me, as we do on this side, what a detailed implementation plan is and whether there is any evaluation, given the Auditor-General's report about a number of programs just recently. How will this program be implemented? Who will do it? What is the plan? And what agencies are going to be responsible in its implementation? Is there an evaluation plan built in? What will be counted in that evaluation plan? How will we know whether it is successful or not?

The other issue is the human side of this. What will happen to a young person who is long-term unemployed—and this program is being held out to be the panacea for your long-term unemployed—if they are placed as intern after intern, after intern, with never any real outcome because of the way in which the program is structured? It seems to me that these are legitimate questions. I am not being cheeky, minister. I am asking these questions because I think they need to be answered to make sure that this program does what it says it is going to do— (Time expired)

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