Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have been sitting here very patiently waiting for the Minister for Small Business to actually answer my questions. This is consideration in detail of the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016, and I have been very polite, I think. I asked him what I thought were fairly decent questions about whether young people on these so-called internships will be paid penalty rates, whether they will be made to work long and extraordinary hours through the night, whether they will be given access to transport options—all sorts of questions that the minister has failed to answer, perhaps because the minister is no longer here. The Minister for Small Business seems to have so little interest in this matter that he has departed the chamber and seems to have left his intern, the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, in his place. I hope you are getting more than $4 an hour, Minister! On the matter of highly paid interns, I cannot go past the fact that my predecessor, the former member for Lyons Mr Eric Hutchinson, has got a pretty nice internship himself, with Senator Stephen Parry, the President of the Senate. It is a little more than $4 an hour, of course. It is around $160,000 a year, to attend functions. So that is not bad.

I am happy to stand here all day—I am here all week—and wait for the minister to come into the chamber and actually answer some of the very serious questions that have been put by me, the member for Mayo, the member for Paterson and the member for Bendigo, amongst others. These are very important questions. This is supposedly—so the government says—a panacea for the scourge of youth unemployment. I do not think there is anybody in here who is not desperately serious to see this matter addressed. Youth unemployment across the country is far too high. Where we differ is on how to address it. On this side, what we know is: you educate young people, you train young people and you provide them with pathways to work via apprenticeships. Yes, there are legitimate internships, such as those that university students and graduates go through, where they train for a short amount of time on the job and they get a portfolio of work, they have mentorship and they are on their way. That is a legitimate internship. A legitimate internship is not being employed by the local fish and chip shop, where the employer gets $1,000 to put you on behind the deep fryer, and you stand there for 12 weeks shuffling the fries and then you are out the door and somebody else walks in. That is not a legitimate internship. That is free labour, and what that means is that the kid next door does not get that job. The kid next door does not get that job on proper wages because that job has been taken up by free labour paid for by the taxpayer. That is just a taxpayer-funded rort for business. It is just not right. So the member for Bendigo asked a very good question on those matters.

I am still here; the minister still has not arrived. I do not know what could be keeping him. This is supposedly a very serious matter that the government has put to the House. We really need answers on these questions. I really would like to see him answer them.

See this speech in context