Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must say that I am a little stuck for words as I rise to follow the member for Bowman, who has been on a flight of fancy that has left all of us over here a bit jealous, to tell you the truth, Mr Deputy Speaker Coulton.

An opposition member: And beyond!

Yes! I am not going to say it folks. But what I am going to say is this: for a man who went to an election campaign running around his electorate screaming 'jobs and growth', he has very little today to say about growing jobs in this country.

This is an important MPI. It is a critical MPI for the young people in my electorate. The young people in my electorate—member for Bowman, you might want to listen—do not care about Canada's economy. They do not care about Queensland's economy. They care about the local economy and their chance to get a job. That is what the young people and their families in my electorate care about. They care about it because the unemployment rate in my electorate has been hovering above 15 per cent.

In 2011 when we last had a census—I know it is hard not to do the joke—there were 30,000 school students in the electorate of Lalor. For next year the projection just in the state school sector is 30,000. So I am predicting there will be, probably, 40,000 school-age people in Lalor next year. That is an intense number of people. If you think about that 30,000 going through since 2011, it is an enormous number of kids who have left school and supposedly gone on to their rosy future.

I saw some hard things in schools when I worked in them, with teachers trying to support kids to leave school and get into employment. But since I became a member of parliament I have heard the most heart-breaking stories. I have seen that with a number of young people who left school and got into a part-time job—perhaps they carried it over from school—some of them lost that job when they turned 18 because lots of franchises are not interested in employing kids on full wages.

It is really hard to sit opposite every day and have silence from the other side about youth employment. Then when they do come up with a solution it is an exploitative solution. It is not a solution that is going to grow jobs; it is not a solution that is going to create jobs. They have this mythical notion that if you cut everybody's taxes it is like watering weeds—jobs will just grow everywhere. I am afraid they will not. Let me take you through this. I had a recent conversation with a family in the electorate, and they asked me a really good question. They said that once upon a time when we built infrastructure in this country we built into that infrastructure build jobs for young people. We built in training opportunities and apprenticeships. So where are the training opportunities in the NBN? There are not any training opportunities in the NBN because this government is loath to put anything in place that will support or ensure that companies take the responsibility for the future that we expect them to take. We expect them to be good corporate citizens. We expect them to join hands with the rest of us and create a future for all of us, not just a future for some.

We have heard a lot over there and we have heard a lot from members on this side, too, about the billion dollars cut from apprenticeships and training—which is absolutely appalling. The lack of commitment to school education where we have retention targets—we have reached 80 per cent in Victoria. The money will be ripped away after 2017. Will that retention rate plummet? I suggest it will. We will have less qualified children leaving our schools. The thing that really gets under my goat in this place every day, along with the silence from the others opposite, is this notion that they are building a country based on individual freedoms. There are a lot of young people in my electorate. What those on the other side have been building since they took government is a freedom to fail. They are giving kids permission to fail. They rant, they rave and they exhort young people. They denigrate young people in this chamber—'Put your phone down and you will get a job.' If it is as easy as that, I will go house to house, and we will put them all into a box. It is a joke.

The other part that really disturbs me is a notion from those opposite that young people can live on $264 a week and be independent or develop the independence that is required to live away from home. The kids in my electorate come from families with a median income of $52,000. Their salaries are actually needed to contribute to the rent or to pay the mortgage in those homes. At $264 a week, those kids are, (a) never leaving home, and, (b) never going to be independent.

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