Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome Minister Pyne to the Federation Chamber. It is great to have him here representing Minister Cash, another fantastic Western Australia. Actually, Minister Cash was in my electorate of Swan last week. It was an opportunity for her to tour the Belmont Business Park and to meet with some of the small and medium businesses in the area which employ many people in my electorate and more broadly across Perth. The member for Gorton will probably remember that the first time I met him was in Belmont many years ago. Minister, you might wonder what Minister Cash was doing in Belmont. It was to do with round 1 of the regional grants program. The coalition government is providing a $6 million grant to the city of Belmont for a business regeneration program, which is halfway through. We were fortunate enough to visit the company Paull & Warner, who have recently moved into the area. They are a smash repair business that has gone high-tech. We also visited KONE Elevators—their Western Australian office—and Alvin Brodie from Bondall, a concreting company in the construction industry.

Minister, today is a great opportunity for us in this consideration in detail to talk on another area of employment—that is, the ParentsNext program. The ParentsNext program helps parents with young children to plan and prepare for future employment. It provides personalised assistance which, first and foremost, recognises their role as a parent. As a custodial single parent to my son, I understand how important it is for parents to put their children first and how difficult it can be to juggle work and family commitments at the same time. ParentsNext has been operating since April 2016 in 10 of the most disadvantaged locations in Australia and has provided pre-employment assistance to almost 15,000 parents already. The current locations are Logan and Rockhampton in Queensland; Playford in South Australia; Bankstown, Wyong and Shellharbour in New South Wales; Greater Shepparton and Hume in Victoria; Burnie in Tasmania; and Kwinana in Western Australia. Parents in the program meet regularly with the ParentsNext provider to set employment or education goals and work towards these goals. The ParentsNext provider helps parents to access services in their local community, which will help them to achieve their goals. Some of the services that parents might access through the program include education, training, parenting courses, counselling, health services, child care, housing services, financial management and language, and literacy and numeracy classes.

We know that the program is having a deep and positive impact on the lives of many parents and young children. More than 1,000 parents in the program have commenced in employment and another 6,000 parents have commenced in education and training. That is why I am so pleased that the ParentsNext program, which has been expanded to 20 new regions, includes my electorate of Swan. We have heard stories about women in the program recovering confidence after emerging from violent relationships, a father who found an unexpected and unlikely role as a playgroup program leader and people who have started their own businesses or visibly gained confidence from this program.

One example of this is a lady who came to Australia on a humanitarian visa five years ago. I will not disclose her name, but she has two young children, aged three and six, and was eligible for the ParentsNext program. As you can imagine, in her first interview with the ParentsNext provider she was nervous. She told the provider that she really wanted to work and would be happy to do any kind of job; however, deep down, her dream was to become a nurse but she felt that her poor English would prevent her from realising this dream. The ParentsNext provider discussed some of the pathways to becoming a nurse that were available to her and provided her with a lot of confidence by reassuring her that her English was good. But she still lacked confidence about her English, so the provider researched courses with more flexible English requirements. They found a course for a certificate III in health service assistance that met this lady's needs. As you would expect, she was thrilled that this course provided the opportunity to progress to a diploma in nursing.

Finding the course was an important start but, as all of us do sometimes, she still needed support. ParentsNext provided her with assistance for the course enrolment, preparation, finding an appropriate local childcare service and applying for childcare assistance. I understand she also received help to locate her family's lost visa information, which was required for the course enrolment, through Visa Entitlement Verification Online. When asked about her ParentsNext experience, this lady said she was thrilled with it and would definitely recommend it to the other women who needed it.

Minister, how does the government propose to build on the successes of the ParentsNext initiative and, particularly, how can those successes be applied to Western Australia and my electorate of Swan?

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