Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to speak on this thorough and considered report of the committee chaired by the member for Bruce because, like many people in this chamber, I have constituents whose experience with ParentsNext was terrible—not just unsatisfactory but terrible. I want to start by quoting from the foreword by the member for Bruce, where he says:

The Australian Government has a responsibility to support and empower parents to achieve full social and economic participation. This is not merely a moral imperative, but an economic priority. ParentsNext grew out of earlier efforts to help young teenage parents, and then highly disadvantaged single mums with positive net outcomes. The Committee's conclusion is that the continuation of a 'program' (we say pre-vocational service) to support vulnerable parents is essential.

ParentsNext, however, is now locked into a punitive frame and does too much harm for the good it also does. Unfortunately, the positive experiences were overshadowed by evidence of harms caused by onerous participation requirements and a harsh compliance regime. The Committee also heard that the program has an undue focus on paid employment, which may not be appropriate for many parents who have made the reasonable choice to focus on caring for their young children.

I read out those two paragraphs because I couldn't agree with them more. In my opinion, they sum up the problems with the ParentsNext program, although I would add to that last sentence, where it says, 'the undue focus on paid employment … may not be appropriate for many parents who have made the reasonable choice to focus on caring for their young children', that it's also not appropriate for young parents who made the decision to focus on their education.

In my electorate of Dunkley, we're very proud of a program that I've previously spoken about in this place, called the Young Parents Program, which started in February 2013. It started as a community partnership co-funded by Anglicare's Communities for Children and Chisholm Institute, and it now also has federal funding. It's delivered by the Frankston Mornington Peninsula Local Learning & Employment Network as the lead agency, which is where the federal funding comes from.

The Young Parents Program is tailored to meet the needs of young parents, young mothers and young women between 15 and 25 years of age who have disengaged from secondary education and have done so not entirely because but predominantly because they've got pregnant and had a child, often at the tender age of 15 or 16. The young people who are involved either have a child up to four years of age or are expecting a child. I've been there many times. Some of them have two children. But what the Young Parents Program does is allow the parents and the children to share the same space—it has child care there—with the support of three program staff: an educator, an early childhood educator and a family support worker. The participants are funded for two years of attendance in the program, where they are able to complete their VCE with a vocational major, the qualification at either year 11 or year 12 level.

That is a commitment to their future and their children's future by re-engaging in education. We know that there's almost nothing more important for a young person's future than engagement in education, and that's the same if you're a young person who also happens to be a mother. I know a number of the young women who are part of this program and who have graduated, and it has given them confidence. It has empowered them to know that they can be good mothers as well as learn, get jobs, and succeed in their own right.

Just a few weeks ago, I went to the open day. A number of the young women there have become nurses. They have finished TAFE courses to become enrolled nurses, which, when you think of where they were when they were 15 or 16, is an extraordinary achievement.

What I've also had to do, though, for some of the young women in that program is negotiate with ParentsNext on their behalf. There was a particular young woman who was exited from the ParentsNext program—and exited from all of her support payments—because she was at the Young Parents Program getting her education and missed appointments with ParentsNext. So, as a result of taking the decision to further her education and further herself and the life of her young child, she was exited from ParentsNext. It was extraordinary. Finally, she had to come to my office with the help of the Young Parents Program because she was desperate for that financial support that had been taken away from her in a completely punitive way. How was she to survive? For me, that is an example of what the committee chair talked about in his foreword to the interim report, in which he said that ParentsNext is 'locked into a punitive frame and does too much harm for the good it also does'.

Undoubtedly, there have been participants for whom ParentsNext has been a godsend, and there is no doubt that programs to assist young parents, particularly young mothers, to get education or training and to be in the workforce are important. It's just about how they're designed and how they're implemented. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that not only did the parliamentary committee recommend getting rid of ParentsNext and replacing it but that the economic inclusion committee also recommended that the government abolish the ParentsNext program and send its resources 'to a co-designed set of voluntary support programs for vulnerable families, particularly low-income parents with young children who want to re-enter the workforce or access more financially secure employment'. It further recommended that voluntary support programs 'should be designed with a fully funded evaluation strategy, to inform ongoing service improvements'. Those recommendations are pretty redolent of the recommendations in the committee's report. The women's equality task force also recommended abolishing the ParentsNext program.

I'm very pleased to say that that is absolutely what the Albanese Labor government—through Senator Katy Gallagher, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Women, and Tony Burke, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—have committed to do. That's because women around the country have stories similar to the one that I've just told about the program being punitive, counterproductive and causing harm. I'm very proud to be part of a government that committed to listening to women's experiences, committed to making decisions that make women's lives better and fairer and that empower women to have opportunities—a government that is not only listening but is then taking the next step and introducing policies to allow that to happen and getting rid of programs that stop it.

From 1 July 2024, ParentsNext will be no longer, and, from 5 May this year, all compulsory requirements for participants in ParentsNext were paused. This is a government that listens, cares and acts, and I'm confident that, with a properly designed replacement for ParentsNext and with a government that listens, cares and acts, never again will a young woman who is doing all that she can to get her education, while also looking after her young child, be exited from support programs that should help her do that.

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