Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a member of the Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services, I thank the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations for this referral and the member for Bruce for chairing the committee.

ParentsNext grew from good beginnings. Its initial aim, when it was trialled in specific local government areas, was focused on young parents who had not completed high school to help them complete Year 12 and young parents under the age of 23 who had been in receipt of income support for more than two years and weren't working or studying. These were the Helping Young Parents program and Supporting Jobless Families program, which grew into ParentsNext.

We know that people who have not finished high school find getting employment much more difficult and then getting well-paid employment with a career path even more difficult. We also know that children growing up in poverty are much more likely to live in poverty themselves as adults. We know that children growing up in jobless families not only experience poverty but are more likely to be unemployed themselves as adults. So the initial ParentsNext, when it began, really focused primarily on young mums, since 95 per cent of those in ParentsNext are women, with an aim to addressing some of the drivers of poverty for women, for single parent families and young families on parent support more broadly. And it grew from there.

The program, as we examined it last year and earlier this year, is a targeted pre-employment program that aims to help parents in receipt of parenting payment to plan and prepare for employment before their youngest child begins school. As its targeted cohort grew from the targeted LGAs, its focus also grew and, again, with good intentions.

Evidence shows that prolonged disconnection from the workforce can lead to a loss of job specific skills, currency of experience and currency of qualifications. It can also lead to a lack of confidence to re-enter the workforce. So the key policy drivers for ParentsNext were about reducing joblessness, welfare reliance and intergenerational welfare dependency, increasing female labour force participation and closing the gap for First Nations people's employment. It aimed to do this by targeting early intervention and assistance to parents at risk of long-term welfare dependency, helping parents identify and reach education employment goals through participation in activities, noting this was a pre-employment program, so there was no expectation that participants would actually achieve a job during this period. However, if they wished to do so, that could certainly be part of their plan. And finally, the program aimed to connect parents with local services to help them find employment.

It was an absolute honour to meet with so many participants and hear their stories. We heard from ParentsNext providers, academics, not-for-profit groups and advocacy groups, but I specifically want to call out the participants who shared their personal stories with us. It's extremely valuable to hear from them. And I recognise the time commitment from people who, by definition, are time poor, juggling young families amongst their other commitments, but also the emotional commitment that goes with sharing your personal story, the highs and the lows, with fundamentally a group of politicians who have come into town and are people you don't know.

The ParentsNext report describes the evidence we heard as polarised, and I would definitely agree with that description. Participants either loved it or they hated it. It was life changing or it was punitive during a particularly vulnerable period.

We heard some fantastic stories from women who said that they would never have left the house if this program hadn't been encouraging them to reconnect with their community. We heard from women who said that the program had helped teach them parenting skills and connected them in with other young mums to overcome isolation and give them some support for them and their young children. We heard of women finishing year 12, getting qualifications, getting current marketable work skills and gaining confidence that there is a pathway for them once their children go to school to get back into the employment market. We heard of women who were able to escape domestic violence because of their need to attend ParentsNext, which gave them an excuse to leave the house.

We also heard the bad stories. We heard of women whose payments were cut off because the baby was sick and they missed a playgroup session. I recognise the member for Dunkley's story of a young woman who was cut off for missing an appointment while she was actually at a ParentsNext education session. These were not unusual stories.

We had people who told us that all the joy of parenting was sucked out of their life when, suddenly, they had to attend parenting sessions or playgroups as a reportable activity, and that they felt like everyone was watching to make sure they turned up and did the right thing. They felt they were being monitored in their parenting role at a time when they were still learning how to parent.

Many of the providers also told us about their misgivings. Providers told us that starting the program when the baby was nine months old was just too early. Frankly, we could find no rationale for why it started at that age. We heard that young mums and young families should be able to enjoy that important bonding period with a new baby, when everything in your life changes and your focus is on learning how to be a parent to your new child. They told us that the work of parenting should be recognised and valued as work, whether you're on income support or whether you can afford to self-fund staying at home. I think we would all agree that parenting is really important work and can establish good attachment, which is such an important underpinning for emotional self-regulation as adults and a sense of security and confidence. This can be a wonderful time, but it can also be a very difficult time. Providers told us that the notion of having to cut a young parent off payments, knowing that they had one or more young children at home dependant on them, was abhorrent and the antithesis of what they as providers and their staff had actually got into the employment business to achieve.

The report into ParentsNext was handed down in February and made 30 recommendations. Most significantly, the committee recommended that ParentsNext be abolished at the end of its current contract and be replaced with another prevocational service. This is partly because the ParentsNext program brand has now got such a tainted reputation that we really felt that we needed to move away from that while not losing the basic benefits of assisting young parents to reconnect. The report recognises that reconnection to employment is an important part to address poverty: women's poverty, poverty of young families and children's poverty. It's important to be able to help young mums and young parents get employment post child.

We also recommended that a co-design process be undertaken for this new service so that we could actually get input from the participants, the academics and the providers—the people with the lived experience from all sides—about what will actually work to help these people at this vulnerable time. Importantly, we recommended that, in the meantime, mutual obligations be suspended immediately, and I'm pleased to say that this has already happened. This is the punitive framework that the chair speaks about in the report. We want the positives of what this program can provide without the punitive framework that makes early parenthood a misery and risks cutting off income for families with young children. I commend the report.

Debate adjourned.

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