Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week I visited the Carringbush adult education centre in my electorate of Melbourne. The electorate of Melbourne has the highest number of public housing dwellings of any electorate in the country and the Carringbush centre provides critical learning opportunities for the residents of the Richmond housing estates and the surrounding areas. I learnt a lot from the people I met in Richmond who were engaged in the language and literacy program—their extraordinary skills, their talents, their desire to live a good and peaceful life here in Australia and also their desire to engage in meaningful work. I also learnt about the difficulties they encounter securing jobs, the importance of language, literacy and numeracy classes and their challenges in accessing affordable health and dental care.

In yesterday's budget there are some things that are going to help them, like the beginning of the Greens initiative to put dental care into Medicare, but unfortunately they, like many other migrants and refugees in Australia, have been forgotten. We have, especially in Melbourne, a wealth of people who have come here from overseas and who have often been living in the country for many years, with skills, degrees and qualifications that are going unrecognised. They face barriers to employment, and one of the key ones is language. It is my hope that at some stage the government moves beyond seeing job seekers as people who do not want to work and that instead we begin supporting these people, especially those who face language barriers, into meaningful and decent employment in Melbourne.