Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning I attended Mission Australia's release of their Youth Survey 2014. It was rather a disturbing set of figures that were released. The survey was conducted across 13,600 respondents. Of those, 19.7 per cent spoke a language other than English at home, and 5.6 per cent of those were young Aboriginal people. Sixty-one point two per cent were female and 38.8 per cent were male. The thing that I found so disturbing was that only six out of 10 felt that they would achieve their aspirations to achieve career success. That was the level that felt they would achieve career success. Seven in 10 felt that they would own a home.

The thing that I find so disturbing about this is that we are getting figures like this, with young people believing that they will not be able to achieve their career goals and will not be able to own a house, whilst, on the other side, programs that will help them do this are being cut—programs like Youth Connections, programs that have worked so well in the electorate that I represent in this parliament. It is an absolute disgrace that we do not have support in place to help young people achieve their career goals and achieve what we have been able to achieve in our lives. I call on the government to be much more proactive in this area.