Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This bill makes it clear—as if there was any reason to doubt—that the Abbott government has learned few lessons from its manifestly unfair budget in 2014.

Sure, the government has engaged in a bit of reluctant backpedalling here and there—including in this bill. But, this bill, as the minister said in his second reading speech, includes measures which 'incorporate the reintroduction, with modifications, or the replacement of three 2014 budget measures'. Why would these measures require reintroduction, modification or replacement? There is a simple answer to that: because they were among the most unfair, unreasonable and unwarranted aspects of the Abbott government's first budget. These measures targeted vulnerable young job seekers. They were measures that were opposed by Labor. They were measures rejected by the Australian community.

Even in a budget widely regarded as the most unfair in 20 years, the rank unfairness of these measures in this first bill when it came before the chamber stank out. That was the 2014 budget of 'lifters' versus 'leaners'. It was a budget that attacked vulnerable Australians, a budget that poured the pain on low- and middle-income families, pensioners, students, Indigenous Australians, young job seekers and the sick. There were cuts to family payments, cuts to pensions, $100,000 university degrees. Billions of dollars were cut from health and dental programs and from schools. There were cuts targeting low- and middle-income families, pensioners, students, et cetera. There were cuts laser-targeted at those the government obviously considers 'leaners'.

What was in the original bill before this House? Some of the government's cuts targeted young job seekers. These included: pausing indexation of income test free areas for all working age allowances for three years from 1 July 2015; extending the one-week ordinary waiting period to all working-age payments from 1 January 2015; extending youth allowance (other) from 22- to 24-year-olds in lieu of Newstart allowance and sickness allowance from 1 January 2015. Perhaps the most egregious and disgraceful measure that came to best exemplify the rank unfairness of the government's 2014-15 budget was forcing young jobs seekers under 30 to wait six months before receiving an income support payment, and then, after they had received the payment for six months, denying it to them for another six months.

The National Welfare Rights Network estimated this last measure—a six month wait for income support—would affect about 43,000 young people, if introduced. The government knew this but continued to do it. Why else did it reserve an additional $229 million over four years for emergency assistance to young job seekers impacted by this measure? Because they knew there would have to be emergency relief for these people.

So let us consider how those original measures have transitioned to this bill. What has the government reintroduced? What has it modified? What has it replaced? Well, the government has reintroduced its measure to pause the indexation of income test free areas for all working-age allowances, other than student payments, for three years from 1 July 2015. For student payments, the government has modified the start day for the pause of indexation of the income test free areas from 1 January 2015 to 1 January 2016. That is the sum total of the modification to this measure: pushing back the start date 12 months.

These indexation pauses are a $134.8 million cut in support for job seekers and students. Labor rejected this measure in its original form and we reject the reintroduced measure in this bill. Secondly, the government has reintroduced its measure to extend the one-week ordinary waiting period to all working-age payments—excluding widow allowance—modifying the start date from 1 January 2015 to 1 July 2015. Again, the only modification to this measure was to push back the start date by six months. This is a $274.8 million cut in support for receiving working-age payments. Labor rejected this measure when it was originally introduced and rejects the reintroduced measure in this bill.

The government has reintroduced its measure to extend Youth Allowance (other) from 22 to 24 year olds, modifying the start date from 1 January 2015 to 1 July 2016. This is another modification of a start date which leaves the unfairness of the measure undiminished. Changing the age requirements of this payment is a $517-million cut in support for young job seekers. For the individual job seeker under 25 years of age, it is a cut of at least $48 per week, or about $2,500 per year. The explanatory memorandum accompanying this bill states that this measure is '...driven by the current high youth unemployment rate'. Punishing young job seekers seems a curious strategy to address this problem.

The government has reintroduced its measure to force young job seekers to wait before receiving an income support payment. The government has modified this measure so that it applies to those under 25, rather than 30, and will make them wait four weeks rather than six months. As a side-note, it is ironic this measure now mirrors the New Zealand model, given reports in The Australian newspaper last year on 16 May that 'cabinet arrived at the six-month no-dole rule after looking at the New Zealand model, which -involves a one-month no-payment period, and wanted to make it stronger'. Never mind. In its modified form, this measure is a $173.3-million cut in support for young job seekers. Thankfully, thanks to Labor's opposition, the government has scrapped its ridiculous plan to lock young job seekers into rolling six-month non-payment periods.

So the government says it will now make young job seekers under 25 years of age wait four weeks for income support. However, as this bill's explanatory memorandum makes clear, many young job seekers will be forced to serve the four-week waiting period prior to the additional one-week ordinary waiting period, meaning they will be waiting five weeks for income support. Young job seekers need support to find and keep jobs, not senseless and unfair measures that push them into poverty, crisis and potential homelessness. Then and now, this measure will place many vulnerable young people in my electorate of Blair in South-East Queensland in severe financial hardship. At the end of December 2014, 5,895 people, many of them under 30 years of age, were receiving Newstart allowance in Blair. This was an increase of 363 since March 2014. At the end of December 2014, 1,449people were receiving Youth Allowance (other) in Blair, an increase of 52 since March 2014. These are the people in the sights of the government.

Labor opposed this punitive measure in its original form and we reject its modified form. Whether it is one month—or really five weeks—or six months, Labor rejects a measure that the government knows has the potential to lock young job seekers into periods without income support. Labor will not leave these young Australians with nothing to live on. The National Welfare Rights Network said this four-week waiting period will:

...place young people in severe financial hardship, leaving them without food, medicines, money for job search and rent. No income means no income — whether it's for six months or four weeks. There is no place in our social security system for such a harmful approach.

This is a government that seems drunk on ideology and blind to reality. It knows the measures in this bill will push young job seekers towards poverty, but it does not care; it could not care less. It could not care that it is denying income support for four or five weeks, potentially without food or rent or medicine or transport to even get to the job interviews they are required to attend.

It expects that young people, who are among our lowest-paid workers and who often are dealing with varying hours of casual employment and high rents, will go to their interviews and look for employment in circumstances where they have been left without the basic necessities of life. This is more and more a symptom of the reality deficit of this government, which is inflicting a Prime Minister who believes Australians want and deserve knights and dames, but does not believe they deserve income support to get into employment. The Treasurer tells people that poor people do not drive cars and tells young families struggling to afford their first home to 'get a good job that pays good money'.

This bill reveals the government believes the false premise that young Australians lack the will to work. In his second reading speech, the minister said:

We do not want to see a shuttle run from the school gate to the Centrelink front door.

This attitude, pervasive within the government, ignores the genuine barriers that young people face when seeking and maintaining work, including: a lack of available work, particularly entry-level and full-time positions; a lack of relevant skills and qualifications; and a lack of employers willing to employ young people. Only a biased and blinkered government assumes that every young person who fails to find a non-existent job lacks gumption and determination. There is no evidence that young Australians as a group lack the will to work, and it is an indictment of the government's attitude to young Australians.

Thankfully, Mission Australia has looked at this issue. Each year since 2002, the organisation has asked young people for their thoughts and opinions on a range of issues for the national Youth Survey. The 2014 survey spoke with 13,600 Australians aged between 15 and 19 years of age. Did these young people report they would rather dodge work for something else, to sit on the couch and do nothing? No, they did not. Eight out of 10 told Mission Australia that achieving career success was either 'extremely or very important' to them, but over 40 per cent though this success was only 'somewhat likely', 'less likely' or 'not likely at all'.

Further evidence of the barriers young people face finding work was outlined in the Australia Institute's 2013 Hard to Get a Break report. That report found that 54 per cent of people aged between 17 and 24 cite an inability to find work as the reason for their unemployment. When asked to identify the barriers they faced when re-entering the workforce, 36 per cent of those young people cited 'too few jobs' and another 31 per cent cited 'lack of relevant skills'. This is the reality facing many young people. The government shrugs its shoulders and ramps up the harsh and punitive measures and the harsh and punitive rhetoric towards these people.

But unemployment has risen under the Abbott government. When Labor left office in September 2013, Australia's unemployment rate was 5.7 per cent. It has been over six per cent and is now six per cent. For historical interest: Australia's unemployment rate last started with a six back in 2003, when the current Prime Minister was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations in the Howard government. The 2015-16 budget predicts that unemployment will remain above six per cent over the forward estimates. In last year's budget address, the Treasurer said:

Unemployment is too high with over 700,000 Australians looking for a job.

In this year's budget address, he failed to mention the number unemployed.

According to the ABS data, there are currently 756,300 young people, older people and mature-age people looking for employment in this country. Nationally, as I said, unemployment sits at about six per cent. In my electorate of Blair, it is 7.4 per cent. According to the most recent available data, youth unemployment sits at about 13.65 per cent nationally and at 16.6 per cent in Ipswich, part of my electorate.

These are crisis numbers, and they are a crisis for the reality and experience of young people. Looking back at the government's 2014 budget, which gutted $2 billion from skills and training programs, shows just how short sighted this government has been in relation to jobs and skills and training. The government refuses to reverse these cuts, and the consequences to young people are devastating.

I call on the government to reverse the cuts it has undertaken and cuts which have made a big impact in my local community. The Trade Training Centres in Schools Program has been a complete success in my electorate. The Ipswich Region Trade Training Centre at Ipswich State High School provides training and support for students from schools like Bremer State High School, Bundamba State Secondary College, Lowood State High School and Rosewood State High School. The Riverview Springfield Trade Training Centre at St Peter Claver College, at Riverview, does likewise. That is a great trade training centre. I have been there on numerous occasions. It is the same thing with the Ipswich trade training centre at St Edmund's College and the West Moreton trade training centre at West Moreton Anglican College, in Karrabin, yet this government has cut the funding. This is emblematic of its attitude to skills, training and jobs and its lack of commitment to young people in this country.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. Firstly, I think we should focus on where we are on unemployment in this country. I think everyone accepts that our unemployment levels are currently too high. We cannot look at that in isolation. We need to look at the history of the past several years and where we are to see where we can go in the future.

We start by going back to the last coalition government. That last coalition government actually decreased the unemployment queues in this country by over 300,000 people. There were 300,000 people who were on the unemployment line when the previous coalition government took office who were actually in paid work when the coalition left office—a reduction of 300,000 people. That was also done at a time when the debt was paid back, and not only the $96 billion worth of Labor debt that they had inherited. It should never be forgotten that along the way they also had to pay back $54 billion in interest payments. They paid back $96 billion. That money had to be taken out of the economy. It had to be earned—every single cent of it—by private enterprise and taken out of the economy to pay back Labor's debt: $96 billion plus another $54 billion in interest. And then another $40 billion was put aside in the Future Fund and the surplus was handed over, with a budget in surplus by $20 billion. That is what the previous Labor government inherited. And, with all that work paying back all that debt and putting aside that money in the Future Fund, the previous coalition government were still able to decrease the unemployment queues in this country by 300,000 people.

Let us contrast that to the six years of Labor. They blew the surplus. They went on a reckless and wild spending spree, running up over $300 billion in debt, which now costs this nation at least $13 billion every single year in interest payments. It simply goes straight out the door. And yet, during that period of time, the unemployment queues in this country increased by 200,000 people. We could fill the MCG twice with the number of people that joined the unemployment queues under the previous Labor government.

It is quite simple. We have seen in speech after speech from members of the Labor Party that they simply do not understand how jobs are created in this country. They think that the government can create jobs. They think they can go out there and spend money on all these little pet projects, like we saw with the home insulation and the schools projects. They think that is what creates jobs. But all they are doing is taking money from productive parts of the economy, like they did with their carbon tax on small business, slugging all those businesses with extra costs and imposts and taxes and making it harder for those people, when those small business people are the ones who are actually the job creators of this nation. That is what we have to get a basic, fundamental understanding of. Those small businesses, especially those entrepreneurs that go out and have a go and create those new businesses, are the job creators of this nation.

Of course, that is why we saw under the previous Labor government their complete misunderstanding of that basic concept. Not only did we see the unemployment queue increase by 200,000, but the sector that they hit the hardest was the small business sector. Over 500,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector of this nation under the policies of the previous Labor government—519,000 jobs were lost in the small business sector. That is what we of the coalition have inherited. That is what we are trying to turn around—not only all the landmines that have been planted along the way.

I can confidently say that we have gotten off to a good start. Already, under this coalition government, we have seen 280,000 jobs created in this nation. They are not created by government. They are created mostly by our small business sector out there in our community. That is 280,000 jobs added since this government took office. We saw 42,000 jobs—according to the ABS seasonally adjusted numbers—created in the last month.

I am proud to say, coming from the state of New South Wales, that a large proportion of those jobs were actually created in New South Wales. If we look at the laggard states—unfortunately the laggard state of Victoria—over the last two months combined, according to the ABS, we have seen 35,000 jobs created in New South Wales. But guess how many, under a Labor government, have been created in Victoria? If you guessed none, you would be close but you would still be wrong. Over the same time that the Liberal coalition government has created 35,000 jobs in New South Wales, in Victoria we have seen almost 2,000 jobs lost, again showing the importance of coalition policies, coalition principles and the simple understanding that governments do not create jobs. It is the private sector and especially small business that create jobs.

The way to get that job creation up is to take those government taxes and reduce the government levies, reduce the red tape, reduce those burdens on those small businesses and give people the incentive to get out, have a go and start a new business. That is what creates jobs. That is what this side of the House understands. And that is one of the reasons why we have seen 280,000 jobs created since this government has come to office.

Also, we have seen the previous Labor government's forecasts for unemployment at this time were 6¼ per cent. That is what they forecast. We have seen from most of their forecasts time after time underestimating the costs of their policies. That was their best case scenario—an unemployment rate of 6.25 per cent. We, in the coalition, have that down to six per cent and we are determined to get that lower. That is why policies like our free trade policies open up trade opportunities with China, with South Korea and with Japan. I note the trade minister is currently working over in India, where we have enormous opportunities to increase jobs in this nation. But back to the specific provisions of this bill. Unemployment in this country is still too high. We still have to help the private sector to create more jobs, more wealth and prosperity for this country.

One thing that must be noted about this bill is that the measures are not stand-alone. In the 2015-16 budget, the government announced a jobs and small business package which increases support services for those impacted by the changes of this bill. You will hear Labor speakers get up on this bill and try and pick holes in it, but this bill cannot be looked at in isolation. You need to look at all the other aspects they have put into the budget. And they include that we have invested in additional work experience places—$18.3 million—to provide job experience and connection for employers. We are running intensive support trials for vulnerable job seekers with a cost of $55.2 million. We are providing new support for youth and mental health conditions—another $19.4 million. Another $22.1 million is for vulnerable young migrants and refugees. We are continuing to support parents to prepare for unemployment—another $8.9 million. These trials will focus on the most disadvantaged and help them prepare for work, find a job and stay in that job.

From 1 July 2016, young people under 25 who are most job ready—that is important—who apply for youth allowance or other special benefits will serve a four-week waiting period before becoming eligible for payment. It is quite a simple concept. We believe that it is against a person's interests to go from the school gate to the Centrelink office. We believe that, no matter what welfare we give them during that period, to have a system where you can go from the school gate to the Centrelink office is not in the long-term best interests of that person. But we do have provisions and exceptions in this, because job ready means someone has to live in an area with good employment opportunities. They have to have reasonable language, literacy and numeracy skills, and they have to have recent work experience. The measures in this bill will save $200 million, but the additional support services that we are putting in have a cost of $375 million. When you add the two up, when you look at the provisions in this bill and the other things the government is doing, we are providing more for disadvantaged youth to give them greater opportunities to get into jobs.

During those first four weeks, a young job seeker will be required to meet with a proactive job provider, agree to a job plan, develop an up-to-date resume, create a job seeker profile on a job search website and provide evidence of a satisfactory job search of up to 200 job applications. Further, we have made $8.1 million available in emergency relief funding to provide assistance for job seekers affected by the measure who are experiencing hardship. This funding will be available for the emergency relief providers. This measure will encourage young people to make every effort to look for work and to maximise their chances of getting a job. Students will not be subject to the four-week waiting period. Further, in recognition of the importance of education and training in preventing future unemployment, young people who return to school or take up full-time vocational education or university study will be able to seek more suitable payments such as Youth Allowance and therefore would not be subject to the four-week waiting period. Job seekers who have been assessed as having significant barriers to finding a job will not be required to wait the four-week waiting period.

Then there are a number of important exemptions. Firstly, someone who has served the four-week period in the last six months will not have to serve another four-week period if they have left a job or their job has ended through no fault of their own. Also, if someone has a disability, they will be exempt. If they are pregnant in the last six weeks, they will also not have to serve the waiting period. These measures will not impact job seekers who have left state care within 12 months. The government will make sure only youth 16 to 25 will have to serve the waiting period. There are some cases where a person under 16 can be on a special benefit. And these exemptions will ensure the bill is fair and there is ministerial discretion.

It is estimated today there are 6.5 million young people under the age of 25 who are living at home with one or two parents. During this waiting period, many people will find jobs that do not require income support payments. We are taking measures to encourage young people to go out and take that first job, rather than perversely encouraging them to go from the school gate straight to the Centrelink office.

I encourage young people today when they are going out looking for their first job to try many different things. I remember my first job when I was still in school. The first day I got my licence I went and sold some things at Paddy's Markets with a mate of mine. We went around some of the factories and were able to con them to give us some of their old broken merchandise. It was a bit of a consignment deal. We would take it to see if we could sell it. They were happy to get rid of their old broken stuff. We fixed it and took it to the markets in the back of an old station wagon as soon as we had our licence. We were able to earn ourselves a few extra bucks that way. That is what I encourage young people to do. Not just to look at the traditional sources of employment but to look in all areas of the economy where they can have a go. Go and knock on the doors of businesses in your local area and show that you are willing to turn up. There are still many job opportunities in this country.

In conclusion, we live in a wonderful country. There are many opportunities for many young people. I know that often the first job they take on will not be the job they have for life. We want to incentivise those young people and take away the perverse incentive to go from the school gate to the Centrelink office, but we have to have appropriate safeguards. This bill, with the other measures we are putting in place, achieves both of those aims and includes those important safeguards. I commend this bill to the House.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In his contribution the member for Hughes gave kindly advice to unemployed young people and selectively utilised statistics over a convenient timeline. I concede, however, that he made one accurate comment. He said that we cannot see the current situation in isolation. I want to quote somebody slightly more renowned and respected in financial and economic debate in this country than him. I want to quote the governor's foreword to the national accounts of 2009. He spoke of 'the most serious and widespread financial crisis in generations'. He further commented that 'these actions averted in this country a much more serious financial disaster' and he spoke of 'significant private wealth having been destroyed'. He spoke of a 'lengthy period of escalating tension'.

People come in here and say that under Howard we had this rate of unemployment and under Labor we had this rate of unemployment, but they leave out the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. One would think that the member for Hughes had never heard of Lehman Brothers and never had any consideration of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns and the Bank of Scotland. It all went past him as the United States and the United Kingdom renationalised financial institutions and taxpayers saved them and bailed them out after the crisis when mortgage backed securities collapsed.

When we look at unemployment in this country this kind of rhetoric about what happened between Labor and Howard is absolutely ridiculous. Despite the realities of that financial crisis, in this country in 2008 there were 20,000 people aged between 15 and 24 who were long-term unemployed and today there are 58,000 people aged between 15 and 24 who are not just unemployed but long-term unemployed. Youth unemployment has reached 13 per cent nationally. Youth unemployment is currently sitting at 13.6 per cent. It pushed above 13 per cent in mid-2014 and has remained above that level ever since. That rate was never reached during the entirety of the previous Labor government. One in five unemployed Australians are teenagers. The unemployment level hit 20 per cent for 15- to 19-year-olds in January this year.

The National Youth Coalition for Housing has estimated that 42 per cent of homeless people in Australia are under 25. They are not waiting around for the advice from members of parliament, who are on quite high incomes, to go doorknocking. They are actually homeless and sleeping on the streets. That is about 26,000 people under 25 are already out on the streets on any one night.

This bill has some very disturbing aspects. It extends from 1 July 2015 the ordinary waiting period for all working age payments. It removes access to Newstart allowance and sickness allowance for 22- to 24-year-olds and replaces these benefits with the much lower youth allowance. They will lose $50 a week. Some people have quoted a very useful statistic in the last few weeks: that some of these welfare payments are less than what the Treasurer of this country receives in overnight travel allowance for staying at his wife's residence in Canberra. That is the comparison: the people this is hitting earn in one week the allowance he gets for one night here and not paying rent.

Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What do you get?

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I get a similar payment. That is the whole point, you idiot. As I said, they are severely attacking people. Last year this same Treasurer, with the usual huff and puff—

Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I have a point of order. The member used a quite unparliamentary term in regard to the minister sitting at the table. I ask that he withdraw.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask if the member would assist the House.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What expression? What was it?

Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You know exactly what you said.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I don't. This is just disruption of the worst order. Mr Deputy Speaker, can you tell me what the expression was? She wants to disrupt. I will go along with what she says.

Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was a legitimate point of order. I ask that you withdraw the unparliamentary term you called the minister sitting at the table.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What was it?

Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm not going to use it in this chamber.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I believe you may have used the term—

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw it.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you. Please proceed.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last year, in typical huff and puff hyperbole, the Treasurer talked of 'an eventual train crash on the budget'. He went on to say that we face a 'tsunami coming across the water'. That was the kind of justification he had last year for saying that unemployed young people should not get any payment for six months. We do not have a situation where these people can always rely on going home and having family support. We have a situation where there are crises in families, where there are disputes, where there are family units breaking up and reforming. Last year, using his same justification, he said that they could be condemned for six months. Because the Australian people revolted, because parents came to my office giving their children's actual circumstances and expressing such extreme opposition, those opposite backed off.

This year, all of a sudden that crisis disappeared. Yes, there is certainly a crisis—a crisis of confidence in this country. This year, in a desperate attempt to try and precipitate change from this crisis of high unemployment, the government brought down a less austere budget. But the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, made this comment about their latest antics:

It is unlikely to be in Australia's long-term interest to engineer a consumption boom by encouraging people to borrow large amounts against future income.

The government are basically saying, 'Go out there and spend; go out borrow.' It typifies the mentality of this government that when, in the last few weeks, people raised the issue of the huge interest rates that banks are charging on credit cards—20 per cent when the base rate in the country is two per cent—one of their ministers said, 'Oh, it is dreadful to raise the question of credit interest rates—it is bank bashing.' In this country at the moment there is $48 billion in personal debt on credit cards, and $33 billion of that attracts interest of 20 per cent. With this mentality in the government, it is not surprising that they seek to attack unemployed young people, to make them the victims, to basically say, 'We will exploit the unpopularity of young people amongst older society by making life hard for them.'

This is a government which advises people to go out and get a well-paying job. We all know that most people in the Australian workforce, the US workforce and the British workforce gain employment not from labour market companies but from connections. Not every person has the advantage of having a family with a business like Hockeys Property, where four people conveniently have the name 'Hockey'. Not everyone in this country can just walk into a company and get a job through family, but that is the kind of mentality over there: 'If you have got a problem with housing, go out and get a good job.' Quite frankly, the Australian people are not interested in whether the Prime Minister owns a property on the North Shore of Sydney and whether he thinks higher housing prices are good for people. They are more interested in the fact that the kids of people in Penrith cannot afford to have a house these days. It is a dream for people in this country to have a house, and it is disappearing if you are under 30. And the Prime Minister says, 'Rising house prices are great because I own property.' This is the kind of mentality that affects this government—a government of privilege, a government of elitism, a government that tries to divide people between so-called workers, and shirkers and bludgers.

The measures in this bill are so disturbing that there is a great possibility that the bill infringes a number of international conventions that we have signed up to. People might occasionally complain and be unhappy with these conventions, but I challenge the government to resile from them, to abandon them, to withdraw from them. Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights—which this country and this government continue to adhere to—requires that people have a right to social security and a standard of living. Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, discrimination based on age, gender or personal type is frowned upon; it is outside the understanding of what should occur.

These measures are indeed deeply disturbing. The mentality of this government is perhaps epitomised by a speech made by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—one of the great heroes of the current Prime Minister. It was virtually to the week 19 years ago that she addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and made an infamous speech, quoting a letter by Paul to the Thessalonians, where he said that if people work they can live, and if people do not work they can starve. It is interesting that, at the end of that great contribution by Margaret Thatcher, which many people regard as the beginning of the end for her, the General Assembly gave her the church reports on poverty, housing and a fair social benefits system.

That is the mentality of this government—a government which basically says 'We will reduce access to decent training; we will make it harder for people to aspire to go to university, particularly in Western Sydney, by pricing courses out of their hands; and we will say that Work for the Dole is the only solution to these kinds of matters.' At the same time, they reduce the availability of training. People need decent training. The unemployment pattern is not just affecting young people. I see significant numbers of older people who had worked in industries for 30 years, and they want to be employed; they still seek work. Quite frankly, they are never going to be employed, because, whether you can establish it or not, the reality is that employers will not take them on. These people often have experience. They do not necessarily need a Work for the Dole exercise to give them an understanding of work habits, how to work with colleagues, how to get to work on time; they need proper retraining to actually be useful to the workforce.

Here, on National TAFE Day, we see the recitation of statistics in this country about the decline of TAFE systems, the retreat of people from this well-established, internationally recognised body to fly-by-night operators in the private sector. We see the cost of courses escalating to the point where people are walking with their feet and unable to have recourse.

Kate Carnell, the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, recently said that we face a generation of young people on the fringes of the economy. That is so true, with unemployment figures reaching levels unseen since the Howard government. The previous member mocked Labor for at one stage hoping for an unemployment rate of 6¼ per cent. I think he should look at his own Treasurer's comments this year, where he speculated about unemployment of 6½ per cent being the outcome in the next few years.

This bill contains a variety of severe measures that will affect young people. Significant numbers of them will be in very desperate circumstances because they do not have strong family support mechanisms available to them. They are often from families who have endured generations of sporadic employment. They live in parts of our capital cities that are not close to public transport and so they are discriminated against in the labour market because employers want people who are readily available.

I was interested in the question about the kind of people this legislation stamps on. This week a report was released by ACOSS, titled Inequality in Australia: a nation divided. Quite frankly, we should have a bit more concern about the increasing inequality in this country rather than taking the hammer to young unemployed Australians. That report noted that 20 per cent of households in this country earn over $232,000 a year and own $2 million in assets. That is the top 20 per cent. The lowest quintile have property worth $44,250 on average. That is the value of the property of one-fifth of Australians; and, despite the view of the Treasurer that 'poor people don't drive cars', it is usually restricted to items such as cars and home contents. This is predominantly where the unemployed young people who are now going to be condemned to $50 less a week and basically be deprived of access to any money whatsoever for a significant period of time come from.

I want to very strongly join with other opposition members in noting, firstly, our success in countering a measure last year which would have deprived people for six months, and, secondly, our continued opposition to these measures.

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

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. As a government, there are key services which members of the Australian public expect us to provide, and those are health, education and infrastructure. These are all vital to our future progression and sustainability as a nation and as a community, but the area where government has become increasingly relied upon are those policy areas which fall under the very large umbrella of social services.

As we are talking about employment, I would like to mention that recently I met with Community Employers WA, CEWA, which is a representative body of 130 employer organisations in the not-for-profit community services sector. Their objectives are focused around the sustainability of services, just as the government's focus is. CEWA was established in 2008 and the board comprises the CEOs of a number of large charities in Western Australia. The purpose of the meeting was for CEWA to share their perspectives on the not-for-profit community services sector, on the relationship with government, on the front-line opportunities and challenges many of their members are currently experiencing, and on the challenges of finding employees in Western Australia, particularly in times when there is a mining boom.

I also met with Tony Hagan, Executive Manager of VisAbility Guide Dogs WA. They have been running a community program, through a foundation called the Scottish Masonic Charitable Foundation, to support blind and vision impaired West Australians to achieve sustainable employment. The program exists to achieve better outcomes for people who are blind or vison impaired. As the existing DES system was not achieving the results that they wanted, they set up their own system. This is relevant in the context of the task force being set up by Minister Fifield to try to improve the disability employment system.

VisAbilty Employment has achieved a fantastic result in the first 18 months of operation. A recent cost-benefit analysis conducted by KPMG indicated that for every dollar invested in the program, $5.58 of economic value is achieved. In addition to this, there are obvious social benefits for the participants in the program and for those who gain jobs through the program, which is not government funded. It was inspired and driven by a not-for-profit and by the private sector and philanthropy. So there are other areas of support for people to gain jobs without relying purely on the government.

Disability support, age pensions and childcare subsidies are just a few of the support networks this government provides each and every day. But overall these social security or welfare measures are continuing to cost taxpayers more and more every year. In fact, in the 2015-16 financial year government expenditure will be highest for these policy measures, costing taxpayers $154 billion. This is vital expenditure as it is directed toward support services for our most vulnerable. It is a safety net for those who cannot afford a basic standard of living and where they would not have a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food in their mouths without this additional government assistance.

I would like to believe that people who claim these support payments recognise that they are for our most vulnerable and that they are able to assess their own circumstances to determine whether they are truly in need of that support. I would also like to believe that each member in this place lives in a country where these vital services are not taken advantage of. As members know, the reality is that society is not always quite so moral and there are those who will seek to take advantage of others when they can.

Before the House today we have a bill which seeks to address a particular type of social services payment which focuses on supporting our youth, who are the future of this country, to find and keep a job. The Liberal Party has always said that the best thing you can give anyone is a job. It would be completely unfair to say that every youth who does not have a job is what society often refers to as a 'dole bludger'. This is far from the truth. But there are those who are this way inclined, and there are those who want a particular job which may not be available at a particular time so they choose to not have one at all.

The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 addresses this concept by taking the view that this coalition government is implementing measures to ensure young job seekers accept a suitable job—not just a job they would like to have. We take this view because it is not fair for every Australian taxpayer to support young job seekers who are not willing to take jobs that are available. In the first instance it is about having 'a job', not 'the job' and focusing on supporting those job seekers who are struggling to find work.

A key provision in this bill is therefore to extend the waiting period young people aged between 16 and 25 must serve before becoming eligible for the Youth Allowance or Special Benefit payment to four weeks. For clarification, the form of youth allowance this bill refers to is those payments made to job seekers, not the youth allowance which is paid to students and apprentices. It also specifically refers to those youths who are what the government deems 'job ready'. This means someone who lives in an area with good employment opportunities, who has reasonable language, literacy and numeracy skills and who has recent work experience. Because these are the people who should not be relying on government handouts, they are the people who should be working to benefit their future and the future of this country. During this first four weeks, young job seekers will not just be sitting on their laurels either. They will be doing everything they can to make themselves job ready. They will be meeting with a Jobactive provider; agreeing to a job plan; developing an up-to-date resume; creating a job seeker profile on the Job Search website; and providing evidence of satisfactory job search, with up to 20 job applications. In other words, they will be doing all the things that will make them a good candidate for employment.

Now I note that when extending the waiting period for these payments was debated in this and the other place previously there were those who suggested that no waiting period should apply. So, if a person does not have a job, they would straightaway be provided with government assistance. On that basis, I put this question to those members: do you really think young 18- or 19-year-old young adults are really going to try that hard to find a job if they know that all they have to do is walk into Centrelink and they will straightaway be given a handout by the government?

Ms Scott interjecting—

I hear the member for Lindsay say 'of course'. Really, I know that cash-splashing is about the only thing those opposite are good at, so I cannot really say that I am surprised they would think this is a great idea. However, the reality is this: while there are people who would hate even the idea of being provided with this form of government assistance, there are also those who would sit back and take full advantage of this type of payment system. I can refer back to my experience with my own son. His first job out of school was to be an AFL rookie, which provided him with a job and a lot of hard work as well. Unfortunately, when he was delisted after two years with the AFL club he was with, he had to go and find himself another job. One of the things suggested to him was that maybe he should enrol for unemployment benefits while he was looking for a job. Thankfully, I had instilled in him that he should not rely on the state, that he should rely on himself or rely on his parents and that it is not the state’s responsibility to look after him until he finds himself a job. He had the same attitude and said that he did not want to sign up with Centrelink. Eventually, he found a job by working in about five different types of jobs. He took any job he could until he found the job that suited him. Now I am pleased to say that he has a job working as an apprentice bricklayer. He has become an important part of the community and a taxpayer to support those who are really in need. I was proud of him for having the morals and the values whereby he thought he did not need to rely on the state and that he should rely on his own abilities to go and find any job that he could until he found the job that he really wanted.

I now turn back to the measures before the House. By introducing this four-week waiting period, the government will save $200 million. However, we are not extending this waiting period without considering the need to provide additional employment opportunities for those who are job ready—quite the opposite. As members on this side of the House know, the coalition is a government which focuses on creating jobs and providing the necessary building blocks to ensure Australia remains a prosperous country. One of the ways we have achieved this in the 2015-16 budget is through our Jobs and Small Business package. As I said earlier, this is about investing in our nation's future, and this government recognises that in order to achieve this we must invest in our small businesses and we must invest in those who will be the taxpayers of the future—our children, our teenagers and our young adults. So what this government has done through our Jobs and Small Business package is invest: $18.3 million in additional work experience places; $55.2 million to run intensive support trials for vulnerable job seekers; $19.4 million to provide new support for youth with mental health conditions; $22.1 million for vulnerable young migrants and refugees; and $8.9 million to support parents prepare for employment. Each of these funding measures will create new job opportunities, will support our youth and, most importantly, will focus the government's attention and expenditure on our most disadvantaged, which is the exact purpose of all social services payments. It is also important to note that under this measure the government has also implemented an $8.1 million emergency relief fund which will be specifically dedicated toward assisting job seekers who may experience hardship as a result of the measures before the House and which will be available through emergency relief providers.

In my electorate of Swan, we have six Job Services Australia providers at eight sites which support both adults and our youth to find employment opportunities. In relation to these eight sites, $52.6 million excluding GST has been spent by the Australian government to assist these job seekers between 1 July 2009 and 28 February 2015. This includes service fees, job placement fees and 13- and 26-week employment and education outcomes, and Employment Pathway Fund expenditure. Although these are significant funding measures to support job seekers, particularly in Swan, this coalition government, when developing these policy measures, has also taken into consideration those who may be assessed as having significant barriers to finding a job. Specifically, this refers to those youths who have been assessed as stream B and C Jobactive clients. These people will be exempt from the four-week waiting period. There are also a number of additional exemptions, including those who have already served a four-week waiting period in the last six months and whose job ends through no fault of their own; someone who has a disability or an activity test exemption; and those jobseekers who have left state care within the last 12 months.

Lastly, I take this time to note that the bill before the House also reintroduces a number of measures previously passed in this place but not the other place under the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 1) Bill 2014 and the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2014. This includes extending the one-week ordinary waiting period which currently applies to Newstart Allowance and Sickness Allowance to Youth Allowance and Parenting Payment from 1 July 2016 and increasing the age eligibility to 25. I note that this measure does now exclude Widow Allowance claimants from this waiting period, which was part of the previous bill. The maximum age of eligibility for the Youth Disability Supplement will also be increased to 24 for recipients of Youth Allowance from 1 July 2016. The bill will cease the Low Income Supplement from 1 July 2017 and it will maintain the income-free areas for all working age allowances, other than student payments, and for parenting payment single at level for three years. Lastly, it will maintain at level for three years the income-free areas and other means-test thresholds for student payments, including the student income bank limits, with a new start date of 1 January 2016.

Overall, the bill before the House continues the work of this government to create new jobs and implement vital savings measures that will put this country's economy back onto a sustainable path. It will remove this concept of entitlement and instead refocus our support payments back to their original intent—providing a safety net for those who need it most. Each of these measures has been appropriately considered by government as necessary to make this $154 billion worth of social services expenditure sustainable in the future, and they are measures which I will be joining with the minister in commending to the House.

It is interesting to note in the employment figures that were released recently that, since the beginning of the year, over 111,000 new jobs have been created, or more than 22,000 new jobs per month. The labour market has continued to perform strongly in the first five months of 2015, after a strong 2014. In 2014, under the coalition, we saw jobs growth of nearly 4,000 jobs a week, which was quadruple the rate we saw in 2013, under the previous Labor government. So the coalition is on track, as I said before. The best thing we can give anyone is a job, and that is what we are focusing on. We are making sure that the system provides those who are vulnerable with the safety net that they need. As I said before, I join with the minister, and the rest of my colleagues, in commending this bill to the House.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to continue the speech which I began earlier but was unable to complete.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is leave granted?

Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Leave is granted.

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

Very generous of you!

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister. I know how keen he is to always hear my speeches in this place. As the member for Swan says, it was very generous. He is a picture of generosity, of bipartisanship, in this place. I probably have not helped his preselection or his standing in Liberal Party branches by saying that, but he is always very convivial in this House.

In my comments, I made it pretty clear what I think about the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. One of the things I was talking about was entry-level jobs and my own experiences and the experiences out there in the community. We have so many people in my electorate who really do try hard to get entry-level jobs, who apply and apply and apply again. Sometimes you hear of people doing 40 or 50 applications a week. It is not unknown for young workers without experience to try and do that. It is very, very tough to get your start in an industry. The other group who never stop applying are those mature age workers—often men but not exclusively men—who, after a very long period of their working life, having worked right the way through, find themselves made redundant and find it very hard to get a job in another industry. Often they are prepared to not be job snobs, to actually get out there and apply and to do the rough jobs that I did in my youth—fruit picking and the like. People are often pretty keen to do that.

That is why it is so disturbing when I talk to union officials like Tony Snelson of the National Union of Workers—who was on the ABC, on the Four Corners program—and he tells me that there are employers who have arrangements, particularly related to the 417 visa, the backpacker visa, that are taking vast swathes of entry-level jobs out of the system, out of the labour market. That is the effect of them. D'VineRipe are an employer in my electorate, and they have now written to me and communicated with me and assured me that they are taking every step to try and eliminate some of the practices that were highlighted in the Four Corners program. I thank them for that, because in the past I have been a supporter of some of their projects, based on the employment that they will generate in my electorate. And we need jobs in my electorate, after this government's treatment of the car industry.

We want to make sure that there are entry-level jobs out there. That is why it is so distressing to read on the ABC website and to see on the 7.30 program, Lateline and Four Corners issues around Baiada chicken-processing plants and the high use of 417 visas. In one ABC report, by Jason Om—it is there on the website—there are reports of workers working up to 18 hours a day without overtime. The Deputy Fair Work Ombudsman, Michael Campbell, is quoted as telling Lateline:

I don't believe that any worker in this country should be forced to work in those types of circumstances nor endure those types of practices by any employer.

An ombudsman report that found much of the work was done 'off the books', with the foreign workers paid in cash. Mr Campbell equated it, in one instance, to syndicated crime. Mr Campbell said, in relation to the fact that some companies—mainly labour hire companies—provided fabricated records or vanished altogether:

Unfortunately what this means for our investigation is that it's very hard to pin down an individual to hold accountable. In many ways, what we see is like syndicated crime. You take one player out and another steps into their shoes.

This is a major employer in this country, a major company that provides chickens to nearly every supermarket—it is hard to buy chicken in this country without coming across Baiada Group's labels: Lilydale and the like—and yet we have these egregious work practices in entry-level jobs. When a person is employed in these conditions on a 417 visa, it in effect denies an entry-level job to a young Australian—a South Australian, a Victorian or a New South Welshman—or indeed a mature age worker. It denies them the opportunity to apply for that job. And it is not just the ABC that is making these findings. If you look at the statement of findings on Baiada Group by the Fair Work Ombudsman—and this is from the Fair Work website, something those opposite should avail themselves of—it says:

Baiada refused permission for Fair Work inspectors working on this Inquiry to access the factory floor at its worksites, denying them an opportunity to observe work practices, as well as talk to employees about conditions, policies and procedures.

Baiada also failed to provide the Inquiry with any “significant or meaningful” documentation on the nature and terms of its labour contract arrangements.

However, the Inquiry found that employees working at Baiada sites are not being paid their lawful entitlements.

The company had verbal agreements with an extensive list of labour-hire operators used to source most of its workers, largely 417 working holiday visa-holders from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Baiada’s labour-hire contractors were unwilling to engage with the Inquiry and produced inadequate, inaccurate and/or fabricated records to Inspectors.

So here we have the Fair Work Ombudsman, which is an agency of the executive arm of government empowered by this parliament to make sure that Australian workers get fair entitlements, yet what do we find? We find a major Australian company deliberately obstructing the investigations of the Fair Work Ombudsman. This is an outrage and it should be seen as such. Then we have this bill denying young Australians any income at all and those opposite talking about young Australians having to do unpaid work experience around the place in the hope that some employer will give them a job. We all know circumstances where that has been good and we have all seen circumstances where that has been bad. But to have this company, which is employing a lot of workers at entry level, behaving in this way while the government brings this bill into the House is utterly egregious. If you think Australians are going to cop this sort of circumstance, you have another thing coming. The bill is manifestly unfair and completely at odds with our traditions of a fair go.

Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Given the opportunity to speak on a bill about youth unemployment, we instead get many minutes of union talking points, the politics of division, the rhetoric of billionaires and those in poverty in Australia, the same sorts of things, sadly, that we get from the member for Wakefield and others on the other side of House.

In addressing the issues raised in the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 it is important we ensure the full story about employment and youth unemployment in particular is addressed. I have heard recent speakers from the Labor Party refer to the current unemployment rate as being too high. Any rate of unemployment is too high. We need to do everything we can to make sure it is as low as it can be, but I remind those opposite that prior to the 2013 election when the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook was released by the member for Lilley, the Treasurer of Australia at the time, he predicted that the unemployment rate in Australia would be 6.25 per cent in the June quarter of 2015. So having beaten Labor's own forecast, somehow the current unemployment rate is too high. Indeed, I would say to those opposite that we have made significant inroads into and improvements in the unemployment rate, particularly when it comes to my state of Tasmania. Hearing members opposite lecturing the government on economic performance and unemployment is a bit like the sound a wet lettuce makes when it hits the side of the colander at home. It is a lot of bluff and bluster but it really does not have a lot of veracity behind it when you think about what occurred with Labor's own forecasts relating to unemployment.

Everyone knows that Labor have dealt themselves out of the rational debate when it comes to the economy. Australians are aware of their false claims when they talked about achieving a surplus time and time again. They know about the Labor government's forecast in 2012 of a $2 billion budget surplus which, at their 2013 budget, suddenly became an $18 billion deficit and then in the aftermath of the 2013 election turned out to be a $48 billion deficit. When you add up the maths, that is a negative $50 billion turnaround in our economic circumstances. You do not need to be Einstein to realise that when the economic circumstances of the country experience such a turnaround that has an impact on things like employment, jobs and our economic freedom of action. But it gets worse. Because of debt repayments and Labor locking in spending growth above inflation, we are in fact spending $100 million every day more than this country earns from taxpayers and businesses. We have to borrow that money and pay interest on it. The opportunity cost by any measure is appalling. We could build two new schools every day if we were not spending more than we earn. We could build many kilometres of new roads or a new teaching hospital each and every month just in the funds we spend paying the interest on Labor's debt.

It is now a matter of historical record that our debt under Labor went from zero at the 2007 election to a trajectory of $667 billion in just six years. That means that each and every single month this country borrows $1,000 million dollars just to pay the interest on Labor's debt. I mention that statistic because, if we are talking about our economic future, if we are talking about our freedom of action, if we are talking about opportunities for our children and grandchildren, those statistics will have a compelling impact on their job opportunities in the future.

Employment and the need to create local jobs is the No. 1 issue in my state of Tasmania. So the words 'youth unemployment' in this bill are particularly compelling. When you think about the broader unemployment rate in Tasmania at the 2013 election, it had an '8' in front of it. The rate was 8.1 per cent. In recent months it has been under seven per cent, certainly representing a move in the right direction.

And it certainly needed to after 16 years of state Labor government in my home state—state Labor and Labor-Green government—concurrently in the last six years of that with Labor and Labor-Greens government here in Canberra. I say that the continuing fall in Tasmania's jobless rate in 2015 is encouraging. It is the best it has been in six years. There is certainly more work to be done, and the policies of the Abbott and Hodgman governments are firmly focused on creating more local jobs.

I will dwell on some of the green shoots of recovery. Over the course of 2014, 13,400 jobs were created in Tasmania. This compares to a decrease of 5,400 jobs through 2013, a year when federal Labor was responsible for the economy. Tasmania's housing sector, I am pleased to say, is showing strong increases in building approvals over the past year. Residential building approvals for Tasmania over the 12 months to April 2015, which is the latest available data point, were 42.9 per cent higher than the previous 12 months.

So it is important to emphasise that the measures in this bill are not stand-alone and should not be considered as stand-alone by those opposite. In the 2015-16 budget the government announced the Growing Jobs and Small Business package which increases support services to those impacted by changes in this bill. As part of the Growing Jobs and Small Business package, from the day after the budget a higher subsidy payment of up to $6,500—doubling from $3,250—is available under the Tasmanian Jobs Program and includes a payment of $3,250 for part-time places.

To strengthen Tasmania's business investment and jobs, a $203 million expansion was made to the Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme. From January 2016 the scheme will be extended to goods going to markets not currently covered by the scheme. Indeed, goods that are destined for international markets through the Port of Melbourne will get that $700 per shipping container assistance to make sure that our producers are able to ship their goods in a way that equalises their costs with what it might cost elsewhere on the mainland to ship similar goods.

The trifecta of free trade agreements negotiated by the coalition in 2014 will also have a significant impact on jobs, particularly in my home state of Tasmania, whose clean, fresh, quality produce will grace growing Asian markets. And when you think about the growth of those markets, Deputy Speaker, it is truly an economic miracle that is coming to the Asia-Pacific. At the moment there are in the region of 500 million people constituting the middle class in that region. The estimates are that in the next 15 years that 500 million will grow to 1.7 billion people entering the middle class, from India to Asia. That will be an extraordinary economic miracle as people are raised out of poverty. And as they are raised out of poverty, here we sit astride the Indian and Pacific oceans in a region that is going to be the engine room of global prosperity for the next 50 years. What an incredible opportunity that is going to be! We have heard the evidence in this place, of Reid Fruits—marvellous producers of cherries in Tasmania—that, by virtue of the free trade agreements signed in the last year, have grown their exports from five tonnes to 185 tonnes.

The Treasurer was in my home state of Tasmania only a few weeks ago, talking to a local fisherman, Karl Krause, who showed the Treasurer some of his documents where a year and a half ago he was selling his crayfish at $65 kilo. They are beautiful crayfish, caught east of Flinders Island, near Babel Island. I have been fishing with Mr Krause. Instead of $65 a kilo he is now getting $100 a kilo for those crayfish. So when I say that we are beneficiaries of that trifecta of free trade agreements, I know that Karl Krause and others want to hug the trade minister, Andrew Robb, for concluding them in such a wonderful way. They are going to be strategic enablers of my state's prosperity for many years into the future.

The government is also investing a billion dollars in Tasmanian infrastructure, including $400 million for the Midland Highway, $38 million for the Hobart airport runway extension and an additional $60 million for tranche 2 irrigation schemes, including a long-overdue irrigation scheme in my electorate of Bass. This will be near Scottsdale and it will provide 95 per cent water certainty. It will enable the conversion of marginal farmland into something that is much more productive so that people will be able to grow more, produce more and export more, to tap into those markets that have been enlarged and enhanced through that trifecta of free trade deals that I talked about earlier. The tranche 2 irrigation schemes—and that $60 million of federal investment will deliver approximately 40,000 megalitres of water to landholders and communities who connect to those schemes.

I would say to those opposite that when it comes to creating more local jobs, when it comes to linking strategy and government investment to the tactical things happening on the ground that are actually going to create those local jobs, then what you are seeing from the Abbott government, working in cooperation with the Hodgman government, is practical action to deliver those jobs into the future.

You would have thought that if this were such an important issue for the opposition that they would have done more about it while they had six years in government in Canberra and while they had 16 years in government in Tasmania—to actually do something more practical in some of these areas. Indeed, in his budget reply speech, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, did not mention the issue of youth unemployment at all. And, to date, Labor has committed a paltry $21 million towards tackling this issue. By comparison, the coalition is leading by example and has committed 15 times more money to help 15 times more people. Our $330 million youth employment strategy is a jobs plan directly targeted at helping young people who are most at risk of long-term unemployment through Transition to Work and intensive support programs. The strategy also provides targeted support to vulnerable and at-risk groups like people with mental illnesses and refugees. So I say to those opposite: stop your ceaseless complaining; stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

We heard from the member for Wakefield during his contribution to this debate union attacks on some of our programs. He attacked our Work for the Dole program. In my electorate of Bass, people are benefiting from these programs. Our National Work Experience program initiative, despite its proven success, is giving people on welfare real job experience that leads to paid work. I have heard members opposite have a go at the Green Army program—the Green Army program!—as if this is something that is not treating these young people equitably. I have had two Green Army programs rolled out in my electorate of Bass from Kings Bridge to the Tailrace and from Kings Bridge to Duck Reach. I have talked to these young people who are not only doing environmental projects that are enormously valuable for our community but also learning the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are going to help them get jobs into the future.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pity you are not doing something about climate change. What is going to happen in Paris?

Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hear the intervention from the member for Wakefield. These skills are skills and competencies under the National Training Framework. These are things that will make a real difference to their ability to get a job into the future. I do not understand why members opposite are actually talking down some of the things that we are doing that will address some of that disadvantage, particularly in regional areas like mine where youth unemployment has been a problem for far too long.

It is self-evident that the best way to create more jobs into the future is by ensuring that our economy continues to grow, and it is growing at an annual rate of 2.7 per cent. Under Labor it was only 1.9 per cent. Job advertisements are up, as measured by the ANZ, and it remains strong, rising in 10 of the past 11 months to be up 7.3 per cent over the year to April 2015 in seasonally adjusted terms and up 9.5 per cent in ANZ's preferred trend terms. There is so much more I could say about those green shoots of recovery, but I would simply say to those opposite: when it comes to job creation and when it comes to job creation for the most vulnerable in our society, get behind the coalition's program.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to have the opportunity to speak today on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 because it gives me a chance to express how angry I am on behalf of my constituents in Hotham that the government is going ahead with this raft of measures that are nothing other than an unbridled attack on the young people of this country.

I am angry on behalf of the young people who live in my electorate and those around Australia. But it goes well beyond that because the legislation that is under review by the House today is a broader conversation about what kind of country we want to live in and how we are going help support young people to adapt to economic change that is underway in this country. The measures that are in the bill go right to the heart of these difficult questions about how we can express in a true economic sense the egalitarianism that we all talk about so much in our conversations with one another.

I will go through the critical measures in the bill so that those in the gallery and the kids who are watching are able to understand some of the proposals that are before us. There are four that I want to focus on in particular. The first is the change that is being suggested in this legislation where people who apply for working age payments, excluding the widow's allowance, will have to wait for one week before any payment is made to them. Essentially, anyone who needs the support of the state in some way or another is being told that they will survive for one full week without income. The second is there is a new requirement for young people under the age of 25, who will now have to wait four weeks before they receive any income support from the state. So young people doing it tough without work will receive no funding at all for one month. The third is the extension of youth allowance, which applies today to Australians under the age of 22, reflecting the general view that there is some level of additional support for young people from family. Under this legislation, the age at which youth allowance applies instead of something like Newstart—that is, unemployment benefits—is being raised from 22 to 24. It is a significantly lower payment, so now everyone in this country who is between 22 and 24 and unemployed is going to see a real cut to their payments. The fourth is indexation changes. Essentially, the impact of this is that incomes will be held down because the point at which income support will kick in is being suppressed, a move that will do nothing more than simply suppress the incomes of Australians who are doing it tough while the rest of the nation grows more wealthy.

I think this legislation—of all the issues that we discuss in this House—makes fully transparent some of the values that underlie the decisions that are made by this government. They are values that tell us that people who are on welfare who have some support of the state should be made to suffer because they have no incomes of their own. That is the effect of some of these provisions which will directly put more Australians into poverty. It is legislation that surely could only have been written by someone who believes that inequality in this country does not matter. Again, I would say the clear, direct impact of this legislation is that many more thousands of Australians will end up living in poverty, some in incredibly deep poverty. It is a reminder for us of what this government wants Australia to look like. That is a place where the generations of people who have fought for better social protections for people who are doing it tough are having them stripped back slowly and surely. We have seen that not only in the legislation that we are discussing today but also in many other proposals that have been put forward by this government, whether it is changes to the indexation rate of pension that will see pensioners worse off over time or whether it is a GP tax, where people in this country, no matter how sick, will have to pay to go to the doctor—clearly a move that will put people on lower incomes in an already worse position.

I reflect at times on what could possibly be driving the government to put forward legislation like this which will so severely damage the quality of life for people in this country who need the government's help. I have to conclude it is one of only two things: either the government is a group of not very nice people, or they just do not get it. They are just not living in the same Australia that I, and most of my constituents, live in. I am going to give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume that it must be the latter, because I know many people on the other side of the House, and I know them to be good people. I have to infer that they have designed this legislation for a very different group of young people than the ones that I represent in my community of Hotham.

For some young people in Australia provisions like denying them any income for a month may seem workable. It may seem workable when you are talking about a young person who has lots of family support; maybe a young people who lives at home with their parents; a young person who can raid the fridge if they need something to eat; a young person who can borrow their mum and dad's car; a young person who can borrow 50 bucks if their parents feel like lending them a bit of cash. It is a very different proposition for those young people to be without income for a month, compared to the young people that I represent. Many of the young people I represent do not live in a household like that. Many of them do not have families that support them. Some families just cannot afford it themselves. They themselves are struggling. Many of them may also be in a situation where they need the support of government.

Let us reflect on some of the comments and indicators that we have heard from those on the other side of the House. The comments of the Treasurer really lead me to believe that this is where this has come from. We know that in the past the Treasurer has made ridiculous comments like suggesting that poor people in this country do not drive cars, which is obviously factually incorrect and also offensive. We had another example relatively recently where the Treasurer said that if people could not afford a house, they should go out and get a better job—as if there are low-income people all over this country who just had not thought of that. It is another indication of how seriously this government does not get it. It is another indication that they are living in what seems to be a very different country to the people I am representing in Hotham.

As you can probably sense, I am very upset about a lot of the proposals in this legislation. One of things that for me makes all this so much worse is that all these measures are being enacted in a time of rising unemployment for young people in this country. In fact, when you look at the numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics we have seen that youth joblessness has reached its highest point now since 1998. There are 15 per cent of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are looking for work and cannot find it. One in five, between 15 and 19 are unemployed.

Those are the macro national figures. We know of course that these figures look very different when we look at different parts of the country. In rural and regional areas of Australia—Cairns and northern Victoria come to mind—youth unemployment is north of 20 per cent. So one in five people in that broad age range are looking for work and cannot find it. It is an area of extraordinary national concern, and one for which we have seen absolutely zero leadership from those on the other side of the House. Instead they go to these draconian measures which imply that, if young people are unemployed, we can bully them into the workforce by taking away the unemployment support that they receive.

Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta, I know that you are probably aware there are lots of welfare organisations which are trying to elevate this issue on the national agenda. The Brotherhood of St. Laurence has done some fantastic work looking at areas of national concern for youth unemployment and brought forward some serious proposals that deserve real national attention. We have even heard, amongst other business organisations, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry—which is not known for its speaking out generally on poverty issues—point this out as an area of national concern. If the government is not going to listen to us, perhaps they will listen to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

One of the reasons that youth unemployment is such a concern is because we know that the impacts of being unemployed early in life can actually have repercussions for decades. Youth unemployment is not a short-term issue that is going to just affect this country for five or six years. If we allow this situation to continue, if we allow young people to start their working life without the opportunities they need to get off to a great start, then we are going to pay for that as a nation. There are issues of concern because of the people affected, but this youth unemployment problem has much broader social and economic implications for us.

There are lots of studies that have been done in very famous universities around the world which look at what effect unemployment early in life has on people. We know that young people who have this experience end up with something we call 'wage scars'. If we look at two young people in exactly the same position and track them throughout their lives, we find that the person who experienced long periods of unemployment early in their life will be at a much lower wage when they are in their 40s and 50s compared to the person that managed to get lucky and find a job early in their life. There is lots of literature about why we see that scarring effect.

One of the most distressing things you find, when you look into the literature of the long-term implications of youth unemployment, is the mental health and physical health impacts that people experience in their 40s and 50s. If the government is not willing to come to the party and have a serious conversation about this youth unemployment problem for the sake of the young people affected, then they should be thinking about what our society is going to look like in 30 or 40 years' time, when we potentially have a generation of young people who have not gotten the help and support they need and instead have been attacked by having their income taken away for a month.

There are some reasons I have talked about concerns for youth unemployment but there is one more I want to touch on before I complete my comments. I am worried about youth unemployment because, when we look at the way our economy is changing in Australia at the very highest level, we are looking into a period where the challenge of getting young people off to a great start in life is growing, not diminishing. We are seeing that technology and globalisation are changing our economy very quickly and very dramatically.

There was a study published by Oxford University in 2013 which suggested that, within 20 years, 40 per cent of the jobs that exist today will have been replaced by machines. The OECD did a similar study looking at the impact of globalisation, finding that, within a similar time period, 20 per cent of jobs will be replaced by globalisation, effectively offshoring to other countries.

When we look at the jobs that are being outsourced and the jobs where people are being replaced by machines, they are the kind of entry-level jobs that young people for generation after generation have used to get their foot in the door, to get their start in the workforce. I am thinking about, for example, law firms taking on article clerks. In their first years at the law firm, article clerks would do very routine tasks. They would look through documents, look for key words in documents. You could imagine, all of this now is being done today by computers. I am thinking of young people who might have, a generation ago, got a job in a call centre. Of course, we know now so many of those jobs are being offshored into other countries.

It is important that we do not just lament this economic change because clearly Australia is getting a lot of benefit from it. We are growing more and more wealthy. We are one of the richest countries in the world. But we do need to think about how we have to change the way that we support young people in order to ensure that they are not victims of what is happening here and that they get to benefit from this increasing prosperity that we are so lucky to see in our country.

We hear stories about people in this country who have played national leadership roles, who have had great success. Paul Keating, for example, never finished high school; Lindsay Fox was the same. These were men who went out and got their start in life, took some risks and ended up being very successful. But we are not going to see this happen anymore. Young people are only going to be able to get ahead if they stick with school, if they get a skill and if they get a good start into the workforce. I really want to have a conversation in this parliament about how we can make sure that young people get that opportunity that they need.

One thing I am very confident about is that we are not going to see that transition happen for young people when we focus instead on punishing them for what is a changing economic environment and bad luck in many instances. Young people are usually unemployed because there are no job opportunities for their level of skill and no job opportunities in the place where they live. The idea that the key response of this government is to take away any income from those young people for a month absolutely beggars belief. As I say, it reflects the type of nation that these people want to live in and their really very false understanding of what life is like out there for young Australians.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. It is good to see this very important topic considered today. Laid bare obviously are the different perspectives on this issue from the two major parties. While the previous address was somewhat vague about the detail of the bill, it is probably an appropriate time at the start of my comments to go through precisely what this bill is doing—rather than vague critiques about how young people deserve a quality of life through instantaneous payment of welfare.

Let's be very clear that there is a very mixed group of people seeking work and it is a really challenging environment. Between 16 and 25, some of the toughest social issues face us in our life cycle and getting a job must be one of those at the top or very close to it. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in supporting people to find satisfactory work. The one thing I want to make sure we never do is just say, 'There is simply not enough jobs out there to go around so let's give up.' We are never going to give up. We are going to make it as positive, as encouraging as possible to skill our population and make sure they can do the work this nation needs.

The last thing we want to be doing is basically expropriating profits overseas by importing foreigners to do the work we are not prepared to do. And if anyone says there is not work for young Australians out there, I will take you to a local orchard or abattoir where there is a 'staff wanted' sign up 12 months of the year. There is work there but it is just not in the places where we choose to do it and not in the places where we want to live. Let's be absolutely clear that we have a challenge of mismatch, not a lack of employment. Let's be honest, the more skilled you are, the more capable you will be at getting a well-paid job. It seems completely self-evident, except if a Treasurer says it then it is offensive. If a poor man says it, it is just as true. We all strive to be skilled, to have skills like tools in a tool box to give us capability. From basic capability comes opportunity as Noel Pearson famously said.

With all of those blithe statements that you have heard from both sides of the chamber, the reality is that some people will not acquire those skills for a huge range of reasons. It is actually pretty hard for the state to separate all that out, to identify the people who are gainfully and willingly seeking work from those who are persistent evaders who simply do not want to work from those who have mental and other health and family issues that make it almost impossible to work their way through the thicket of life to engage with work.

The state does not have spies in every house. We do not have time for one bureaucrat to follow every job seeker, so we have to have basic rules that serve the nation well. Within those rules you need flexibility so that at some time a minister can make a determination to change the laws quickly, which this bill allows for; so that a department can provide an emergency relief fund of over $8 million to assist thousands of people who potentially may need emergency payments over that first month of job seeking, which this bill allows. We will stream young job seekers into A, B and C recognising their ascending levels of complexity in finding work, and we will exempt those stream B and C people from the one-month wait, which this bill allows. We recognise that some people have health issues making it impossible to work or they are in the second or third trimester of pregnancy and should not be subjected to this delay, as this bill allows. We also recognise that any times people have already lost a job through no fault of their own and then fall back upon the welfare system. But if they have already served a one-month waiting period, they should not have to do it again in the same year, which this bill allows.

How many more exemptions can we put into legislation to ensure that those who should not be affected are not? We all know young people. We can all say we do not know about how life works but we have all been through it. We know that fundamentally one has a choice. If you are fit of mind and body, you can train, study or work. What this legislation says is that at any time, if you are facing a one-month wait and you choose instead to return to school to complete it or seek out training or, better still, go off to university, you should be exempted from any one-month waiting period. This bill does that.

We are reaching a point where it has become so perplexingly obvious that this works to identify the people doing the right thing and exempt them and then says to everyone else, 'Do your level best.' As a nation, there is not much more that we can ask. As a nation, we cannot say much more to a young person than: 'When you reach the age where you can work, we ask that you spend the first four weeks of that time meeting a jobactive provider, designing a resume, agreeing to a job plan and a strategy for the kind of work you would like to do and creating your profile on a website to make it easier for employers to find you and to make it easier for you to make an application. Then we ask of you, in that 28-day period, to turn up to a job interview, do your best and tell us what you've got. And then, after that period, you can, if nothing else has worked, access the nation's welfare system.'

We do have a problem. You would think, by listening to the other side, that we have no problem. You would think, by listening to the Labor Party, that the only problem we have is that we are not guaranteeing the quality of life of young people by throwing welfare at them on the day they ask for it. The entire system has waiting periods. When was the last time you went to an emergency department? When was the last time you went to a general practice? When was the last time you sat anywhere waiting for a service? There are legitimate waiting periods that play a role. This waiting period says: give it your level best. Let us just keep in mind that we have 6.5 million young Australians living at home in this period. They have every reason, with the support of a loving home, to go out and do their best to engage the real economy.

Australia holds a gold medal—not for the things that I am proud of. Australia, together with New Zealand and Ireland, has the greatest proportion of households that have no-one working in them. We have the greatest proportion of households in any community—should you fly over one when you are returning to your cities later tomorrow night from parliament—where simply everyone in that household under that roof receives welfare. Is that a legitimate challenge to a government? Are we not elected with the responsibility to change that? With the depth of evidence that we have around connection to employment and health outcomes, surely the next dollar spent is better spent connecting people to a job, placing under a roof in every town and city in this country at least one person earning a wage, at least one person who gets out of bed in the morning, at least one person who jumps in a car and drives to work, at least one person who brings home a salary, puts it on the table and says to their dependants: 'This is how a country works. This is how tax is paid, and from that come the services that we all know are there when we need them.'

But it is only this side of politics that does that simple bit of calculation, that tiny bit of calculus that you simply cannot make a promise that you cannot fund. You simply cannot deliver a service if you do not have an income to do it. We have half of this parliament who think it is utterly okay to slide into perilous debt, which is effectively borrowing money from China and the Middle East to pay for what we cannot fund ourselves. Do you think that is done for free? Do you think they say, 'We won't call that one in one day'? It has to be paid by someone. The money has to come from somewhere. That is not a debate that we can have in a mature environment, even in this place, because there is a simple and fundamental belief on the other side that you do not need to run balanced budgets, because it is a problem for the next generation—it is a problem for our kids. We have talked long and hard about this idea of intergenerational theft by running a debt now because we presume our welfare needs are greater than our kids', and we just clock it up.

That stops with the election of this government. We will start to live within our means. It does not mean you do not still run a deficit budget if that is where you are caught, but you are slowly, slowly whittling away the living beyond your means. Every person up there in the galleries understands it. They all have their credit cards. They all pay them off. They all have their home loans. They all pay them off. But we have this preposterous claim by an opposition that we can simply keep spending.

We slid from zero debt to GDP to 17 or 18 per cent of GDP. And then we cast these glances across and laugh at the Greece-EU experience as if that is not some European manifestation of what we debate here in a slightly more moderate context. You have Greece with no concept of living within their means and an EU that fundamentally paid for them to do it until now and can no longer afford to do so. That is why we bring bills into this place like the one we debate today.

It is not as if 100 members of this parliament on one side sit around dreaming of ways to reduce welfare. That is not why I went into public life. I went into public life to try to make that dollar work as well as it possibly could and make sure it ends up in the pocket of the person who most desperately needs it. A perfectly fit, perfectly healthy, 16- to 25-year-old living in my town and my city should go out and look for a job if they are physically, mentally and socially able to. If they are not, all of the exemptions are built into this bill, and none of those dishonest speeches you are hearing from the other side will even address that. It is laid out for them in bullet points, but not a single speech over there talks about those exemptions.

You would expect a mature opposition to say, 'There are pages of detail here, and we appreciate that there is some effort to provide exemptions to the most needy,' but they might respectfully disagree on the way the exemptions are structured. Let us have that debate. That is why we pay us the big bucks down here: to come up with better legislation. But no, we do not. We hear this blind story about 'income scarring' and how people deserve a quality of life from the minute they are old enough. It is the old notion that the welfare officer from the CES goes to the grade 12 class and says: 'Make sure you know where the welfare office is. Make sure you fill out your forms. Make sure you go shopping for every entitlement you deserve.'

That is not a nation that I want to be part of. I want a welfare safety net, but I do not want it to be the reason for living. The whole point is getting people back to work. In my electorate, we have started that process. In my electorate, we have engaged up to 500 small businesses by saying: 'Will you take a young Australian? In this waiting period, can they work shoulder to shoulder with your workers? Can they turn up when everyone else turns up? Can they take their lunch break when everyone else takes their lunch break? And can they be there, cheek by jowl, with people doing a job? Through no fault of their own, they have often lived in a household where nobody worked, where no-one ever has worked, where no-one has any hope of work. The first step is reducing the barriers to at least developing the lifestyle skills and a cultural awareness of what it is like to work.' It is so important. That is why we talk about it down here. It is why we agonise over how hard it is to draw some of the most complex young lives into employment, but we know that the big picture makes it worth that fight.

In my electorate I have men's sheds that are opening their doors to 50-year-old-plus gentlemen who have said, 'I can never work again,' but they say: 'Come down and learn some new skills. Come down and become certified and credentialed on these power tools.' Ultimately, what these men's sheds intend to do is to accept work from needy families where there is repair and maintenance on their households. Men's sheds can potentially provide an outreaching service from the men's shed. It is all well and good to sit around and have a coffee and do some wood turning and metalwork, but let's actually go out and find a widow, a pensioner, a person who has had a partner go into hospital or a single mum and help then with repairs around the home—the thing the love the most.

And suddenly you are unlocking the potential of work for the dole recipients who say: 'There's nothing to do. There is no job I can do.' There are thousands of hours of work to be done. It is about having the wit to connect. It is about taking senior skilled Australians and saying, 'You can be a paid supervisor of these work for the dole recipients.' It is about connecting need and expertise. It is not about giving up. It is not about walking around to your 18-40-year-olds and saying: 'They're a nasty government. All they want to do is take your welfare off you. All they want to do is remove your income' like it is some birthright—it is not. It is a privilege. A payment we enjoy in this country that very few others can call on is a privilege.

If there is one battle that will absolutely delineate the two parties we have here, it is that we regard welfare as a privilege that is earned by reciprocity and by acting within social norms. Aboriginal communities got it. They did not even invent paid welfare. In Northern Queensland it was Noel Pearson who said, 'If you are beating up your wife, if you are destroying your house, if you are not paying your welfare, if you are ending up in front of a court or if you are not sending your children to school why should we pay you welfare?' Pearson got it. This mob does not. That is a fundamental understanding that in return for welfare payments you do your best. We are saying here to go to 20 job interviews. Spend that month with a plan to work, not a plan to not work. It is a simple black-and-white comparison between this government and that opposition.

This government is not on a roll as we go into the parliamentary break for no reason. They are not on the skids for no reason. They are in this diabolical situation politically because they have not picked up the big questions and they have not answered them correctly. On this one they oppose a simple measure that says to young people: go out and give it your best shot for 28 days. Then, potentially, the welfare system is open to you if there is no other alternative. They had a simple yes/no question. They got it wrong and they will pay for it at the next election.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened with great interest to the member for Bowman's contribution just then. It is not just about saying go out and have a go for 28 days. It is saying to people to try and do that with absolutely no money. That is what the issue is at the heart of this bill. I would like to see him try to go out and spend 28 days getting dressed, going on the transport system, having to buy lunch while you are out and looking for 28 jobs but having absolutely not a dollar of income to do it on. That is, at heart, the issue. We do not disagree with many of the principles the member for Bowman outlined in terms of mutual responsibility under these payments and about requiring people to participate and—as he said—to have a go. We just do not believe that is reasonable or fair to ask people to do that without any form of income support. Not everybody is in as privileged a position as many of us may have been at that age to have family who could support us through that time. That is at the heart of why we have these concerns with this bill.

The challenge, obviously—and the member for Bowman referred to this quite rightly—is there is persistent high youth unemployment across our nation. In particular, in regions like my own in Illawarra, it is one of the most serious and persistent social and economic issues that we confront. It is clearly the case that one of the flow-on effects across the developed world from the global financial crisis has been its impact on employment opportunities for young people. In Australia, we have seen a serious drying up of entry-level jobs. These are the ones that give young people a start in the workforce. This increasingly applies to young people with post-secondary qualifications. It is not only those without any employment specific education and training who are seeing the opportunities for entry-level jobs dry up right before their eyes.

Many young people are telling me and, I am sure, many of my colleagues in this place across both sides of the chamber that nearly every job they would like to apply for says an essential criteria is a minimum of two or three years experience. That requirement then blocks them from getting a start to get the required minimum experience in the first place, so they end up in this no-win situation where they want to get the experience they need to get a permanent job but then all the jobs that they are potentially qualified to apply for all require experience. It is a really persistent problem for them. And I am sure all my colleagues have heard this from young people who are in the job market.

Young people are also increasingly relying on cobbling together multiple jobs or indeed contracts—many of them working on short-term contracts—in order simply to make enough to live on. This type of work then locks them out of reliable or permanent work and it leaves them precariously attached to the workforce. Whilst sometimes this can lead to a permanent job after a period of time, that does not seem to be the common experience for many young people. In this context, therefore, I believe it is completely wrong for the government to seek to implement a bill that will only add to the financial stress and difficulty for young people in our communities.

This bill introduces a number of social service measures from the 2015 budget relating to both youth allowance and Newstart for young people. I would like to briefly outline these before indicating where I stand on the matters before us and then, more importantly, to discuss the significance of supporting education and training opportunities to assist young people with gaining employment.

Firstly, the bill seeks to reintroduce the initiative from the 2014 budget about a waiting period but with a different time frame proposed in this budget. Secondly, it seeks to revisit that proposal that required young people under 30 to actively seek work for six months before receiving income support payments. This was opposed by the parliament and now the government is seeking to reintroduce the policy with a reduced period of four weeks, with a proposal to delay the introduction of that until 1 July 2016. Labor continues to oppose this proposition as it will leave young job seekers under 25 was nothing to live on for a full month. This would also limit their ability to participate in job-seeking activities as they would have no income available to them. Therefore, it seems a particularly short-sighted and mean proposition. Clearly this proposition would push young people into poverty and potentially trap them in an endless cycle of no income support at all, thereby increasing poverty, crisis and homelessness.

Thirdly, the bill continues the previous budget measure to extend youth allowance (other) from 22- to 24-year-olds in lieu of Newstart and sickness allowance, also simply making life harder for these young people. We continues to oppose that proposition. Fourthly, the bill proposes to cease the low-income supplement paid as part of the compensation for the carbon price from 1 July 2017. This is a payment that is made to singles and couples on low incomes. Labor is willing to consider this proposition but not in the context of the other proposals in this bill.

Finally, and fifthly, the bill seeks to re-introduce measures from the 2014 budget on indexation but with the exclusion of pensions and an amended start date. Specifically, it would maintain at level for three years the income-free areas for all working age allowances, other than student payments and parenting payment single, from the existing start date of 1 July 2015. Also, it would maintain at level for three years the income-free areas and other means test thresholds for student payments, including the student income bank limits, with a start date of 1 January 2016. This measure was opposed by Labor in the context of the 2014 budget and we continue to oppose it.

It is clear the government has actually learnt nothing from the fundamental unfairness of last year's budget. This budget is just as unfair as the last when it comes to young job seekers. This is compounded by the fact that this budget has done nothing to re-instate any of the savage cuts in last year's budget to the skills portfolio, in particular for apprentices and trainees. Apprenticeships and traineeships are important pathways for young people to undertake education and training that would improve their opportunities to gain a job.

Let me just recap the extent of the cuts in last year's budget. The government's early action on apprenticeships was to introduce the one initiative they had taken to the election on skills. They introduced their apprentice loan scheme. But we in Labor were quite angry on behalf of apprentices that in outlining this scheme before the election the government did not outline to apprentices that it would be at the cost of the Tools For Your Trade payments which provide direct financial assistance to all eligible apprentices to get the tools they need for their trade and to assist with other costs. I am sure that many members have received the same feedback that I have about the intense disappointment felt among apprentices about this decision.

Last year, I visited a construction site in Werribee, outside Melbourne, with my colleague the member for Lalor. We spoke directly to about 20 apprentices across a number of trades. They were all angry about the removal of the Tools For Your Trade payments and, to be honest, quite scathing about the Trade Support Loans as a replacement option. Indeed, in the in-detail budget session last week, the minister indicated that only around 24,000 apprentices across the nation had taken up the loan. Given that there are several hundred thousand young people in apprenticeships at any one time, that is a very, very low uptake. This morning, with the Leader of the Opposition, I visited some apprentices at the Canberra Institute of Technology. I asked the class, 'How many of you have actually taken up the Trade Support Loans?' There was only one in that class who had. All the rest had no interest in undertaking debt. So they clearly missed the impact of Tools For Your Trade.

Just as importantly, there were very significant apprenticeship support programs abolished in the budget. The first one was the Apprenticeship Access Program. This particularly targeted very disadvantaged young people to get them the skills, appropriate knowledge and familiarity with work culture, as the previous speaker spoke about, such that they were prepared to undertake an apprenticeship. In November 2012, I visited the MTA Autostart Access Program in Granville with the member for Parramatta. I saw firsthand an impressive program that helped people who were very vulnerable job seekers get themselves ready to gain a full apprenticeship. During that visit, I met local car business owners, managers and representatives of the Motor Traders' Association. They were all very dedicated to helping young adults get a start in a region plagued by youth unemployment. They were very proud of the success they were having in transitioning so many of those young people into full apprenticeships. With no notice or evidence of failure, this scheme was simply abolished in the 2014 budget.

Another program that was abolished was the Apprenticeships Mentoring Program. Many of my colleagues would be aware that there has been a consistent concern about the number of apprentices who are actually completing their training. This program was very much appreciated not only by apprentices but also by employers. In March of 2013, as the minister, I launched the Construction Apprenticeship Mentoring Scheme at the Master Builders Association of the ACT training centre.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A very good organisation.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the member opposite says, this is a very good organisation and one that was very keen to participate in the mentoring of young people in apprenticeships—a really important thing to undertake. It was an $80 million program and it was critically targeted at improving those completion rates. Again, I am quite at a loss to understand why the program was simply abolished in the 2014 budget.

We also see cuts across the apprenticeship sector more broadly. The old Australian apprenticeship centres have been rebadged as the Australian Apprenticeship Support Network. The problem I have with this is that these network providers that work with apprentices at the local level are now doing that with $10 million per year less than the old apprenticeship centres had. Plus, they have been given the job-matching and mentoring work that used to be happen under other programs. So all up, instead of $170 million or $180 million per year, they are being asked to do with less money. So the reality is that there is still a lot more work with significantly less money, so I can only see that, with the best will in the world, those new providers are really going to be under the pump to effectively impact both apprentice commencement and apprentice completion rates.

In particular, I just want to make the point that one of the areas that are particularly significant in this space is to get small and medium businesses involved in being able to take on apprentices and trainees. Many of them are really keen to do this, but the management of an apprenticeship—the paperwork, the legal requirements, the follow-up with the apprentice and managing the apprentice—is just too much for them to take on as well as their business responsibilities. So for many decades they have had the option of the group training program in order to participate in training apprentices. The group training organisation did all of that work and managed the apprentice, who was placed with a particular employer. Sadly, at the end of last year, the government abolished the financing of the joint group training program which allowed them to do this. So we have seen a lot of slashing in the skills portfolio, at least half of which—about $1 billion—has been in support for apprentices and trainees in this country.

So the government, in bills like the one before us, has a very mean approach to dealing with young people who may find themselves unemployed and do not have the sort of extended family who can financially support them for a month. They will actually be unable to access any income support for that period. At the same time, we are seeing significant cuts across all the sorts of programs that would actually give them the opportunity to get some skills, some training and some work-readiness and to improve their ability to get into the labour market—and all this at a time when the labour market is becoming harder and harder for young people trying to get a start, particularly in those entry-level jobs, as I discussed at the beginning. We are now seeing increasing reports of university graduates who are struggling to get their first job, because they may have their degree but all the entry-level jobs in the professional area they are looking at require a minimum of two or three years experience. So it is not just young people with no post-secondary qualifications; it is increasingly those who are graduating from our TAFEs, our RTOs and our universities all facing this same challenge. So it just seems to me that the government is intent on creating a bit of a perfect storm that is just going to make it more and more difficult. If the OECD recognises that youth unemployment is a critical factor for the developed world, I think we should be putting in place decisions and legislation that lead to solutions to that for young people, not put more barriers in their way as I believe this bill does.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am certainly pleased to follow the member for Cunningham in this debate, because I agree with the sentiments that she has just expressed, and I know that she has put an extraordinary amount of work over the years into working with young people. Indeed, I have served on committees with her and I am aware that she would be acutely familiar with the plight of young people in this country, and therefore she comes to this debate with a great deal of experience.

Let's be absolutely clear about the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015: it would not be here were it not for the fact that the government's previous proposal, which would have meant that young people would have been left without any government assistance for six months, simply would never get through the parliament. It was not going to get through the parliament, because not only our side of politics—the Labor Party—but just about every crossbencher in the Senate opposed it, because it was grossly unfair and unjust. When that legislation was introduced in 2014, it signalled a very clear intention of the Abbott government to try to take away support from some of the most vulnerable people in our community, some of whom are clearly young people. When it could not get that legislation through, it then rebadged it and reframed it in a watered-down version of what is still considered by many to be heartless and unfair legislation—and that is what this bill actually is all about.

There is also a common theme to the Abbott government. It is a theme of the government wanting to wash its hands of responsibility and transfer the social and financial burdens onto others. We saw it with respect to the freezing of the financial assistance grants to councils: you cut $1 billion from the councils because you know full well that they will in turn have to find the money one way or another or cut their own services to their communities, but you transfer the problem to them. Again, we saw it with the cutting of the pensioner concessions, $1.3 billion in funding to the states, for exactly the same reason: you know full well that someone will pick up the pieces further down the line when the federal government washes its hands of the responsibility. Then we saw it with respect to the government wanting to introduce a GP tax, where indeed the same would apply: if you increase the GP tax then you make the community pay for the services they require. When it could not get that through, it came in through the back door: it froze the support payment to the GPs, knowing full well that in time they would pass on their increased costs to patients through the patient fee that they would then charge. Those are just some of the examples, and we have not even got to the cuts made to health and education.

It is clear that this government wants to transfer its responsibilities to the broader community, and again we saw it only this week when the federal government's green paper talked about cutting funding to public schools in this country, something that would never have been contemplated up until this week but is clearly on this government's agenda. Whilst the federal government and the Prime Minister have denied that they want to cut funding for primary and secondary public schools in this country, the truth of the matter is that that green paper signals a very clear intent of this government.

This particular legislation has within it two very unfair measures. The first is that it will make young people wait up to four weeks before being eligible for any government assistance. Currently the wait, I believe, is one week, so they go from one week to four weeks. The second is that under this proposal, as was the case in last year's proposal, young people will be transferred from Newstart to youth allowance. That means a loss of $48 per week for those young people. Right through to the age of 25, unemployed people will be eligible only for youth allowance, not Newstart.

Newstart at the moment pays around $260 a week, or less than $37 a day. Youth allowance drops that payment to $213 a week, or about $30 a day. Compare that with the minimum wage of $641 or the average wage in this country of $1,476 a week. The government is asking people to try and survive on $213 a week when the minimum wage is three times that. I ask members opposite who have come into this place to support this legislation whether they truly believe that they could live on $30 a day—to pay for their food, their clothing, their housing, their health needs, their transport and so on. I doubt whether they could. The reality is that most people cannot unless they get additional support from one place or another. What the Abbott government is effectively doing is deserting young people—because it has no sense of social justice and no understanding of the growing social inequity in this country.

Even more disappointingly, this is a government which is always looking at ways of balancing its budget on the back of those who are doing it the hardest but which rarely looks at trying to secure additional income from the higher income earners of Australia. As other speakers on this side have already made clear, not all young people who are out of work have family support to rely on or to fall back on—which is what this legislation is pushing them to do. Some young people, for very good reason, have moved away from home, sometimes chasing a job which, when they got to their destination, simply did not live up to their expectations or to the promises that were made to them when they moved away from home. In other cases there might be family breakdown. I have personally dealt with families in my electorate where that has occurred, where the young person has moved away from home and communication between the young person and the family has indeed broken down. Then there are young people who, even if they could get support from their family, come from families that are already struggling to make ends meet. Making things tougher for the young person does not help the family situation at all. Lastly, I am aware of young people who have moved away from home and who find themselves in a difficult situation but who, out of pride, will suffer in silence and not turn to anyone else to assist them.

When a young person cannot make ends meet, that young person may become homeless. If so, they might start, in some cases, couch surfing and the like—turning to friends to support them even if it is just for a place to sleep overnight. Regrettably, some of them end up, out of desperation, finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, while others turn to charitable groups to help them. Whatever the case, the bottom line is that the community wears the cost.

We know that unemployment in this country is rising. It is projected to grow to around 6.5 per cent, which is higher than it has been for years. Even worse, we know that youth unemployment rates are much higher, in many places two or three times the headline unemployment rate. There are reasons for that, but what is disappointing is that, knowing that unemployment is rising and knowing that unemployment for young people is much worse, the Abbott government has cut some $2 billion over the last two budgets from apprenticeship and skills programs—the very programs which were meant to help young people, to train them up and give them some kind of a chance for a start in life. The Abbott government believes this is not important and has cut $2 billion from those programs.

Then we have the cuts to TAFE and the universities. When you make such cuts and you ask young people to go out and train themselves, the effect is to make the training courses much dearer. So you are asking someone who does not have a job, who is trying to get a job, to go and train themselves—but you cut the funding to the institutions that are providing the courses, knowing full well that they will in turn push the cost of those courses to unemployed young people even higher.

One of the ironies of this government's rhetoric is this. I can recall, months ago, the minister coming into this place and talking about the wonders of the Green Army program—how that was going to employ thousands of young people and how it was going to give them a chance and a start in life. But what do we see in this year's budget? A cut of $73 million to the Green Army program. The rhetoric having served its purpose months ago, the Green Army program is being quietly pushed to one side—again, knowing full well that that program might have given at least some young people a break.

Most of the unemployed young people we are dealing with come from low-income households. They do not come from the high end of town; they come from the low-socioeconomic areas. The statistics bear that out. So we are hitting hard young people who do not necessarily have a family with the capacity to support them. The underlying narrative to this government's rhetoric and, may I say, to the rhetoric of many of the speakers from the government benches who have come in to support this legislation, is that the unemployed are not trying hard enough to get a job, particularly the young unemployed—that it is their fault that they are unemployed. Government speakers have implied that in their contributions.

The reality is quite different from that. The reality is that there are simply not enough jobs for the unemployed of this country. For young people, it is even more difficult. For young people, when there is a job advertised, the first thing a prospective employer asks is, 'What experience do you have?' If the young person has no experience, they do not get the job—and, if they do not get the job, they do not get experience. It becomes a vicious cycle and so they are not given the breaks that they need.

The truth of the matter is for many young people this bill is going to be bad news and, whilst it might only sound like a four-week break, a four-week break to them is $1000 which many of them simply do not have in their pockets. Only this week I received an email from the mother of a young person in my electorate—a 23-year-old—and the email in my view sums up the reality facing the young people of Australia. The first point she makes is that, whilst working for the dole is a reasonable idea, it rarely leads to paid work at the end of it. This young man has six level-two certificates from TAFE in various trades. He has paid for an additional course out of his own pocket to get a forklift licence. In 18 months he has applied for nearly 400 jobs. His job provider, again not surprisingly, has not been able to find this person a job, because the truth is there is no work out there. One employer offered him a job for six months on the basis that he works for nothing—in other words, 'You can do work experience with me for six months.' When a young person said, 'I cannot survive on nothing for six months,' he was told by this employer that, like so many other young people of today, he was simply not prepared to work. What kind of attitude is that? This young person, who has made every effort, in every sense of the word, and is desperately wanting to get a job but he cannot. He should not be further abused by having his payments cut or accused of being someone who is simply not trying.

There are a couple of other matters that I want to very quickly touch on before I conclude my remarks. In recent years we have seen governments, both at federal and state level, privatise a whole range of government departments and, as a result of that, we have seen the loss of opportunities in apprenticeships in particular that were previously provided by these government departments. We have also seen a number of major industries collapse in this country; I refer in particular to the auto industry. In my region Holden in particular was one of the major employers of apprentices in South Australia. With the closure of Holden, all of those opportunities for young people will be lost, and that is a real concern for people in Adelaide broadly. The last point I would make, and it is one that has been made by other speakers, is that, in their desperation, young people wanting to get jobs are being seduced into paying for very expensive training courses by unscrupulous RTOs with a promise of a job at the end, when in fact there will be none. These are young people who do not have the money in the first place, but out of desperation they scramble the money together, in one way or another, only to find out that they have just blown money they did not have. This is unfair legislation, which the side of the house will not support it and we do not support for very good reasons.

Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand also to oppose this bill, which sets out to do five things. This bill deals with the one-week waiting period excluding the disallowance; it introduces a requirement for young people under 25 to wait four weeks prior to receiving income support; it extends the youth allowance from 22- to 24-year-olds in lieu of NewStart and sickness allowances; it makes changes to the low-income supplement; and imposes indexation changes to working-age payments.

I am particularly concerned about the under-25 measure and its one-month waiting period. I have previously stood in this place to oppose to the under-30 measure, as it was then known, where we are asking young people to live on fresh air for six months. I am pleased that Labor stood its ground on that and it is because of Labor that the government backed down on the measure to a certain extent, but, of course, they have not backed down quite far enough. There is still a one-month waiting period proposed for people under 25. It concerns me that the government really has no idea what this will mean for young people. Young people will have no income support whilst they are supposed to be out there looking for work and they will be required to undertake work-seeking activities without receiving any payment. I do not think government members understand how it is possible to maintain yourself, to make yourself presentable, to go along for job interviews, to meet prospective employers or to enrol yourself in training, to get to appointments, to catch public transport to get to interviews, when you actually have zero income for a month— zero, nothing to eat, nothing to live on, no income.

What on earth are young people under 25 supposed to survive on? We have not heard anything from members opposite about how this is to be addressed. We did hear that with the previous the under-30 measure that some non-government NGOs had been given some more emergency relief money for this, but since then a lot of the emergency relief funding has been cut by the government and so a lot of these non-government organisations, which would ordinarily support to families and others without income, can no longer do so.

There are many young people to whom this measure will apply, and you have to wonder why the government would be introducing it. What is the government's motivation? We have been calling on them for some time to do something about rising youth unemployment, which in some parts of regional Australia should be very concerning for all of us. As a Tasmanian, I know there are regions in Tasmania where the unemployment rate is sadly well over 20 per cent and it is expected to continue to rise in the coming years to around 30 per cent. That high rate is quite shocking. Tasmania's south-east, north-west and north are all areas of high youth unemployment. The question, as I have said, is: what is the government's commitment to young people who are currently unemployed?

We did finally see some measures after we called on the government to do something in the last budget. I have said in this place on a number of occasions that we were pleased to see some measures, but sadly there is no new money in these measures. The organisations the government is talking about partnering with to support young unemployed people are the same organisations that do not support this waiting measure and did not support it last time; these organisations know the impact that it will have on young people and job seekers. They know that these people will not be able to be job ready and will not be able to meet their obligations if they are receiving no income for a month—no income for a month.

I just do not know how those opposite, if they are thinking rationally, can think that this is a good idea. If they are really serious about addressing youth unemployment—and I think that some of those on the other side in this place are, because they understand what it is doing, particularly to regional Australia—how can this policy be consistent with that? How can it possibly be? There is no way that this is consistent with tackling youth unemployment. There is no way the government can possibly be serious about it.

As we have heard from previous speakers, the government has also been cutting money to apprenticeships and traineeships, about $1 billion now. We have had revelations today about the government perhaps walking away from vocational education and TAFE training altogether. In addition, as the previous speaker, the member for Makin, pointed out, we have a lot of training organisations preying on vulnerable young people and getting them to sign up to VET FEE-HELP loans without them understanding quite what they are. So, there are some really serious issues out there in areas of high youth unemployment, where people need support and assistance from government and from community organisations which should be appropriately funded to deal with that.

The last federal budget indicated that the unemployment rate in this country would go up to a 14-year high of around 6½ per cent. If you look at unemployment in Australia at the moment, there are around 800,000 to 900,000 job seekers, and there are about 150,000 vacancies at any one time. Clearly, when you 'do the math', there are not enough vacancies for everybody who wants to work or is looking for work to be able to take up a job. What we need to see from the government is job creation. The government need to have a jobs plan. They say that the small business measure is essentially their jobs plan, but I've got news for them: it needs to be more than that. There needs to be a jobs plan and it needs to deal with removing the barriers to work and the disadvantages that some job seekers have and to deal with the education system—with universities, TAFE and vocational funding. It is a very complex issue that requires thoughtful, detailed answers.

The government needs to sit down and make a proper jobs plan that will be effective, will work, and that targets all those different areas, looking at what is required and what levers the federal government has available to it to deal with this, because we are not going to see the unemployment rate drop. It will hover around where it is unless the government takes this issue seriously and actually has a job creation plan.

We cannot continue to come into this place to argue about what are essentially savings measures in the budget. These measures are not about getting people jobs. They are not about encouraging young people to go out and seek employment. They do not do that and they will not do that. All this government is doing with this bill is pushing young people into a cycle of poverty that they will be unable to get out of. That is all that it will do. It has the potential to put young people in a cycle of poverty, with no income support at all, as I keep reiterating—no income support at all: nothing for people to live on for months, nothing with which to pay their bills, nothing with which to buy food and nothing with which to pay for accommodation.

I do not see how this is fair. I do not understand how members opposite can continue to come in here and defend this bill. I do not know how they can possibly defend it. It really is an abandonment of young people by the government. It is really showing the unfairness of this government, and the unfairness of this budget and the previous budget. It is showing that the government do not care about young people in our community. They say they do, they had the youth unemployment measure in the budget, but we know the truth and young people know the truth—that, if the government were serious about youth unemployment, they would not have put those measures in this bill.

The bill has about $1 billion in savings over the forward estimates. That is $1 billion that could be in the pockets of unemployed people, to pay for their food and for their shelter. My question to the government remains: how are people going to be able to pay for these things? Who is going to pay? How are these young people going to pay for their food, how are they going to pay for the bus fare to go to a job interview, how are they going to pay their rent when it falls due if they are not receiving any money? I really do not understand why government members cannot comprehend this. How do you pay for these things when you are not receiving a cent? It is not that complicated.

I am just astounded—and you probably get that, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, from the way that I am talking. I am astounded that we are in this place again looking at measures similar to those we stopped the government implementing last budget, and they do not appear to have learnt very much. They have come back with what is, I guess, an improvement, as I have said, but not much of an improvement at all. You have to wonder what it is going to take for the government to actually listen. What is going to take for the government to listen? How many times are we going to have to knock down punitive measures targeted at job seekers instead of welcoming a job creation plan from the government? How many times are we going to have to do that? How many times are we all going to have to stand up and knock back, speak against, this type of legislation that increases penalties for job seekers?

In my portfolios, I have had to stand up here many times and address punitive measures for job seekers, where the government is trying to ask more of job seekers and penalise them more. This bill does that, again. It will penalise young people. I am not sure whether the minister and/or the government have in fact looked at how this will interact with other measures, as I talked about, such as the cuts to emergency relief funding; the removal of some of the housing measures, with homelessness and housing affordability being such issues; and the cuts made to community service organisations that would ordinarily help people who do not receive an income of any sort or any support from government.

I do not think the government have thought this through very well at all. It appears that, in their last budget, they simply went hunting for savings. They identified that they could cut off payments to people and that that might make savings and also motivate young people to go out there and get themselves a job. But, as I have clearly outlined, the jobs are not there—and nothing the government are doing will create more jobs and more job vacancies.

That is the fundamental difference between this side of the House and that side of the House. We believe that governments have a role to play when it comes to job creation in this country. We believe that governments have levers available to them to go out there and to support industry, to support business, to support small business and to do other things in the community that generate employment, but also to invest in education and to invest in TAFE and vocational education.

Today is national TAFE day. As I said earlier, we have seen the green paper and other documents today that say that the government might take away vocational education and/or TAFE funding from states. This is just appalling. I have had people come and see me today about the importance of skills. Having been a TAFE-educated individual myself, I understand the wonderful role that TAFEs play in our community. The government really does need to look at the whole thing in terms of vocational training and education, higher education and job creation, and come up with a proper plan to deal with unemployment. The government's own budget has unemployment going up to 6.5 per cent—a 14 year high. We have youth unemployment rising right around the country, particularly in regional areas and particularly in my home state. I know that many people in regional South Australia—and South Australians in this place—are also very concerned about their unemployment figures.

The attitude of the federal government appears to be: 'Hands off. Not our problem. It's the problem of the states when it comes to funding education. It's the problem of the states when it comes to funding vocational education. It's the problem of the states when it comes to dealing with employment issues.' That is simply not good enough. It is not a good enough for a federal government who is saying, on the one hand, that it wants to do something to support small businesses to hire people and is saying that it cares about youth unemployment, to then not look at this issue in a holistic way. It is not actually looking at all the different things that do need to be addressed so that we can address unemployment in this country—particularly youth unemployment—properly.

I am proud to be opposing this bill. I am proud to come in here, and I will keep doing it. I will keep coming in here and standing up for young Australians, who are out there and who want to have a go. They are being stopped from having a go by this government who wants to take away money from them at every single opportunity. The government does not seem to want to let up.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 is a disgraceful bill. This is a bill that does nothing more than hurt young people, and it is particularly targeting young people that are employed. This bill does nothing to create jobs. It does nothing to invest in skills. It does nothing to invest in the economy or the future of our young people. This is a mean-spirited, punitive bill designed purely to save a few dollars for the government.

This bill introduces a range of social services measures from the 2015 budget that relate to youth allowance and Newstart for young people. It does a range of things from applying a one-week waiting period to all working age payments, excluding the widow allowance, to requiring young people under the age of 25 to wait four weeks prior to receiving any income support. This measure, of course, is bad enough on its own, but it is a revision from the 2014-15 budget measure that required young people that were under 30 years of age to actively seek work for six months prior to receiving any income support payments at all. This government wanted young people under 30 to not receive any assistance at all and basically go without a dollar for six months if they could not find a job.

We all want people to be actively out there searching for work and looking for work, and young people are doing that, and there should be assistance to do that. The reality is, though, that unemployment numbers for young people are really high because there just are not the jobs there for them. The solution to helping young people get into work is not punishing them. The solution for helping young people get into work is to bolster the economy, and work on a whole range of programs that build their skills and make sure that they are educated and qualified enough to find the jobs that are there. Of course, there are always going to be those who, for periods of time, will not be able to find a job. To punish them for that with the harsh measures that are contained here is reprehensible. This is a government that really has no sense of what it takes to actually work through an economy that has people in it—the people in our economy.

The bill before us is extremely harsh and extremely damaging, and it does nothing to lift the stocks of our country. The youth unemployment rate is currently very high at 13½ per cent—well over double the general unemployment rate, which is now at six per cent. Before the election, when Labor was in government, I recall that unemployment had a five in front of it. Now that the Liberals are in government, it has a six in front of it. It was too high under Labor at five, and it is way too high under the Liberals at six and rising. That is the reality that we face. The answer that the Liberal Party and the Liberal government put forward is to punish people. Their answer to youth unemployment is to punish young people. If you are young person who is out of work—not that you are not looking, not that you are not trying, not that you are not finishing school, going to TAFE, getting qualifications and going to university—and if, even after all of those efforts, you are unable to find work then the government will punish you, and they will punish you quite severely. You will be severely punished. You will be punished by losing any opportunity to receive any payments whatsoever from this Liberal government.

The government will force young people to borrow, beg and in some cases—I dare the thought—steal. That is what this amounts to. We do not live in the sort of world in Australia were we force young people—or anybody else, in such a harsh world where they have no options left to them—to beg, borrow or steal. That is what this bill should have been called: 'Beg, Borrow or Steal'. Young people, regardless of their efforts, regardless of how hard they try, are going to be sent a very clear signal from this unthinking, unkind and very harsh government.

There are about 281,000 young people who are currently are employed. So that is more than a quarter of a million young people that are currently unemployed. They are looking for work, but the jobs do not just appear. We have really high unemployment rates. The rate for the general population is more than six per cent and climbing; if you are a young person, it is more than double that and not looking good at all. The worst part, though, is that in some parts of this country that figure is much higher. I know for a fact that in my electorate of Oxley, between Brisbane and Ipswich, youth unemployment is a serious issue. I know that with my neighbour Shayne Neumann in Blair unemployment is way too high. I know that in parts of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth—and particularly in regional and rural areas—it is way too high. This is a really harsh act on rural and regional centres. We in this place all understand that it is exceptionally difficult for anyone, let alone for young people, to find work in some of those rural and regional areas. In fact, an option for most young people in some of those rural settings is to go to the big capital centres where there is more opportunity.

Rather than come up with some solutions and some programs to help farming communities and small business employ young people and keep people in those rural and regional communities the government have said they are going to do the opposite. The Liberal government say: 'We are going to punish you. We are going to force you out of those communities. We are going to make you look for work in other areas.' This will further exacerbate the difficulty that rural and regional farming communities have. I wonder how many of those communities will be asking their representatives in the Liberal and National parties what they are doing about that and why they are driving more young people out of those communities.

It is beyond belief that this government would make people who are unable to find a job suffer for weeks and months at a time with nothing—no assistance, nothing at all. This is the beg, borrow or steal bill. We have many really severe youth problems in the country. I have seen tears on the other side when we hear of some youth problems in country areas and around rural and regional communities—'What can we possibly do about it?' I will tell you what we should not do: we should not pass this bill. That would be a good start. I do not know that there would be too many farming families who would look at this bill and think it was a good idea for their kids and people in rural towns. Youth unemployment in some rural areas is two or three times higher than this, so how does this help their town and their community? The simple answer to that question is: it just does not. This is a punitive, mean, nasty method by which the government will save a few dollars. The government calls it 'savings' but of course a young person would see this in a very different light.

A range of very well respected groups around the country have come out and said they are appalled by what the government is doing. The National Welfare Rights Network said that the one-month waiting period:

… will place young people in severe financial hardship, leaving them without food, medicines, money for job search and rent. No income means no income—whether it’s for six months or four weeks. There is no place in our social security system for such a harmful approach. The Parliament should reject this plan outright.

I agree: we should just reject this outright. I do not see how we are going to help young people find work when they do not have any money to get on a bus to look for a job or any money to get on a train to turn up at an interview. If they cannot manage to do that then of course the government are going to punish them even further. They will say, 'Because you did not turn up we are going to punish you even more.' This is the response you get from the Liberal and National parties. This is how they deal with issues. You are punished by the government because you cannot find a job in a very difficult employment market. They will punish you. If you have got no money and are living on the street but can get there on time, you may not get that job because you cannot have a shower in the morning. If after applying for 150 jobs you are exasperated and turn to other things, then this government will punish you again. They will punish you severely.

What is the key message that the Liberal and National parties are sending to rural and regional farming communities and families out in the bush, where it is the toughest? That is where it is the toughest. As tough as it is in Sydney, in Brisbane and in the capital centres, there is actually more opportunity. If you live in a farming community that is where it really hurts. Why does the National Party in particular see this as a really good solution? It is a solution to what? Punishing young people for something that is not their fault.

If as part of this bill the Liberal and National parties actually said that they were going to counter this punishment by providing more TAFE courses, more funding for skills, more training and more job opportunities then you might think that at least there is some balance to their punishment, but there is not. In other areas and in other bills they are taking more money out. Only just this week we heard that the government are looking at options—remember this—to make every family pay again for public education. We all pay for public education, but they want families to pay again. They want to means test families—and 'mean' is the correct word here; they are very mean. They want to keep making families pay more and punish them on the way. This is an unbelievable bill.

If at the same time they mete this punishment out to young people there were some glimmer of hope that they were working hard on restoring the economy so unemployment comes down, you would go, 'Maybe there is some balance here,' but there just is not. Before the election there was a debt and deficit crisis. We heard 'debt and deficit' and 'debt and deficit'. Tony Abbott called the fire truck. He turned up with a fuel canister and kept pumping fuel all over the fire and making it worse. Back then there was an emergency—a $17 billion deficit. That was the end of the world. Guess what it is today? It is not less; it is more. How much more? Is it $1 billion or $2 billion more? No. They doubled it. The economic geniuses in the Liberal and National parties took it from $17 billion to $35 billion. Anyone who thinks I am making that up should grab the budget papers and have a read for themselves. It is in their own budget papers.

If that was not bad enough, with their fantastic economic management they doubled the deficit. They are punishing young people. Unemployment is going up. Unemployment under this Liberal and National government goes in only one direction—up. There are more people unemployed. What did they do with the debt that was crippling our economy? Maybe they should start turning the debt down. You would expect there to be less debt. That would be the expectation. I am sure the people in the gallery are thinking, 'Of course, that is what they would do.' No, they did not. They put more debt on. In fact, just in the last budget that Joe Hockey put forward—not the first budget—he added an extra $35 billion of debt. There is another $35 billion. Where are they getting the money for that? They must be borrowing the money. This is a big-borrowing and big-spending government. They spend big but not in the areas that count, not in the areas where we should be getting some help. So they double the deficit, adding more to debt. Unemployment is going up. They want to put a tax on education—they want families to pay not once but twice, with a means test; they will say to all those communities out in rural and regional areas, 'You have got to pay again'. When it comes to TAFE, what do they do? They make it harder for the states to provide good-quality courses and trades training. What did they do with the apprenticeship trades training tools allowance that Labor put in place? They took it away—they want to make it harder for apprentices. Tony's tradies must be looking at this and saying, 'Please stop helping us.' If you are one of Tony's tradies, you must be exasperated with the help that you are getting.

In the next decade or so we are going to be short about 100,000 people with skills in science, technology, engineering and all those areas where Australia has a competitive advantage—where our small business community might actually be able to compete with the rest of the world and move forward. What does this government do with skills training? It de-funds just about every skills program that the former government had put in place. When Labor say that we think it is important that kids learn coding at school and when we encourage young people to go into the sciences and to learn about mathematics and engineering, they think it is a joke—and in fact they were deriding our policies in this area. I do not think students think it is a joke, because that is where the jobs of the future are. In fact, the future is so close that it is right in front of you; that is how close the future is.

Ask any family what they want for their kids, ask teachers what they want their students to learn and ask people where they think the jobs of the future are—ask them. You will not get the answers from a Liberal or National government. In answer to all of these complex questions that we have before us in our economy—the challenges of people getting a job, of young people getting into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all of those areas—what is the solution that the Liberal and National parties put forward? More punitive measures to punish young people, more cuts to programs, fewer services, fewer skills, less training, less of everything. At the same time, they expect that somehow this will magically help those unemployment numbers. I am still waiting; I think that in another six months I will still be waiting to see if any of those numbers improve, but I very much doubt that they will.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have a discussion in this place from time to time about the issue of intergenerational equity, and I think this is a really important issue. I am very concerned that this generation has been letting young people down in all sorts of areas, whether it is housing affordability, the cost of education, or employment prospects. Young people are currently experiencing very difficult economic, employment and social circumstances. I believe that it is a fundamental responsibility and function of any government to help nurture, support and guide our young people to lead happy, productive and fulfilling lives. However, since being elected this Liberal government has been more than happy to take the axe to the support and resources that previous governments have provided for young people, and we have seen youth unemployment levels on the rise.

The measures in the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 continue the Liberal government's attacks on young Australians by seeking to introduce a one-month wait period for Newstart allowance. This bill leaves young job seekers under 25 with nothing to live on for a month. It represents an abandonment of young Australians by this government. Labor will oppose this cut to young Australians, just as we opposed last year's attempt to leave young job seekers with nothing to live on for six months. Whether it is one month or six, Labor will not support a measure which pushes young people into poverty and hardship. How does the government honestly expect people to live during such a period? How do they buy food, pay the rent, pay for the train fare, maintain their dignity—pay to travel or dress for job interviews and the like?

This bill also seeks to change the eligibility age for Newstart, pushing job seekers between the age of 22 and 24 onto the lower youth allowance. This is a cut of around $48 a week or almost $2,500 a year. That is a very significant amount of money, particularly for a young person. Therefore, this bill has the potential to lock young people into a cycle of no income support at all, pushing many young job seekers into poverty and homelessness, with the prospect of mental health problems and quite possibly drugs and crime. It is not just Labor that thinks that this measure is cruel and unfair. Major welfare organisations right across the country have condemned the policy. The National Welfare Rights Network said that the one-month wait period:

…will place young people in severe financial hardship, leaving them without food, medicines, money for job search and rent. No income means no income — whether it's for six months or four weeks. There is no place in our social security system for such a harmful approach. The Parliament should reject this plan outright.

John Falzon, the CEO of St Vincent de Paul, said:

This change is a clear admission of the cruelty of this measure without actually abandoning it.

ACOSS said:

The government now proposes to reduce the six month wait for unemployment payments for young people to one month, yet neither policy has been justified, especially at a time when unemployment is rising.

Back in February, I held a Wills Youth Issues Forum, which was attended by many social service providers, employment networks and local community leaders. People at that forum expressed very serious concerns about the approach being taken by the federal government on the question of addressing youth unemployment and social welfare issues. With unemployment forecast to rise to 6.5 per cent, staying high longer than previously estimated, this type of harsh measure is unfair and bad for the economy. Since the federal election in 2013 the unemployment queue has grown by 56,500 more people, bringing the total number of unemployed people to 745,000 on this government's watch. According to the Department of Employment's March 2015 report, since Labor left office, unemployment in my electorate of Wills has increased from 6.1 per cent in September 2013 to 6.7 per cent in March 2015. In Brunswick, unemployment rose from eight per cent in September 2013 to 8.5 per cent in March this year; in Brunswick East, it increased from 5.7 per cent to 6.4 per cent; in Brunswick West, from 7.5 per cent to 9.1 per cent; in Coburg, from 8.5 per cent to 8.9 per cent; in Coburg North, from 5.8 per cent to 7.6 per cent; in Fawkner, from 7.8 per cent to 8.2 per cent; in Fitzroy North, from 6.1 per cent to 6.4 per cent; and across Glenroy and Hadfield it increased from 6.4 per cent to 7.2 per cent. In Pascoe Vale South it rose slightly, from 5.4 per cent to 5.6 per cent; and in Strathmore it rose from two per cent to 2.1 per cent. This is a pattern right across the electorate of increasing unemployment. Indeed, unemployment in Broadmeadows, just to the north of my electorate—an area with which you are personally familiar, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell—unemployment has risen from 21.9 per cent to 23.5 per cent. Really, that is a terrible result. The level of unemployment just to the north is really in Spanish or Greek terms.

Right across the nation, long-term unemployment is at its highest rate in 16 years. Yet, in the context of such high unemployment levels, the Liberal government wants to make it harder for people not only to get a job but also to make ends meet when they do not have a job. This is harsh and insensitive to young people who are experiencing very difficult economic and employment circumstances at the moment.

Youth unemployment is around the highest level since 1998. Young people accounted for 29.8 per cent of the long-term unemployed pool in February 2015—well above the 22.5 per cent recorded in September 2008—and youth unemployment in Melbourne's northern suburbs, as of April, is at its highest level since the 1990s, at more than 14 per cent. According to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the number of young people facing long-term unemployment in Australia has tripled since the global financial crisis. In 2008, there were 19,500 long-term unemployed young people aged between 15 and 24; but now that has risen to over 56,000.

In response to these growing community concerns about rising unemployment and youth unemployment levels, I will be hosting a Wills unemployment forum next week, on 30 June, at the Coburg Concert Hall from 7 pm. I believe that providing people with sustainable job opportunities is fundamental to building a prosperous, socially resilient and happier community. The fact that we have seen economic conditions deteriorate and employment opportunities diminish is a matter of real concern in my community. I am committed to reducing unemployment for local people and I intend for this forum to provide a platform for discussion, ideas and solutions. I will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss and identify solutions to address the economic and social issues associated with unemployment and how we as a community can reduce unemployment for our residents. Members of the panel will be: the Hon. Brendan O'Connor, the federal shadow minister for employment, who is well known in this place; Councillor Meghan Hopper, the Mayor of Moreland; Melanie Raymond, the Chair of Youth Projects Ltd; David Kennedy, the Executive Director of the Inner Northern Local Learning & Employment Network; Professor Eoin Killackey from Orygen; Nik Filips from the Salvation Army Crossroads program; and Tony Coppola, from the Northern Melbourne Regional Development Australia Committee. I would imagine, Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, you are familiar with Tony. He is very well known in Melbourne's northern suburbs and has a long history in terms of promoting employment growth and industry growth in the north of Melbourne.

I look forward to reporting the outcomes of the Wills unemployment forum to the House, just as I have done previously with the Wills youth issues forum. When you mention people like Tony Coppola, it brings to mind the importance and significance of manufacturing in providing jobs for young people in my electorate of Wills and in neighbouring electorates around Melbourne. The National Institute of Economic and Industry Research modelled the prospective impacts on unemployment following closure of automotive manufacturing as far back as 2010. They developed models which gave estimates for the loss of jobs as a result of the closure of a major automotive manufacturing firm. At the time there was not an indication that that would actually happen, and the exercise was undertaken to demonstrate just how important the presence of Ford was to the regional economy of northern Melbourne. But, sadly, this scenario is now a reality. Under the scenario, Geelong residents, given their high level of employment capture locally, faced the greatest impact. For Hume the reduction in resident jobs was around 2,000 positions in the fourth year of closure. For Whittlesea, the peak was also reached after four years, with the best part of 1,000 fewer resident employment positions, and for the city of Moreland after four years they estimated more than 700 fewer positions.

The strategic issue is that the impact of the closure is long term, with regional economies struggling to replace the jobs lost. The issue is even more complex in that replacing jobs is one thing but replacing jobs with equivalent positions, in terms of skills and salaries, is quite another. The National Institute of Economic and Industry Research concluded that retrenched workers with lower qualifications would find it hardest to find equivalent employment and that the lowest-skilled workers would be stranded in casual work or long-term structural unemployment, particularly in Hume and in Whittlesea. So we face very serious unemployment issues in the northern suburbs, both the issues that we have right now and the issues that we have in prospect with the automotive industry being relocated. Kate Carnell, who is the CEO of ACCI, said that:

… unless the youth unemployment issue is addressed—and it will need to be addressed quite aggressively … we will end up with a generation of young people on the fringes of the economy.

I think that is absolutely right.

I mentioned before the Inner Northern Local Learning and Employment Network. It is an independent local community organisation that has been undertaking important work, creating and implementing strategies to support young people across Moreland, Darebin and Yarra. I want to take this opportunity to commend their work. They have found that Melbourne's northern region has significant disadvantage and high levels of youth unemployment between the ages of 15 and 24. They say that to tackle youth unemployment we need concerted action from stakeholders across multiple fronts. They have brokered the establishment of the Youth Employment Taskforce, a group of key leaders that will drive the development of a comprehensive strategy. They have 30 cross-sector members with representation from local leaders from business, local government, schools, educators, TAFE and university.

David Kennedy, the chair of the taskforce states:

We need to support young people to develop the skills and attributes required in the 21st century workplace, this is everyone's responsibility and must be seen as a priority by our whole community or else we will have a lost generation of young people.

The local youth employment strategy has been developed by a very broad coalition, recognising that young people in this region are finding it increasingly difficult to gain entry to the labour market and, as a result, unemployment and under-employment are increasing at a significant rate.

I mentioned earlier the Wills Youth Issues Forum that I held earlier this year. It dealt with some of the serious issues on the sharp end—things like the drug ice, alcohol, crime, mental health, homelessness and unemployment. I think everyone at that forum understood how important employment is in tackling those social problems and everyone understood how important education is in enabling people to achieve jobs. So we need to have a focus in this country on education, on manufacturing and on employment, because these are the things that will help solve our problems—not the bill before the House.

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank members for their contribution to this debate. The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 will introduce four 2015 budget measures in the Social Services portfolio, along with certain other measures from the 2014 budget and earlier fiscal decisions. The 2015 budget measures incorporate the reintroduction with modifications or the replacement of three 2014 budget measures introduced previously.

From 1 July 2015, the one-week ordinary waiting period currently applying to Newstart Allowance and Sickness Allowance will be extended to Youth Allowance (other) and the Parenting Payment. This bill is amending last year's budget measure so that the Widow Allowance claimants will not be affected by the measure.

From a delayed start of 1 July 2016, the age of eligibility for Newstart Allowance and Sickness Allowance will be increased from 22 to 25. Young people between the ages of 22 and 25 may apply for Youth Allowance instead. Young people aged 22 to 24 in receipt of Newstart Allowance or Sickness Allowance before or on 30 June 2016 will not be affected and will remain on the higher Newstart or Sickness Allowance rates. Further, the 2015 budget measure in the bill will cease the Low Income Supplement from 1 July 2017.

The bill will also take the opportunity to introduce some amendments relating to indexation that are currently before the Senate. The first of these indexation amendments will maintain at level for three years the income-free areas for all working age allowances, other than student payments and for Parenting Payment (single) from the existing start date of 1 July 2015. The second will maintain at level for three years the income-free areas and other means test thresholds for student payments, including the student Income Bank limits with a new start date of 1 January 2016. The 2014 budget measure Stronger Participation Incentives for Job Seekers under 30, which sought to introduce a six-month waiting period for under 30s applying for Newstart Allowance, Youth Allowance or Special Benefit, will no longer be implemented. Instead, the bill introduces a four-week waiting period for under 25s applying for Youth Allowance (other) or Special Benefit—and I should stress—for those who are job ready. The measure will start from 1 July 2016 and will only apply to job seekers assessed as job ready.

Job seekers affected by this measure will also participate in rapid activation pre-benefit activities to ensure that they are looking for work. This measure includes a long list of exemptions—exemptions that are conveniently ignored by those who oppose this measure in seeking to create concern amongst vulnerable people in the community. This is becoming the sort of rote response from the opposition when it comes to measures put forward by the government—scare campaign after scare campaign, misrepresenting and misleading vulnerable people and taking advantage of them for their own political interests. It is quite disgraceful. These new measures are the basis of listening to the Australian people on earlier measures introduced. They bring back measures which are far more modest in their ambitions but, importantly, reflect the consultation that has been conducted over the course of the last year.

The exemptions are many in this bill in terms of the four-week waiting period for under 25s. If someone has already served a four-week waiting period in the last six months, they will not have to serve another if that job ends through no fault of their own. I heard members opposite talking about someone going to another place and getting a job and in seeking that job they may have already served that four-week waiting period. If that job does not work out, they do not have to serve another waiting period within that same six months. It is an absurdity to suggest otherwise. That is not what is proposed in the bill. What happens in these cases is that, if they have done exactly what we have asked them to do, they will go onto the Youth Allowance payment. If someone has a disability or an activity test exemption—for example, they are pregnant and are in the last six weeks of their pregnancy—they will not have to serve the waiting period.

The measure will not impact job seekers who have left state care within the last 12 months. I will make sure that only youth aged 16 to 25 will have to serve the waiting period. There are some cases where a person under 16 can be on the Special Benefit. These measures apply to job ready Australians, young people. We are going to introduce regulation to include further exemptions that I have made absolutely clear over the course of this debate outside of this place. Former carers or people with a disability are exempted. Those recently released from prison or psychiatric facilities are exempted. Young people who are unable to live at home will not be subject to these measures.

This measure is not stand-alone. We have also invested in employment and education supports for young people under 25. We have made $8.1 million available in emergency relief funding to provide assistance to job seekers affected by this measure who are experiencing hardship. But not only have we listened and reversed the previous measure, at a cost of some $1.8 billion; we have invested more than $330 million in jobs programs for young people. The savings measure that results from this change is only $200 million. This is not about savings. This is about a fairer system. This is about a system that encourages young people to choose a life of work and not a life of welfare.

The funding that we talk about through emergency relief providers or others, or those involved through the jobactive network, will be there to support young people and encourage them into work. We have invested $18.3 million in work experience places, which will provide on-the-job experience and connection to an employer. We are running intensive support trials for vulnerable job seekers—some $55.2 million. We are providing new support for youth with mental health conditions—some $19.4 million. For vulnerable young migrants and refugees, we are providing some $22.1 million. And we are continuing to support parents to prepare for employment, with around $8.9 million.

I noted in the debate that those opposite talked about the issue of young people who may fall victim to homelessness. I found this interesting, because it was the previous government that did not provide for the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness. When we went looking for the funding that would continue to provide support to the states to assist people with homelessness, the cupboard was bare. Zero was the amount that was allocated by the previous government for the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness in this budget year we are moving into—absolutely zero. So, as a new measure that had to be funded by savings that this government has been prepared to put through, we were able to commit a further two years to the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness. And we are not just going to shovel the money out the door to the states like the previous government did. We are insisting that they give priority to two important issues: family and domestic violence and youth homelessness. They are the two things they have to deal with. There is $230 million to the states to provide support in those areas.

This measure will save $200 million by introducing a four-week waiting period for youth under 25, and it will cost $375 million in additional support services for young job seekers. This measure replaces the under 30s measure contained in the 2014-15 budget. The total cost of that reversal is $1.8 billion. We are taking measures to ensure that young job seekers accept any suitable job, not just the job that they would like to have. Unemployment benefits are for those who are looking for work and struggling to find work. We think this is a very fair and targeted measure. We do not believe—as those opposite seem to, in their ideological opposition to this measure—in running a shuttle from the school gate to the Centrelink office front door, what you could call the 'Shorten shuttle'. We do not believe in running the Shorten shuttle from the front gate of the school to the front door of Centrelink. It is not something we support. We believe young people should be choosing a life of work, not choosing a career of welfare. That is why we are making the changes we are. The position of those opposite is purely driven by ideology. It would not matter how we changed these measures; they always think that everybody is entitled to welfare.

Debate adjourned.