Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to rise and speak on this bill, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016, in continuation. I was talking about the three stages of the PaTH program, which will support up to 120,000 young people over four years. The first stage is getting them ready—preparing young people. The second stage is giving them a go—trialling them through an internship, supported by a youth bonus wage subsidy and voluntary internships of between four and 12 weeks where employers will receive an incentive of $1,000 up-front and a young person, an intern, will receive a $200-a-fortnight payment to supplement their Newstart allowance—on top of their Newstart allowance. Then, of course, the third part of this program is hire—giving young people a job. In order to provide that incentive to employers, the government is proposing that businesses will be eligible for a youth bonus wage subsidy of between $6½ thousand and $10,000 from 1 January next year.

This bill is needed because it is required to ensure jobseekers are not disadvantaged by taking part in the Youth Jobs PaTH measure announced in the budget to encourage eligible young jobseekers to take up a PaTH internship. Participants, as I have mentioned, will receive $200 fortnightly in addition to their social security payments. The bill ensures that these payments are not considered as income for social security and veterans' entitlement purposes. That is obviously very important; we do not want to do anything that will impact on their social security entitlements. So it will amend the Social Security Act, the Veterans' Entitlements Act and the Social Security (Administration) Act to support the Youth Jobs PaTH measure.

I do want to make some particular comments in relation to the member for Melbourne's contribution and more broadly in relation to some of the opposition that we have heard from members opposite. This is an incredibly important program for young people. In contrast to those opposite and to the Greens, here we are, as a government, looking at every possible measure to drive young people into work. We are incredibly proud of what we are doing. And it is absolutely fallacious to suggest that this is a $4-an-hour program. What we are providing is a $200-a-fortnight bonus—that is in addition to Newstart; $200 extra per fortnight—which will put young people into the position of an internship for a limited period of time and, very importantly, will give employers the opportunity to trial someone and to train them. We all know that, when an employer brings anyone new into their business, there is a high degree of commitment by that employer to introduce a young person into the workplace, to train them and to get them job-ready, and the employer does not do that unless he or she, or the company, has a commitment to bringing someone into their organisation. It is also great opportunity for young people: to learn new skills; to get a taste of that industry or to get an understanding of that business; to get a sense of self-worth; to be encouraged; to be inspired; and of course, in doing so, to receive this important bonus.

So it is really regrettable that, while we have had this criticism both from the Greens and from the Labor Party, we have seen no ideas from members opposite. What are their ideas? We have seen no contrary ideas from the Labor Party.

As a government, we are doing everything possible to drive jobs, to drive new programs and to look at new ways of getting young people into work. And its is not just through the PaTH program. We have our $96 million Try, Test and Learn Fund, introduced by the Minister for Social Services, asking all members of the community—volunteer groups, community organisations and members opposite—to come up with innovative employment ideas to drive employment. But what do we hear today from the member for Melbourne? No ideas. It is a zero ideas zone from the Greens and from members opposite. We recognise that government does not have all the ideas, and we are saying to Australians, 'Here is nearly $100 million for an innovative scheme'—like a scheme that is being promoted and funded in my region, the GROW scheme, where G21 and Give Where You Live have done some wonderful work to try to address the very significant problems with youth unemployment, particularly in the Geelong region.

We are making some very important inroads, despite some members opposite—particularly the member for Corio—trying to talk down our local economy at every opportunity. Last month's unemployment figures show that unemployment in the Geelong is currently sitting at four per cent, with a three-month rolling average of 5.8 per cent. Despite all the criticism from those opposite, we are doing so much better than the Labor Party have ever given us credit for. While we get criticism from those opposite, what is remarkable in this debate is that we have no ideas from those opposite.

Not only do we have our Try, Test and Learn scheme on top of our PaTH scheme; we have the Transition to Work scheme, which is an alternative for the jobactive providers. It supports young people aged 15 to 21 through intensive pre-employment support to improve work readiness and help them into work or education. We have the ParentsNext program, which helps eligible parents to identify their education and employment goals—again, to help them get into work. We have our Empowering YOUth Initiative, again to support innovative approaches to helping young unemployed people move into work. We are absolutely committed and doing everything we can to drive those jobs and to drive those opportunities, and it is really disappointing that we have not seen some bipartisanship on what is a very, very significant measure.

The Minister for Employment, Senator Michaelia Cash, did an extraordinary job in leading our charge in passing the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014, which of course is a bill that is all about putting Australian workers first. In contrast to Labor, who wanted to back the union organisers, including those who had engaged in fraud and corruption, which is very disappointing, our government is focused on putting Australian workers first. It was wonderful to visit Kings Cars with the minister and to talk—

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

Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member is reflecting on members opposite and saying that they support fraud. That is not the case, and she should withdraw.

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

That is not what she said.

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

That is exactly what she said.

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

I call the member for Corangamite.

Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will not withdraw. That is not what I said. I said that the Labor Party did not support a bill which combats union organisers engaging in fraud, engaging in corruption and engaging in dodgy union deals.

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

There is no point of order. Please continue.

Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a great opportunity for me to say it again. What an absolute disgrace it is that the Labor Party did not support the Registered Organisations Bill, in contrast to the likes of the former Labor Attorney-General Rob McClelland, in contrast to the likes of Martin Ferguson and in contrast to the likes of Bill Kelty, who all stood up and said, 'Yes, we do require this reform; we do need to put Australian workers first.' So thank you for the opportunity to make that point. It was a shameful day when the Labor Party would not support this vital industrial relations reform for our nation.

As I was saying, in May, the Minister for Employment, Senator Michaelia Cash, and I visited Kings Cars, one of the many local employers in our region, and spoke very, very proudly about the Youth PaTH employment program. It is getting a lot of support and we are very enthusiastic as to how we can work locally with our local employers to make sure that as many employers as possible take up this opportunity and give young people a chance—because that is what it is all about.

Everything our government is doing is about putting the Australian worker first and driving jobs, and we are so proud. I will take the opportunity to look at what we are doing locally. There is our massive investment in infrastructure, including, at long last, the $690 million that has been provided for rural and regional roads in Victoria. We had to drag the Labor Party kicking and screaming in Victoria on that one. There is more investment in rail and our huge commitment to Avalon Airport—all about driving jobs. There are our massive job creation programs, including a $20 million jobs and investment package for our region, which is very significant—looking at new investment, new opportunities, new industries and new jobs, including new jobs for young people. There is our Geelong Region Innovation and Investment Fund, which has created some 850 new jobs across our region. There is our $155 million Growth Fund. There is the Geelong Region Job Connections program, supporting lots of fantastic grassroots job creation programs, including supporting the Pivot Summit, which I will be very proudly opening on Friday—driving digital jobs, jobs for the future and jobs for young people.

There is our focus on advanced manufacturing. What a reflection it was on Labor when they committed only around $7 million to our region, in contrast to our very significant investments in advanced manufacturing, including an industry growth centre in advanced manufacturing and $4.7 million for Deakin University for the Future Fibres Research Hub. There is also our strong commitment to the National Stronger Regions Fund and our strong commitment to small and medium business—delivering those tax cuts. Back in 2011, the Labor Party were very supportive of tax cuts for small- and medium-size businesses. Back then they were being quite open with the Australian people and acknowledging that that did drive new jobs, more investment and more opportunities. But now we see in another blatant, pathetic case of politicking, led by the Leader of the Opposition, an illogical opposition to tax cuts for small business. Then there are our free trade agreements—again, all about driving jobs.

We are getting the economy boosted again—as we did when we abolished the carbon tax and the mining tax and stripped red tape—and proudly doing all these important things to drive jobs and investment. This is a very important bill for young people and for our nation, and I commend this bill to the House.

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

I wish I could say it was a pleasure to follow the member for Corangamite in rising to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. Such are the delusions of this government, where they think if they get up and say the word 'strong' and 'we are backing Australian workers first' enough times that it will somehow echo and ricochet from this parliament out there into the community. But the community, of course, know exactly what this government is up to in a whole range of areas because they see in this parliament every single day that we either have no positive agenda at all or we have these rampant reactionary measures. The member opposite wandered from this bill, which is all about internships, and into industrial relations—all sort of weaved into the ABCC. What I would like to let the House know is that the Australian Building and Construction Commission does not deal with criminal behaviour at all.

There was a fellow in my electorate named Ark Tribe. He lived out in Middle Beach and he worked on the Flinders hospital site. He was worried about the safety of himself and the workers at that site, so they held a safety meeting because they were worried about working in an unsafe environment. And do you know what happened? He got hauled before the courts by Gestapo style tactics for months and months and months of his life. He was not a corrupt union official; he was just a construction worker who wanted to work in a safe environment. Those opposite want to criminalise that sort of behaviour and want to pretend that it is wrong. The fact is, people like Ark Tribe are the real Australians who are really representing the Australian tradition—that of a fair go, of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, of working in a safe environment and of being able to come home to your family. Instead, we have this nonsense where those opposite talk about fraud. There is a place to deal with fraud whether it is in unions, the local footy club, a company or anywhere else in the community and it is called the courts. And guess what: they are doing it every single day. There is nothing particularly special about it. That is the way we have set up our community for the administration of justice. That is the way we should pursue it because that is the best way to pursue it. We should leave industrial relations separate from criminal law.

I guess we should talk about this bill. The other thing those opposite like to do is talk about real-life experience. I was a union official and, on occasion, I had stop-work meetings. These days, those opposite might have put me in jail for it. I might be in chains, like my forebear: my great-grandfather, Peter Roberts. He was on the docks at Geelong. He died in an unsafe work environment. He was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Those opposite would have banged him up because that is what they are about. They are about criminalising trade unions and trade union activity.

Mr Falinski interjecting—

That is what was said. Let me tell you about what happened when I was a union official. Every so often I used to have to go out to some small retail establishment. I would be there and they would have somebody in to do 'work experience' or as an 'intern'. This would go on for weeks, sometimes months, and these people would be used to displace existing workers. Sometimes it was not such small institutions. We had one major retailer do it once. And I would have to patiently explain to those institutions, those commercial organisations that what they were doing was in fact illegal and that they should be paying these people.

From time to time some manager, or sometimes it was an owner of a company, would get into his head that maybe, if he had people come in as interns or for work experience, that would be a great boon to his business and that somehow the individual committing this free work would also get a benefit. Now, from this article in TheSydney Morning Herald by Clara Jordan-Baird, who is the national policy director of Interns Australia, I have got some figures: 'Only 20 per cent of unpaid interns are offered employment with the same organisation.' What happens to the other 80 per cent? I can tell you from my real-life experience: they get exploited. Let us think about that.

We roughly know what will happen under this bill and it will all come out in the Senate inquiry. The government is attempting to institute a program where we know the majority of people in the scheme are going to be exploited in some way.

Government members interjecting—

I suppose I will be generous with those opposite after the interjections. I heard the member for Corangamite talk. I remember being on the backbench of a government that was in a death spiral. You know those dive-bombers? I had a constituent who was in a dive-bomber. He was a guy who had to sit in the rear seat and he was the gunner. That is who you guys opposite are: you are in the rear seat of a plane and you are assuming there is a pilot in the front, but they have bailed out and you are just sitting in the back and shooting away and you are taking out the rudder and the wings and you are hurtling towards the ground. And as you are hurtling towards the ground you are issuing orders to the rest of us. You are giving us your bon mots of wisdom as you hurtle towards the ground.

I have been there, so I am not telling you how to suck eggs. But from these situations—and I have certainly seen enough of them in my time in parliament—we should know the sorts of rorts that go on and the sorts of people, the bottom feeders, who are attracted to programs just like this. To be fair to those opposite, we have seen it in all sorts of programs across administrations. The LPG subsidy was my favourite. It was started by Howard. There was $3,000 to subsidise LPG conversions. Australian taxpayers spent $750-odd million subsidising commercial activity that would have gone on anyway. All it did was drag demand forward. It doubled the price of LPG conversions. No-one was keeping an eye on that.

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

Member for Corangamite, do you have a point of order?

Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I ask you to remind the member to confine his remarks to the bill. This is a speech on the bill that is before the House at the moment.

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

On relevance, I call the member for Wakefield.

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

Was anybody here for her speech? Anyway, I am happy to relate it back to the bill because I am talking about the sorts of rorts that can go on under programs just like this. I will arrive at my point if you will allow me to just take this slightly circuitous route.

We had a program that did not create a job, that subsidised commercial activity that was going to go on anyway, that dragged all this demand forward and that did not do the industry one lick of good, because I can tell you it cost jobs in the end. I saw LPG conversion companies go out of business because all the work had been done in this massive boom that did nothing but push prices up. And you can bet that there were a few bottom feeders who entered that industry just to get their hands on the subsidy.

Here we have this program, which puts a $1,000 incentive into the business and then a wage subsidy after that, where we have a group of vulnerable potential interns. We know youth unemployment is at extraordinary levels and that it is often regionally based. I know exactly what the member for Corangamite is talking about when she talks about the challenges of this and the desire to do something, but it has actually got to be the right thing to do. Nobody on the government side of the program has gotten up and said, 'Well, this won't be rorted. Don't worry about it; we've got all these protections in there.' What you are setting up here is a program with no protections. For a start, in this bill there is no definition of 'an intern'. I could set up an intern pathway company where I partner with small business to take the interns from one place to another, and maybe I would get a fee and everybody would be a winner.

David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Think positively.

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

Think positively! The member opposite tells me to think positively. I have been here too long to be so naive about the sorts of people who would be attracted to this program, because we have just seen it in VET FEE-HELP. I remember being in the government party room when we were told about VET FEE-HELP.

Ms Henderson interjecting—

Listen to this. It was supposed to be for TAFE. Then it was extended to private providers. Then, what happened? You came into government, and what did you try to do? You tried to fix it up—four or five times.

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

The member for Wakefield will resume his seat. The member for Corangamite on a point of order?

Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I would ask that the member direct his comments through the chair.

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

I am happy to direct my comments through the chair. This government attempted to fix that program four or five times. Eventually Senator Birmingham from the other place did it. I know Senator Birmingham. He is a smart cookie. He has now fixed it, because he has come down on them like a ton of bricks. Previous ministers tried to say, 'Maybe we can negotiate with these people.' The truth is that whenever there is a Commonwealth dollar you can bet your bottom dollar—do not be naive about it—that there will be some bottom feeder out there who will set up a method of rorting the program.

Ms Henderson interjecting—

Those opposite come in here with their rote-learning speeches where they recite the lines—and the member for Corangamite is a little bit better at disguising the lines. I heard some speeches last night. Honestly, they turn page 3 and then this is what page 4 says. I have seen speeches like that before—on both sides of the House. But the learning from this is that you need to question the executive, because when they come up with a program like this, which, frankly, you could drive a truck through—there is no definition of 'an intern' and no real safeguards—it could be rorted by a middle man or by just your local company who thinks, 'Well, I'm going to get rid of all my existing workers and bring in all these interns.' And do not tell me it will not happen. I have seen whole companies where everybody is on a traineeship. There is nobody to train the trainees, because every single employee was on a traineeship. I remember one South Australian employer where even the owner of the company was on the traineeship. That was in the Howard years, so we are going back a few years.

There has been completely shameless abuse of government programs across governments of various persuasions. So this is the thing: do not think that there is not someone out there right at this moment looking at this bill and thinking, 'How can I make some money out of this? How can I exploit this? How can I use this?' because you can bet they will. And you will have to come back here when the first scandal comes out and we will read all your speeches back to you. When it appears on the ABC or when The Sydney Morning Herald does an investigation, guess what will happen? We will have to come back here and read all of your silly speeches about it where you recited the lines that were written by some 22-year-old in the minister's office—with all of that life experience there.

That is the problem with this bill. It is just sloppy. And whatever you say, we have got a second reading amendment with which the member for Chifley, he has learnt, is wisely going to push it off into a Senate inquiry. Hopefully, that will tighten this bill up. This is dangerous stuff, because it is full of exactly the sort of naive thinking, the wishful thinking, that is present on this government's back bench. As I said before, they are in a death spiral, so they are grasping onto whatever they can. But this is the wrong thing to grasp onto. I would encourage those opposite to start doing your jobs on the back bench. Behind the scenes, actually start to put a bit of pressure on your executive—who are all shifting though their jobs so quickly that they are not really paying attention, let's be honest, with all the ministerial changes in this government. Start doing your jobs.

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We can now resume normal transmission, I think. This is a critical piece of reform. For far too long too many people have languished, trapped, in the social security system, and the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016 is the beginning of a long and arduous journey to change the status quo.

Having run my own business, I know the challenges that businesses face when employing people they do not know, particularly those who have never worked before. To a small business, the cost of not getting it right can be expensive in terms of time and money and, most importantly, in lost opportunities. Employers often attempt to contain that risk by choosing to employ people with work experience and a proven track record. Unfortunately, this traps those who are trying to get ahead, trying to break out of the welfare system.

Over the last 24 hours I have borne witness to the Labor Party lecturing the rest of us on inequality in Australia. The member for Lilley was particularly illuminating on the issue. Never once did he mention microeconomic reform as a key platform to alleviating inequality. Never once did he talk about breaking the cycle of welfare dependency and unemployment. But we do. We talk about reform. We care about breaking the cycle of poverty and we care about employment, because the awful truth is this: that, after nearly seven decades of government-funded poverty programs, we have hardly moved the needle.

Many social programs during this time have done nothing more than entrench poverty from one generation to the next. It is simply a fact that, if you are solely reliant on the welfare system in today's Australia, it is highly likely that your health and education outcomes will be substantially lower and you will have a shorter lifespan. At the same time, the chances of you forming a household are very low, while the likelihood of the system passing these outcomes onto your children is very high. This system costs $154 billion a year. In truth, the money is a second-order issue, because the Turnbull government is about saving lives, not money. When we on this side talk about reforming welfare—we are talking about saving lives, not money.

Those opposite typically provide two solutions to alleviating inequality: the first is increased spending on welfare; the second is a more distributive tax system. Despite dedicating hundreds of billions of dollars to decreasing inequality, those opposite say things have got worse, and yet their only answer is to keep doing more of the same. Labor can talk ad nauseam about inequality, because they need people to feel like they are victims and supplicants of the state. Under no circumstances will they talk about the inequality of opportunity that their own policies have created.

Of Australians aged under 20 who are on income support, 67,000 have, or have had, a guardian who has been on welfare for the last 15 years. Our lifetime welfare bill has now reached an estimated $4.8 trillion dollars. That is not an amount we should try and grasp in terms of dollars and cents, but rather as a sum total of human misery. But numbers do not paint pictures. This is the story of a never-ending cycle of poverty passed on from generation to generation.

On this side of the House, we believe in standing up for hardworking Australians who aspire to a better future for their friends, their families and this great country—a modern and dynamic society that believes in helping people up, not dragging them down—with government as the great enabler, not the great enforcer. I am proud to be part of the Turnbull government that recognises that a new approach is urgently required. We cannot underestimate the urgency of the now. The Youth Jobs PaTH is part of our government's $840 million project to improve people's chances of making a go of life, of getting and keeping them out of welfare and helping them to achieve their aspirations. The package, which is part of the Australian Priority Investment approach to welfare, provides a new, cutting-edge approach to youth employment. It will help 120,000 vulnerable young Australians over four years take advantage of job opportunities as our economy diversifies and transitions to broader based growth. It will help young people to get ready for meaningful work by giving them the tools they need to have a go and get a job.

The Turnbull government is seeking to improve employment outcomes for Australia's young people in a real, meaningful and tangible way by making it easier for them to enter the workforce. Young Australians should have the personal and financial opportunities that come with having a job—the independence, the experience, the self-esteem, the excitement and the chance to hone their skills. This aspect of employment is too often ignored by those on the Left of politics. The simple sense of achievement on someone's mentality has transformed lives and entire communities. Our future prosperity as a nation will suffer if we do not persistently tackle high levels of youth unemployment. Young people who cannot find a job are more susceptible to long-term unemployment and, from that place, it is a short trip to a cycle of welfare dependency.

I welcome the reductions in the youth unemployment rate that this government has seen so far, but the numbers are still too high. We have identified that it is often a lack of experience that keeps young people out of the workforce, so we are implementing a measure that will facilitate young people getting exactly that experience so they might find it easier to gain meaningful employment. The Youth Jobs PaTH program will help and encourage young Australians to learn new skills, become job ready, get a job, and stay in a job.

Having had open and frank conversations with the businesses of Australia, looking at the preliminary findings of the 'investment approach' actuarial analysis, and studying best practices both here and abroad, we have designed an innovative program that will make a real difference to young Australians. The prepare, trial, hire pathway will encourage employers to take a chance on young people by enhancing their employability, providing them real work experience, and increasing incentives for employers to take them on.

Importantly, the program will give vulnerable young people that are trying to better their lives and create a future for themselves the confidence they need to transition to, find and retain work. We need to understand that what many of us in this place take for granted for some people is simply unknown. Vulnerable young Australians have no, or virtually no, experience of what work looks like, of what the expectations are in terms of practice, behaviour, what to wear, what is done and, more importantly, what is not done at work.

The Youth Jobs PaTH is divided into three stages: prepare, trial and hire. To help young people gain a foothold in the labour market, young jobseekers will participate in intensive pre-employment skills training within five months of registering with jobactive. The first three weeks of training will focus on skills such as working in a team, presentation, and appropriate IT skills, like limiting your use of Facebook. A further three weeks of training will centre on advanced job preparation and job hunting skills.

The government will introduce up to 120,000 internship placements over four years to help young jobseekers who have been in employment services for six months or more gain valuable work experience. Jobseekers and businesses, with the help of employment services providers, will work together to design internships of four to 12 weeks duration, during which the jobseeker will work 15 to 25 hours per week. Participation in an internship will be voluntary for both jobseekers and employers.

In addition to gaining valuable hands on experience in a workplace, young people will receive $200 per fortnight on top of their regular income support payment while participating in the internship. People that take on interns will receive an upfront payment of $1,000, and will benefit from the opportunity to see what a young worker can do and how they fit into the team before deciding whether to offer them a permanent job.

Stage 3 of the new Youth Jobs PaTH provides increased and streamlined wage subsidies for young people. Australian employers will be eligible for a youth bonus wage subsidy if they hire a young jobseeker who has been in employment services for six months or more. Businesses will have the flexibility to employ young jobseekers either directly, through labour hire arrangements, or combined with an apprenticeship or traineeship. As part of these reforms, existing wage subsidies will be streamlined, making them easier for employers to access. In our modern and dynamic economy, highly entrepreneurial and flexible firms with dynamic mindsets will proliferate.

Yesterday I heard from Bernard Salt that five of America's top 10 companies were formed within the past 40 years. In Australia, our top 10 most valuable companies were founded before 1929. We need business leaders with new ideas. And, as much as it pains me to say it, young people are the source of most these bright new ideas. The Turnbull government will also encourage young people to start their own businesses by fostering their innovation and interest in self-employment.

It is interesting that in the United States some of these innovative companies were formed by people still in their 20s—people like Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates was only 19 when he started Microsoft and created the DOS operating system that IBM bought. Even Warren Buffett started his funds management company when he was only 22. In Australia, this sort of entrepreneurship needs to be both encouraged and developed. This government will be part of enabling that to occur. It is this sort of stuff that not only helps young people find jobs that they love and that they want to be involved in but also builds our economy. It also helps create companies that pay taxes, that create jobs, that create wage growth, that create more competition in our marketplace and ensure that all of us, all consumers have the benefits of competition in the marketplace, so governments do not need to regulate as much, so that we can get out of the way of the market and allow people to enjoy the benefits thereof.

This bill, along with all the other reforms the Turnbull government is implementing, is about people's lives. It is about making a real difference to vulnerable members of our community. It shows that if you are willing to work hard, to put yourself out there, this government will support you no matter what your circumstances. This bill is not about the soft prejudice that says that people from tough backgrounds cannot aspire to something better, that they are victims now and will forever-more be victims. This says that the human potential inherent in all of us will be supported and encouraged, that no person is not worth something, and that everyone can make a contribution. It is about saying that we believe that everyone can make a difference for themselves and for their families, and that if they are willing, this government, the Turnbull government, will support them. And we will break the cycle of poverty that has endured in this country for far too long.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want our government to provide tangible opportunities for young people to gain relevant on-the-job training and experience. I worked for more than four years in executive roles in the youth space. When you know the challenges that face unemployed young people like I do, you really do want ideas like the ones contained in this legislation to work. However, I must put my concerns before the House.

As I outlined in my first speech, many young people in our country, for a variety of complex reasons, are struggling to transition to employment. Contributing significantly to the youth unemployment rate is the reality that every year fewer and fewer entry-level jobs exist. Young people who are underemployed, early school leavers or those who fail to transition successfully from school to further education or employment are some of our most vulnerable members in our society. High youth unemployment rates and overrepresentation in underemployment mean that young people who are disengaged from education are not in training or employment and that they face a bleak financial future—a future with hardship, increased likelihood of health and mental health issues, and an increased probability of involvement in the criminal justice system.

As our population ages, it is imperative for Australia's economic productivity and the well-being of society more generally that we equip all young people with the skills and support needed to become active, positive, contributing citizens. Young people who are unemployed for a prolonged period of time suffer wage scarring. The effect of wage scarring can be long-lasting and financially and emotionally detrimental. A recent international study from the Work Foundation in the United Kingdom indicated that long periods of unemployment when young can reduce an individual's wage-earning capacity between 13 and 23 percent by the age of 42. This phenomena negatively affects not only a person's individual financial ability but the nation's collective fiscal productivity. Therefore, I do commend the government for pressing ahead with the idea of systematically linking youth job seekers with work-trial opportunities and paid employment. It is a fundamentally good idea. But, like any idea, it also needs to be implemented well to make it work. It is from this standpoint that I offer a constructive critique of this bill, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016.

My first observation when reading through the bill is that there is little detail on how the Prepare, Trial, Hire program—the PaTH program—will operate in practice. Much is left to regulation and administrative discretion. I understand the advantages of retaining flexibility when implementing a program like this. You want it to be able to adapt as conditions change and to leave room to incorporate improvements when lessons from its implementation are learned. However, too many fundamental questions remain unanswered in the bill and several important protections for young people are omitted.

For a start, it is not sufficiently clear how young job seekers will be insured while they are on their placements. WorkCover-style entitlements that insure young people against accidents in the workplace are a fundamental workplace right, and my Senate colleagues will find it hard to support any final version of the bill without such protections.

The term 'internship', which is used in the bill, should be revisited. It conjures up images of making coffees for bosses in the offices of lawyers and accountants when most job seekers will be going down a very different, practical and vocational-skills-and-trades pathway. 'Work trial' would be a much more encompassing and meaningful expression to be used and would also highlight that the placements are intended to lead participants into work. Work health and safety requirements, including bullying and sexual harassment protections, must also exist to complement the WorkCover-style entitlements that are required.

The amount of and timing of the subsidy received by business to take on a young person must also be clearer so as to understand exactly how the incentives will work for business. In particular, we need to know whether those incentives may become perverse if the churning of interns can work to a business advantage. Churning would be an unintended and perverse outcome, and would not be to the benefit of either the young participants or to existing employees who find their jobs being displaced by a readily available pool of subsidised labour.

The lowest-skilled workplaces are particularly vulnerable to such churning, as young job seekers are generally less skilled and would, therefore, compete directly with other employees in a low-skilled workplace. Similarly, we also need to know that young participants are not displacing their own jobs. We need to know that businesses that employ a lot of young people, like McDonald's or a retail chain, cannot access young labour that simply replaces a significant chunk of their pre-existing workforce. It is for this reason that the Nick Xenophon team will seek to work with the government to ensure that appropriate industries are targeted for the PaTH program and that, where internship experiences are meaningful and do not displace existing labour, they genuinely facilitate a transition to ongoing employment. We cannot have a program that it is simply open slather and leaves young people open to exploitation. Between 2012 and 2015, NCVER recorded that the Australian economy lost almost 160,000 trainees and apprentices. We should, therefore, be targeting trades and the construction industry, and be, primarily, promoting this initiative to Australian small businesses. This will reduce the risk of churning by big business.

The range of reasonable excuses for a young job seeker to end their internship early needs to be expanded. Currently, it does not appear that the legislation allows for a young person to terminate their internship for judicious reasons such as for sickness or for compassionate grounds, such as the death of a close family member. That, surely, must be amended.

Furthermore, the definition of 'misconduct'—currently grounds for early termination of the internship—needs to be clarified in the legislation to avoid perverse incentives for business and to protect young people. For example, what level of proof is required for misconduct to be proven? Or is it just the word of the business owner versus the intern? Given the clear power imbalances between business and a young job seeker, there needs to be a clear and reasonable standard of proof defined in the legislation. To complement this, a complaints system needs to be established so that young people can access it if they become exploited. I am concerned that without such legislative protections and oversight we risk the cultivation of the Dickensian master-servant relationships, echoed in the 19th century.

There needs to be adequate resourcing for jobactive providers so that they can effectively negotiate placements with businesses and support internship participation. An additional question is whether jobactive or Transition to Work providers are better placed to house the PaTH program. I would argue that Transition to Work contract providers are a better fit as the government has a collective of organisations in Transition to Work that have proven specialist experience in delivering employment and transition support to young people.

The proposed bill currently excludes related entities from being able to deliver the 'prepare' phase of the PaTH program. In practical terms, this means that a provider that is both an RTO, a registered training organisation, and a jobactive provider will not be able to refer jobseekers from its own caseload to its own RTO to complete employability skills training. This runs counter to the notion of creating integrated services to prevent service gaps and will create particular problems in regional areas, where few providers are readily accessible. One possible remedy might be to exempt not-for-profit providers from the related entities rule.

One hundred dollars a week is very little to be paying an intern when their prospective employer is being paid a multithousand dollar subsidy to take them on and help them into employment. The balance of incentives needs to be much more fairly weighted. Furthermore, in rural communities, $100 may be barely sufficient to cover the cost of running a car—remember that in communities such as mine there are few buses. The dollars offered would not cover the long drives that are required to even attend a program.

A work-trial style program like PaTH is only the beginning of the work the government needs to do in the young jobseeker space. The economic burden for Australian society and government as a result of youth inactivity and poor transitions is substantial. A national youth activation and transition service targeted towards young people who are not engaged in education, employment or training and who have multiple barriers would contribute to reducing this burden and increasing the productivity of the nation as a whole. For many young people who have had experiences of employment, those experiences have been temporary in nature. The Australian government Productivity Commission working paper Prevalence of transition pathways in Australia recognised that many young people frequently 'churn' in and out of the labour force. One of the main reasons for this is the casual or temporary nature of the majority of their employment opportunities. There is an urgent and compelling need for a youth activation and transition service to exist for disengaged young people to ensure that they successfully transition into stable employment or further training. The current jobactive service does not provide the specialist support needed for young people to successfully transition to sustainable employment, particularly young people who face complex non-vocational barriers, and yet those young people, who are the most vulnerable with the highest barriers to overcome—the stream C young people—are not in the youth transition service but in the adult transitional employment service, jobactive. It does not make sense. Of those young people, we know that many are not 'employment ready' after they leave school, particularly young people who did not experience a solid secondary education. For those young people, the opportunity to connect with vocational or pre-employment education and training needs to coincide with intensive support to address non-vocational barriers through the development of an individual plan with mutually agreed specific steps to address barriers, to identify and develop personal strengths and to reach goals. This level of support is the best way to create a foundation for future employability. International experience suggests that such rapid activation of young people who are not in education or employment provides the greatest opportunity for a positive outcome. Such a national plan should be delivered as a specialised youth service, it should adopt a place based approach and it should be delivered by local community services. This is especially the case in regional and remote communities, where local delivery by providers allows for the flexibility to tailor the service to specific community needs and is integral to successful delivery.

Addressing the needs of young people who are unemployed, underemployed or inactive is equitably responsible and would be fiscally advantageous to the Australian government through the implementation of cost-effective, preventative activation programs that will ultimately reduce long-term dependence on welfare and increase Australia's productivity.

I and my colleagues do commend the idea behind the bill before us, but adequate safeguards would also need to be legislated in order to make it work in practice. It also must be understood that a workable program for young jobseekers is but a first step in engaging young people transitioning towards employment. I will support the bill in this House, but I acknowledge that my colleagues in the Senate reserve the right to propose amendments relating to what I have spoken on today.

I want to finish by telling you a story of a young person from my electorate, who served me at a checkout in the supermarket just a couple of weeks ago. This young man graduated with a bachelor's degree in science majoring in geology and ecology, and went on to study honours in environmental biology at the University of Adelaide. He is now in his first year out of university and has struggled to obtain even an interview for an environmental job, not just in South Australia but also interstate. He has also emailed a lot of companies explaining his interest in doing work experience or vacation work, but most employers will not take on work experience students. For every graduate or entry-level job he has applied for, the employer requires years of experience. As the young man described it to me: 'It's a never-ending cycle. If employers don't want work experience students, how are we supposed to get the experience in the first place? It's an issue of not just experience but also the sheer number of applicants for the jobs.' One job he went for, a graduate-level environmental officer position, had over 200 applicants, and this level of competition was not unusual. Of the group of about 20 to 30 talented students who graduated with honours with this young man last year, only 10 per cent have obtained full-time work in their area of specialisation and most have resorted to working in a supermarket and the like.

Young people, just like the rest of the population, want to build a good life for themselves. Currently, our society is failing to provide the jobs for our next generation of workers to get their start. As we do that, we will continue to fail our young people and we will fail Australia.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016 because it is an essential debate to be had in this place insofar as providing opportunities for young people in this country to find work is concerned. I start by commending the contribution by the member for Mayo. I think her concerns about the bill are absolutely correct. The intent of the bill—at least if it is to ensure the opportunity of young people to get work—is noble and good, but, as always, we need to look at the impact of the legislation and whether in fact there are sufficient safeguards in place for the most vulnerable workers in the labour market, namely young people.

I also think it is true to say that there is no point providing a subsidised program, if you do not understand the challenges confronting young people. The member for Mayo went to the issue of non-vocational barriers to employment—the fact that there are so many young people who are not only not equipped with skills to deal with the labour market and find a job but also dealing with so many other barriers, including homelessness, intergenerational unemployment, drug dependency and all sorts of other difficulties. Whatever we do in supporting those on the margins—young people struggling—we need to ensure that we attend to them in a holistic manner; not only providing a job, in the case of people who might be struggling, but also attending to their other concerns so we can make sure that their attachment to the labour market is not a precarious one.

Labor supports opportunities for young people. We are concerned that there are in excess of 260,000 young people unemployed in Australia, and that is a very significant proportion of the unemployment numbers in this country. We know, as the result of automation and other changes in the labour market, there are fewer entry-level jobs for younger people. Therefore the government does have a role to partner businesses and partner companies to ensure we provide greater opportunities. We also know, because of the disruption to other sectors of the labour market, we have a situation where young people now are competing against older workers for the same jobs. There was a time when fast-food chains probably employed predominantly young people. That still may be the case but, increasingly, we are seeing older workers having to take on fast-food work because they have been displaced from other sectors of the labour market. This adds to the difficulty young people are having finding work at the moment.

We support the tenor of the bill, but we have some grave reservations. The member for Chifley has moved a very significant amendment that goes to the concerns that Labor has in relation to this bill. The night of the budget, when it was introduced by the Treasurer and later advocated by the Minister for Employment, was the first indication we had in relation to this proposed initiative that it would only apply to existing jobs. In fact, when asked whether it would apply to additional jobs or existing jobs, the Minister for Employment advised that it would only apply to existing jobs and then, of course, subsequently had to correct the record and say, 'No, it could include additional jobs as well.' That is a fundamental concern we have with respect to this initiative.

There is a concern that we are using tax payers' dollars to subsidise jobs that were going to be provided to young people anyway. If the minister needs to get a lesson on deadweight loss, she only need look at the weakness of this scheme. The way that the scheme has been set up will allow employers to use it to ensure there is no additionality to the labour market and, indeed, allow them to employ young people in existing positions, thereby avoiding having to fully pay for their own workers and, of course, not having to pay them pursuant to industrial instruments. There is a twofold problem here: firstly, the taxpayer will be paying for these so-called interns for work they were going to employ someone for anyway, but now they are getting a subsidy from the taxpayer; and, secondly, they do not have to ensure it is additional to the workforce. That is a concern, and it has been catered for in the amendment moved by the member for Chifley, where we want to get some guarantees as to this initiative.

We do not have to go too far back to remember what this government was considering doing to young jobseekers. It was not when long ago that the government was looking at cutting any benefit whatsoever for all jobseekers up to the age of 30 from any support for six months. This government advocated that young people up until the age of 30 would receive no support for six months even when they were looking each and every day for work. Because of the pressure from Labor and others, that has now been reduced to one month, but I can tell you that for young people who are independent people looking for work, if they are not to receive any support for the first month they are unemployed and they are not living at home, it is an enormous burden and it is counterproductive. It will be more difficult where there is no support whatsoever for young people to look for work.

We ask the government, as they ended up backflipping on the six-month suspension of any support, to also change their position on the one-month suspension and provide some level of support, provided the young jobseeker is looking for work. That is what mutual obligation means. You cannot have the principle of mutual obligation when you say, 'There's an obligation on the young jobseeker to look for work, but there is no obligation on us to help them.' That is not mutual obligation. That is just putting the onus on them with no support from the government, and that is completely undermining the principle of mutual obligation that I thought both major parties shared in that regard. I ask the government to reconsider their position on the absence of support for one month so that they are not being unduly unfair.

While I am on my feet, in relation to support from government, they also extended the youth allowance to cover 22- and 23-year-olds so there would be, in effect, a 20 per cent cut, in real terms, to income support for unemployed young people at the age of 22 and 23. That is still something the government is seeking to pass through the Senate. It is a massive cut. If you are on Newstart, on the lowest support—we know Newstart is not a very significant income—you are going to be subject to a 20 per cent cut to that income, if you are 22 or 23, Again, that is a pretty harsh thing to do to that age cohort, and we would ask the government to reconsider its position there. It is pretty harsh stuff. It is not going to help them find work. It is going to make it more difficult. It is just gratuitously punitive and, quite frankly, quite nasty, but in keeping with this sort of government.

This government wants to have a society that is easy to hire and easy to fire. That is liberal philosophy, quite frankly—let the market rip, underline the safety net, go after penalty rates, find ways to displace workers in the labour market, undermine employment security, diminish the conditions of employment, and smash unions so that there is little collective bargaining happening in the labour market. That is pretty much the modus operandi of the Liberal Party. Given that the aspiration of Prime Minister Turnbull and this government is to have an easy-to-hire, easy-to-fire, low-wage society, we are concerned that this initiative, even if it is well-intended, could actually lead to that result. Therefore, I think the government should seriously contemplate the amendment moved by the member for Chifley. I will just go to some of those points.

The member for Chifley has made clear that the opposition is not declining to agree to the second reading of this bill, but we are concerned about a number of key areas. Firstly, we are concerned that the jobs will not be displaced by cheaper labour. I have mentioned the fact that with this scheme, by being able to replace existing workers, rather than it involving additional jobs and an increase in the number of jobs available for young people in the labour market, we are concerned that if you have these so-called interns coming into workplaces on income that is less than the award that applies to that workplace you are effectively undermining the existing arrangements in that workplace. It is the classic race to the bottom method used by reactionary right-wing governments, and we would be concerned that this initiative will actually apply in that way. So, quite rightly, the member for Chifley has said that we need to be given some assurance that that would not take place as a result of the efforts of this initiative.

Our further concern is that wages will not be undercut and some participants will be paid below award minimum wages. That is specifically referring to the failure to recognise awards in the workplace. Further, that participants' safety will not be compromised and that adequate insurance arrangements will be provided. Again, because this class of jobseekers will not be strictly identified as employees, they will not be covered by the workers compensation schemes that apply to actual workers. It would be very concerning to Labor if there were not sufficient support to provide some other means to ensure not only their safety benefits but, indeed, provide compensation if they are injured at work.

Given that this scheme is effectively going right across the labour market, dealing with private sector companies, we are concerned that there is a possibility that these young people will be in unsafe situations where they will be at risk of injury, or worse. The member for Chifley may have already mentioned that we recently saw the tragic death of a very young participant on a Work for the Dole scheme in Toowoomba. It was an absolute tragedy and I know everyone in this place has that view. We say that when it, in particular, comes to young people in workplaces who do not have a great deal of experience, and given that this can go across so many sectors of the labour market, we do really need to ensure that we go above and beyond in providing safety and that in the induction of young people into these workplaces there is sufficient training for them to understand the potential risks. I am not suggesting that that will not happen, but there is no clarity from the bill suggesting that it will happen. Labor is insisting that we get some undertaking from the government that the safety of these young people has been taken into consideration.

Too many deaths are occurring in workplaces in this country. Three weeks ago a German backpacker was on the 14th floor of a building site in Perth and fell to her death, tragically. That is just one of many examples that can happen if young people, or workers generally, are not given sufficient safety training. We need to make sure that happens.

Another concern is that participants will not be used to help businesses sidestep unfair dismissal protections. That goes to our concern that, increasingly, people feel so little security of work. We would be worried about the vulnerability of workers if employers were able to obviate their responsibilities and not provide sufficient protection for those participants.

We have talked about prioritising small and medium enterprises. We do not want to see wholesale use of this scheme by large employers just as a mechanism to displace workers who are being paid under an award. Any scheme that involves taxpayers' dollars to subsidise wages should be about adding to the labour market, not taxpayers subsidising under-award-wage jobs. That is not what this bill should be about. Yet, when you read the bill, there is no clarity—none on security of employment, none on safety and not sufficiently on insurance, if compensation is required when there is an injury. There are so many questions requiring answers from the government, which I think are very inappropriately determined through our amendment. Until we get some clarity we have not made our position fully known on this. We ask the government to take these issues very seriously.

Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. The Turnbull government's prepare, trial, hire program, or PaTH as it is known, is a program that is supposed to prepare young people for work by placing them in voluntary internships for between four and 12 weeks. This bill is designed in part to support the introduction of PaTH.

I am particularly interested in the issues surrounding getting young people to work. I represent the electorate of Brand where pockets of the community are struggling with youth unemployment figures that stand at a staggering 13.6 per cent. This is more than double the national unemployment rate average. This is despite the electorate being home to Western Australia's major industrial strip in Kwinana—home to big and small businesses, from Co-operative Bulk Handling, Alcoa and BP to smaller fabricators and contractors. Supporting this state and the nation during the construction phase of the mining boom, job seekers in WA and Brand are now having to look elsewhere, beyond the Kwinana strip, to find work now the mining industry has moved into its foreseeable production phase. The move into this phase was always foreseeable. There was no surprise with this movement of phases. It was plain to see for all. The construction boom in the mining industry of Western Australia could not last forever.

The government—I might say the state government of Western Australia as well as the federal government here—has had a long time to consider the impact of this economic change on communities in Brand, in Western Australia and across the whole country. This government has used its time to come up with, and endlessly repeat, a slogan to address the unemployment rate—'jobs and growth', they say. It seems to be a big useless loop. I am concerned that PaTH is a cobbled together program that will not provide realistic opportunities for young unemployed people. I am concerned that it will not address the lack of jobs available to young people and will instead fail young job seekers.

Let us have a look at what PaTH is. It is supposedly designed to prepare young people for work by providing job seekers aged 17 to 24 with pre-employment training and placement in voluntary internships over four to 12 weeks. Businesses will be paid $1,000 to take on an intern and then receive a wage subsidy of between $6½ thousand and $10,000 if they hire them at the conclusion of the internship. During that time interns may work 15 to 25 hours a week. In return, job seekers will receive payments of $200 per fortnight on top of their current income support payments while they are participating in the PaTH program. The program is being introduced at the same time the other government job programs, such as the Work for the Dole scheme, are hopelessly failing our young unemployed.

I see and hear regularly from my constituents who are worried about their children that are unable to find meaningful work and with little prospect of meaningful work in the near future. I hear concerns from young people themselves who want to work but have no job, and this is not from lack of trying. Of course, the reality is that when there are less jobs than there are job seekers people will remain unemployed. This is a sentiment that has been shared with me by people in the jobs service industry, who have expressed their frustrations at a lack of jobs for people to apply for.

The Kwinana strip has been a major source of jobs for people living in Rockingham and Kwinana—the two cities within Brand—for many decades. Recently, on a visit to a local job service provider in Kwinana, with the member for Chifley, I was told by these people working on the frontline trying to help people find work that the jobs that were once so plentiful on the strip, as it is known, have now dried up. The jobs for those people who want to work are just not there.

Youth unemployment in parts of Brand stands at more than double the national unemployment average, as I have mentioned before. I repeat it because the figures are astounding. What happened to the jobs and growth mantra espoused by the government during the election? Where are these jobs? Where is the investment needed to get people back into meaningful employment? The sad truth is that Australia's youth are counting the cost of the Turnbull government's failure to develop a real jobs plan for the future and a real sustainable jobs plan for our nation.

In Brand and across the country we are seeing a government that is not willing to invest in their future by investing in the productive infrastructure that can deliver real opportunities and benefits to the community. One glaring example of this failure in my electorate comes to mind as I consider this bill: the Kwinana outer harbour. I know members of this place will have heard me mention the Kwinana outer project often. It is one of those nation-changing and certainly electorate-changing—not to mention state-changing—infrastructure projects. Instead of progressing the construction of the Kwinana outer harbour project, the Turnbull government is pursuing a $2 billion investment in the Perth Freight Link, a road to a port which is fast approaching the day when it will reach full capacity and even then the road proposed does not even make it to the port. In fact, it stops about two kilometres south of the port. An alternative investment by the government, an investment in the Kwinana outer harbour project—a long-term investment in a long-term future—would instead unlock latent potential across existing industries and attract new industries into the area.

Support for the new outer harbour makes sense. It would help grow the local, state and national economies. It is estimated it would create 25,000 new jobs. That is a lot of employment opportunities for our young people. It would provide real paid jobs and training; not short-term internships off the back of a hastily put together program. The Kwinana outer harbour project would encourage innovation through the application of modern technology to port operations, and it puts people first by supporting a sustainable industrial base to underpin the flourishing communities in Brand. Such investment would create job opportunities that would give young people an employment future, and a long-term employment future. It would open up opportunities for new and developing industry to move into Kwinana to expand the large industrial estate that has been planned for there for many years. These new industries would be located next to a state-of-the-art export port.

Despite promising that it would tackle youth unemployment, the coalition has failed to deliver on the means and ends of actually doing so. According to the Department of Employment, youth unemployment nationally is at 12.8 per cent with nearly 300,000 unemployed young people between the ages of 15 and 24 unable to have productive work lives. On top of this, the department acknowledges there are another 170,000 people who have been unemployed for more than a year. We have a generation of young people who are disillusioned by the act of looking for jobs that simply are not there. It is a national disgrace.

Against the backdrop of this woeful performance, the Turnbull government has pulled together the PaTH program. I am concerned, as are many of my colleagues, that PaTH will not be a pathway to meaningful employment opportunities and will simply result in young people being exploited. We already know that the Work for the Dole program is not providing long-term solutions for young people. It is failing our young unemployed. In the case of Work for the Dole, even the government's own figures show nearly 90 per cent of its participants are not in full-time work three months after finishing the program. You would think that these results would cause a re-think on performance of this program, but, no, as we have heard from my colleague the member for Chifley, the response from the government was astounding. And I will repeat the response which was heard at last month's Senate estimates, 'The purpose of Work for the Dole is not necessarily to lead directly to a full-time job.'

It is no wonder that the failure of this program and the attitude towards young people trying to find work causes me to have concerns about this new plan proposed by the government. As you have heard from my colleagues who have spoken already on this bill, they and many others in the community are worried about whether the program represents a fair deal for Australia's young jobseekers. Under the PaTH program, we are concerned that young people will be forced to pay an even heavier price through the program's apparent flaws.

This bill is designed to provide support to participants' social security entitlements while in the program. It does this via two measures. Firstly, a provision will be inserted into the Social Security Act and the Veterans' Entitlements Act so that the $200 payment interns receive is not counted as income for social security or veterans' entitlements purposes. And, secondly, it amends the Social Security Act to allow young people to suspend their payments if they are indeed employed—against all odds. They can then restart them without re-applying if they lose their job through no fault of their own within 26 weeks.

Now, if taken in isolation the government will claim the measures in the bill are noncontroversial and should be accepted. However, a closer look shows us that the reality is very different and that our concerns are justified. We are concerned at what the future might hold for young people who are at a most important stage in life as they look to enter the workforce and as they look to prepare for the rest of their lives. The reality is that the measures proposed by the government form part of a broader new program design which could see young jobseekers exploited. I agree with the proposition that there is dignity in work, but there is not much dignity if you are the victim of exploitation. The measures could undermine workforce standards, which would have an even broader impact on the wider community and those already in employment.

Perhaps most alarming is the fact that, unlike with Work for the Dole, for the first time participants would be placed in the private sector and would be paid below award wages. The Work for the Dole program is not-for-profit- and government-organisation based. PaTH places young people into businesses. This means private businesses will be given access to thousands of young Australians who will work for the benefit of business for less than the minimum wage. The implications of this are obviously concerning and again, impacts on more people than those participating in the PaTH program itself. PaTH has the potential to be used to displace jobs with cheap labour. Families do not want to see their children used in this way. Young people do not want to be used in this way and workers do not want to be usurped out of their jobs by a cheaper and potentially untrained labour source.

In this country we have a minimum wage overseen by the Fair Work Commission. This is something to be proud of. However, with PaTH there are very real concerns raised that participants may be entering a program where they are 'working' for below minimum award wages. The program could very well see young Australians doing the same job as others, except being paid less than the minimum wage. It is a dangerous path to take and, as the member for Burt said, it is a dangerous race to the bottom.

The reality is that we are experiencing a time in this country where wages growth is at the lowest rate on record. My colleagues' concern, and my concern, is that PaTH could be used to undermine wages across industries, and this concern is very real. Not only is it worrying to young people who potentially will be paid below award wages, and not only is it worrying to their families and loved ones who will potentially watch them work for less than they deserve and for less than an award wage, but it will also be worrying to workers and employees who could see underpaid PaTH interns doing their work and taking their jobs. In such cases there would be two victims: the underpaid intern and the person who, sadly, loses their job to them. Large numbers of interns could completely remove the need for existing employees to work at certain times in certain sectors, including hospitality and tourism. Who is to say that large numbers of PaTH participants would not be used over weekends, removing the need for regular employees at those times and also removing the need to pay penalty rates for those employees?

This is counterproductive, and could potentially add to the problem of underemployment in the community. Underemployment, as we all know, is a massive concern, with people struggling to find enough work to pay the bills and to keep their heads above water. It is a time where they are seeking more hours and greater employment. There are 1.1 million Australians wanting more work, but unable to find it, and underemployment in the August quarter was at 8.7 per cent, the highest level since this data began in 1978. In these circumstances it would be irresponsible to support a program that has the very real potential of adding to this problem and to people's hardships.

Another concern is that despite repeated questioning there are few assurances that interns will be covered by appropriate workers compensation schemes should there be an accident. That is because PaTH participants will be considered as 'volunteers', not as employees. This is despite the fact they will be doing jobs and will get paid, albeit a below award amount. This is farcical and it is a clear demonstration of exploitation. It is damaging, because in some jurisdictions this could affect the way workers compensation systems would treat participants in the event of an accident—which may well be a life-changing accident.

There are no specifics about the program: there is no detail on areas where jobseekers will acquire skills. The program has been touted as a means to prepare young people for work during these times of high youth unemployment, but there is very little in the way of detail in the way it will be implemented. In fact, while the program was announced in May and is scheduled to start next April the government cannot even tell us what an 'intern' is. In Senate estimates back in May the clearest outline of training and skills outcomes Minister Cash offered us was, 'We will give you the skills that employers tell us you just do not have.'

The government has also had trouble explaining what jobseekers will be doing in the internship phase of the program—whether they would be working or just observing. To say that this is a vague outcome for participants would be an understatement. It leaves them with little scope to plan, to achieve or to develop in their work experiences. I and my colleagues are also concerned that large numbers of participants could be used within companies at any given time, with little sanction applied to employers that might 'churn' through participants as their engagement concludes. We do not know if this will happen.

The lack of information around this program and the problems not only for participants but for the wider community mean we cannot agree to this legislation at the moment. The government needs to show how these issues will be fixed and addressed. We call—Labor is calling—for this legislation to be considered by a Senate inquiry. We would be doing a disservice to young jobseekers if we just agreed to PaTH and to this legislation without amendment. We would be doing a disservice to those workers who potentially would have their jobs undermined by this program.

The government's failure to invest in jobs and in infrastructure that will provide jobs, cannot be hidden behind a poorly-put-together program such as the PaTH program. The government must address the concerns raised against this hastily-put-together internship program, and Labor demands a better deal than this for young jobseekers.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the amendment by the member for Chifley and to discuss this program that has been put forward by the government in the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. It seems to me that this is a creative concoction. They have come up with the word 'PaTH' for a path, supposedly, to somewhere, and then they have thought, 'Prepare, Trial, Hire'. It is a clever little idea. There is only one problem: we have all seen The Pursuit of Happyness. We saw the film. We saw Will Smith being homeless while he worked for nothing with his young child with him. We have seen the film. We know that the glorified internship is a very, very sexy word that people use for unpaid work, unless there is a quid pro quo in terms of some kind of an accreditation.

An internship in this country is not tightly defined. We do, however, use the word to describe what RMIT students might do as part of their practical placement for which they are given accreditation in their postgrad study. ANU runs similar programs. There is a quid pro quo here. The young person attends a workplace in a learning environment to do a work placement. We even use that language of 'work placement' in high school with VET programs. There is always a quid pro quo.

The problem with this plan is that it is called an internship, but there is no quid pro quo. The notion here is that we are just going to roll out a policy so that we can pay kids $100 a week on top of what they get for Newstart and they will actually be working. Or are they working? This is the least thought-out piece of legislation from those opposite to come into this place in 3½ years, and it is the worst. Worse than that, it is packaged like it is some kind of panacea for youth unemployment. There is no panacea for youth unemployment. There is no quick fix and there is no easy fix. We have tried these things before and they have been dropped. Why? Because they were not successful.

As a young person, when I first left school at 16 I was part of a program that came out of what we now call Centrelink, which used to be something very different. We were put into positions that were three-month trials where the government subsidised the employer to put those young people into those jobs. I was in a job for 12 months and I watched four other young people come and go in three-month blocks and get no ongoing employment. In our era, I talked to lots of young people who were just going from three-month position to three-month position to three-month position. What we did was subsidise business. What we did not do was find long-term jobs for young people.

This is just another iteration of that, although this time it is dressed up as if it is more important. This is not about putting someone into a low-paid entry-level job where they may not even require a school finishing certificate or year 12 qualification. This is being dressed up like it is some kind of postgrad experience. It is not. This is about exploiting young people and finding yet another way to subsidise business. If they cannot get their $50 billion tax cuts through, I suppose this was the next best thing. They are going to subsidise business and wrap it up like it is going to address youth unemployment. It is not.

As we saw in The Pursuit of Happyness, the American version of an internship is unpaid postgrad work. That movie blew apart any notion that internships are necessarily a way to get to work. Mr Deputy Speaker, if you remember Will Smith in that movie—I certainly do—you will remember him sleeping in a public toilet with his son. If you remember, that model that the movie exposed was where American companies—I think it was a law firm or an accountancy firm—would put on 10 interns who would do unpaid work and would ultimately vie for one paid position. It was not funny. The movie was incredibly sad, and so is this proposal which came down on budget night. The minister responsible, when asked, 'Is this about new jobs or existing jobs?' said, 'It's about existing jobs.' It is about existing jobs, so it is about reducing the wages of young people as they enter employment—well, quasi-employment or possible employment. Perhaps one in 1,000 will get a job out of this program. I have found this entire idea to be completely and utterly fanciful. It is absolutely fanciful.

There are so many other questions that come from it. Will they get a payslip? It is illegal in this country not to give a worker a payslip. Where in the provisions in here does it explain exactly what role these kids are going to play in these jobs? Are they going to be paid by the hour? Is that the plan for this loose $100 on top of their Newstart? Is the $100 if you show up or is it $100 if you work 15 hours? Does anyone want to quickly do the maths on how much an hour this worker is going to cost the company? It is not like we pay young people an extraordinary amount now.

There are real risks in this. As someone who spent her life working with young people, I know what those risks are. As someone who spent her life with young people who went and got that part-time job after school, we applaud them and we love it. At 14 and nine months in Victoria, off they go out the door to get that part-time job. But when they are doing year 12 and they turn 18, halfway through the year they come to see you, heartbroken because they are no longer in that part-time job. They are too old and they cost too much on an 18-year-old's salary, so they have been replaced by a year 9 student. This will be open to absolute exploitation and abuse, and this government should be ashamed to put it forward as a serious idea.

This government wants to address youth unemployment. If they actually want to do something serious for the 260,000 young people in this country that are currently looking for work then perhaps they need to address the way we build infrastructure. Perhaps we could take the advice of the economists around the country and get started on some of those things.

I note, too, today that we are talking about a situation where the ABCC bill, which is being put to the Senate, actively discourages large companies from putting on apprentices. So, we will discourage apprenticeships and we will introduce internships—vaguely wrapped internships—in this path-to-nowhere program. Let's look at the notion of internships in this country. We have people doing internships and, as I said, the general view of those internships is that they are part of some kind of university qualification as a workplace placement and, in that sense, they are not necessarily a bad thing. But this legislation is a case of extrapolating from what the community perceives to be a good thing: you are going to a university that is going to give you not just an academic training but also the practical work component that is going to help you become more career ready. Note: we are talking about internships in this country that are generally about building a career; it is an entry level into a career. However, we have now got this down to youth unemployment—youths of 17 to 24 years of age. I do not think they are going to build a career from working for 12 weeks for what is ostensibly $100 a week, on top of the government's Newstart allowance. So it is a subsidy for business. It is not about youth unemployment and it is not about preparing kids for work.

While I am here, I cannot ignore this notion—and I hear it in this place all the time—of how young people need to be in a program to develop soft work skills. What on earth are soft work skills? Tying your tie? Getting out of bed on time? As someone who has raised three sons, I have watched them all go out to work at very early hours of the morning at young ages. Every young person has to go through that process. We do not spit them out of school, put them in a truck, take them to a job site and say, 'They're ready.' Part of that development is about the relationship between the employer and the young person. When young people go through those first months of getting up and getting ready for work they sometimes stumble. It takes them a little while sometimes to figure out that they actually need to go to bed before 10 pm if they have to be up at 5.30 am. You cannot teach that as part of a program on soft skills. Our employers are not screaming out for young people to have soft skills. Our employers are asking for students who have the skills to work in a collaborative team. They are asking for literacy and numeracy. Most employers know that the soft skills of being polite to people and saying good morning when you get to work will have been learnt at home and that most of those things are about work culture. Work will teach them. They will develop those skills when they are at work.

So we have this notion that we are going to subsidise companies to teach soft skills in an internship that is about entry level work for young people. Let's face it, if this legislation comes into being then this internship is going to be about supermarkets. This is going to be about fast food outlets. This is going to be about 7-Eleven not having to break the law anymore, because it will be legal for them to do what they have already been doing. In fact, they will be further subsidised to do exactly what they have been doing, and they will be able to do it without having breached a visa regulation in the process because they will be doing it to young Australian people. This is a road to nowhere. It is a path to nowhere. In fact, it is nowhere for a young person. We know where this path will lead to in terms of work conditions and wages in this country. It will drive down wages. It will drive down conditions. They are my other questions: does this young person get a pay slip? Is this young person going to be on work experience, or are they considered to be an employee? Are they going to be covered by WorkCover? Are they going to be covered by the Fair Work Act? Will they have to provide their own equipment? Will they be expected to show up with hard shoes on on the first day of job? Will they have to pay for their uniform?

This legislation is an absolute thought-bubble from this government. They have not given any consideration to how they might tackle youth unemployment, except to find a way to drive down young people's wages and to drive down work conditions in this country. My last big question is: does the bill specify when these hours of work will occur? Will they be from 8 pm until three in the morning for a job of picking up glasses at a nightclub? Is that the job young people are going to be doing for their Newstart allowance, plus $100? Are there going to be limits on how far from home they can be asked to travel before they are cut off Newstart, because they did not attend the nonworkplace for the noninternship to get their nontraining?

This government should come into this place and treat it with some respect. They should approach the creation of legislation that is supposedly about getting young people into work seriously. If they cannot approach it seriously then they should sit down and watch some American films, because I am sure that if they had seen The Pursuit of Happyness this bill would never have come into this chamber. Will Smith did a terrific job in that film, showing us all what Americanisation looks like. If we want to have internships in this country then can we have it so that there is a clear advantage for young people to be engaged in them and it not be an opportunity for potential exploitation?

I am going to finish with a quote from Clara Ivy Baird—a good friend of mine. She has worked in this building and now works for Interns Australia. She says:

There are countless interns who have gained real life benefits from their internships. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is also true: desperate to pick up work, too many young Australians are being lured in by an 'internship', and then used to pick up dry cleaning, make coffee and fill out data entry, often without being paid at all.

That is the real experience of a young person who is dealing with other young people. The people she is mostly talking about have a university degree. They are not 17-year-olds straight out of school, ripe for exploitation by this government and its cronies.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. Can I say up-front, I commend the member for Lalor on her contribution. She is always worth listening to, and she certainly seemed to cover the perils of this legislation very well.

In another life, before I was in parliament, I had a couple of jobs that were less well remunerated than being a politician. I started off my time at high school spending every summer cotton chipping in the cotton fields around St George and then spent time, when I was at teachers college, working in an abattoir and at Hungry Jack's before moving into better paid jobs. I do say, Member for Lalor, that elements of my time as an articled clerk were not unlike what you described, except they did pay me as an articled clerk. I think 'paid slavery' would be the official description.

In 2016, we have heard an awful lot about jobs—all that talk of jobs and growth. I think I will need to get a therapist at some stage to get 'jobs and growth' out of my head. The coalition was all about the jobs and growth that they would be creating. But, sadly, the Turnbull government has failed at the very task that they set themselves—to create jobs and to create growth. They set the standard, and they failed. They have not met their own fundamental KPI which was—as written on the side of buses, basically—that they would deliver jobs and deliver growth.

Employment conditions have deteriorated so much that they are now, arguably, worse than at any time since the peak of the global financial crisis. I remind you of that, Deputy Speaker Broadbent, because the global financial crisis was the worst set of economic conditions since the Depression. But that is what we are looking at now. The problem is not just the unemployed; there is actually a huge problem in Australia of underemployment. The figure for underemployment for the August quarter was 8.7 per cent. Youth unemployment is at 12.8 per cent. There are more than 270,000 unemployed youth between 15 and 24 years of age. A recent report from Anglicare stated that there is only one job advertised for every six low-skilled jobseekers in Australia. The report said that in May this year alone nearly 140,000 people competed for roughly 22,000 entry-level jobs advertised across Australia.

This is a huge problem, and one that will not be solved by the government's PaTH program that is before the chamber. This bill is designed to support the government's prepare, trial, hire program—or PaTH. It provides that payments made to interns under the PaTH program will be excluded from the income test for social security payments, and thus not affect recipients' payments and entitlements. It allows for the suspension for up to 26 weeks of a person's social security payment, where they are employed by a business that is eligible to receive a youth bonus wage subsidy in relation to them under the PaTH program.

The problem lies not so much with the provisions in this bill as with the PaTH program itself, as detailed by the member for Lalor. The PaTH program is, appropriately, set to commence on 1 April 2017—because, surely, this is an April Fools Day joke on the young people of Australia. The program claims to provide job seekers aged 17 to 24 with work experience to maximise their prospects of subsequently gaining employment. These are, perhaps, noble intentions. But, although the objectives of the program might have some merit, there are huge problems with the architecture of the scheme. Australia's young unemployed are a very vulnerable group open to exploitation, and good government's job is to ensure that they are not being unfairly treated.

Existing programs, such as the Work for the Dole scheme, do have problems, and you could argue that they are failing. On the government's own figures, nearly 90 per cent of participants in the Work for the Dole scheme are not in full-time work three months after completing the program. We do not want to see our young unemployed given false hope and working for under award wages in a scheme that is destined to fail them.

This scheme, unlike the Work for the Dole scheme, will place young unemployed people in the private sector. Private sector employers will be paid $1,000 as an up-front payment for each jobseeker that they take on through the PaTH scheme. There are concerns that employers could take on large numbers of PaTH participants at any one time. Employers could churn through the participants without ever offering a job to any of them—repeatedly saying, 'This person was unsuitable.' This could result in employers not having to employ workers in particular areas at certain times. For example, an employer in the hospitality industry could use PaTH participants at a time when they would otherwise have to pay their staff penalty rates.

There is a real concern that the PaTH program will result in jobs being replaced with cheaper labour because of this program. Participants will be 'working' for below minimum award wages. A PaTH participant will receive their Newstart payment plus the $200 incentive payment while they are working for an employer in the program. If the participant is working for 25 hours a week, their hourly rate will be only $14.50. To put that in context, the national minimum wage is $17.70 an hour.

The 7-Eleven wage scandal is fresh in our minds—we saw that footage. Here in Australia in 2016 people are, effectively, paying their employer for the job that they have. I have not seen a lot of condemnation about that come from those opposite. In light of the 7-Eleven scandal and some of the concerns in the fruit picking area, why should we consider sanctioning the underpayment of our unemployed youth? That problem with the scheme would be very easy to fix. The government would just need to set the bonus payment and the hours to be worked at a rate that equates with the national minimum wage. The fact that the government has not fixed this just shows where their priorities lie—despite their protestations about unions, their priority is never to uphold workers' rights. Wages growth, sadly, is at its lowest on record. The PaTH program could further undermine wages across a variety of industries.

A further, very basic, problem with the scheme lies in the government's failure to actually define what they consider an 'intern' will be under the scheme. It is six months since the scheme was announced, and we still have no definition. Can an intern be a waiter, for instance? Can an intern be a shop assistant or a retail assistant? Is there any threshold necessary for the intern to learn new skills? We just do not know. Most people consider interns to be learning something additional to that which they learn in educational institutions. Traditional roles as interns have been found in publishing houses, law firms and other professional services, where you will enhance what is delivered by academics. But it does not seem that the government's definition of an intern will marry with my traditional view of an intern that we are perhaps more familiar with. I should say up-front that I do not have a problem with industries having interns—it is this program that I have significant concerns about.

There is another question that the government has not addressed yet—whether the participants in this scheme will be covered by appropriate workers compensation schemes in the event of an accident while they are 'working'. The participants will actually be considered volunteers in the workplace and not employees. This can affect how they will be treated by workers compensation schemes in the event of an accident. So there are many problems that have not been addressed in this scheme, which was way too hurriedly announced by a desperate coalition in their May budget.

The Prime Minister promised us the end of three-word slogans—but what did we see throughout the election campaign? Jobs and growth. I think I have even heard it this week. Sadly, the Prime Minister has not delivered—on his watch youth unemployment has climbed to nearly 13 per cent, double the national average. The Turnbull government talks the talk but does not walk the walk when it comes to job creation. Representing a marginal seat, I should point out that the Prime Minister decided to start his election campaign in my electorate, in Moreton. It is a marginal seat, so I can understand that. He kicked that off at the Brisbane markets, probably knowing that employment is always an important issue in the electorate of Moreton. In the lead-up to the 2013 election the Liberal-National Party candidate, Malcolm Cole—a good bloke—made a commitment that the coalition would stage a Moreton jobs summit within 100 days of the election. The Abbott government was elected, so the deadline for the coalition government to hold this employment summit, important for Moreton, was Monday 16 December 2013. But nothing occurred—not a thing. On 27 September 2013 I wrote to the relevant minister, Senator the Hon. Eric Abetz, a Tasmanian representative, regarding the implementation of the promised summit but to date this coalition 2013 election commitment has not been honoured.

This year we had a new election and a new parliament, the Prime Minister was elected by the people of Australia—with a majority of one—so I wrote to Prime Minister Turnbull after the election asking for the commitments made by the LNP during the 2016 election campaign to be honoured and I again asked that the commitment made during the 2013 campaign to hold a Moreton jobs summit also be honoured. You would think, with all the rhetoric coming from this government on jobs and growth, that the Prime Minister would be a man of his word, that he would honour their commitment. Sadly, to this day there is still no jobs summit on the horizon for Moreton— in fact, I have not even had a response from the Prime Minister to my letter to him. I call out the coalition government and ask that they honour their commitment—it is so important for the unemployed people in Moreton.

In contrast, the Labor Party has always had as its first priority the creation of jobs, and especially preparing youth for jobs. The member for Lalor and I in our previous lives were educators. We know how the important role education plays in giving people opportunities. In fact, Labor announced as a 2007 election commitment the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program. The Labor government's 2008-09 budget subsequently provided $2.5 billion over 10 years to implement that program. Four rounds of phase 1 of the program were completed under the Labor government. Sadly, the coalition government announced in 2013 that the funding for the trade training centres would cease following round five of phase 1, and the projects would thereafter be known as trade skills centres. The objectives of the Labor program included addressing skills shortages in traditional trades and other eligible occupations by improving student access to trade training facilities that meet industry standards and improving the quality of schooling offered to secondary students undertaking trade related pathways. As this is the graduation season, we know how many students end up working through a variety of courses. People end up at university through a variety of courses, including those trade training courses. The program was also assisting young people to make a successful transition from school to work or further education or training.

This program is reaping benefits for the youth in my electorate of Moreton. I recently attended the opening of the trade skills centre at the Runcorn State High School with the member for McPherson in her ministerial portfolio. Runcorn State High will now be offering their students the incredible benefits of having trade training facilities on site at their school. This facility will make an enormous difference to the future of these students. There will be two more trade skills centres opening in the future at nearby schools. The principals of those schools, Terry Heath from Yeronga State High, also in my electorate, and Linda Galloway of the Balmoral State High, in Griffith, were there to witness the opening of the Runcorn centre.

At the opening, I met Michael, who is a grade 10 student at Runcorn State High. He was proud to show me around the facilities. He said he was looking forward to the workshops starting so that he could build a Formula One car—one of the things they do. The Formula High School Program is one of the programs to be offered at the Runcorn State High School. It will teach students engineering skills and practices while building a race car—not quite the same as making a tea cosy for my mum when I was in shop. But this is not just fun; it obviously prepares them for work. Students who undertake the Formula High School Program will be completing a certificate II in Engineering Pathways, an engineering qualification that will equip them to enter a range of occupations. The student participants will learn practical, general, work-ready knowledge and teambuilding skills—real preparation for jobs where students learn a skill that is useful for employers, who will then give them a real job.

I fear that this PaTH scheme is not going to result in any more young people obtaining full-time work, but it may put the young unemployed, who are already vulnerable, in situations where they will be exploited. Young people deserve better than to be used and abused by an unscrupulous employer wanting cheap labour. That is my fear. Labor is calling for this legislation and the PaTH program itself to be considered by a Senate inquiry to ensure that these concerns are addressed. (Time expired)

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

I was not actually going to speak on this bill, but I heard the member for Lalor talking about the movie The Pursuit of Happyness, saying how this is an example of why intern programs are not very good. The member for Lalor may not be aware, but the movie The Pursuit of Happynesswas based on a true story of an American gentleman called Chris Gardner. He left jail with no experience, no college education, no connections and obtained—

Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order. The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.