Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition (Social and Community Affairs)) Share this | Hansard source

The next time you pass someone in that street who is selling the Big Issue, look seriously at how this person represents a new model of small business. At first glance he or she might look like another homeless person haranguing a busy public, but nothing could be further from the truth. He or she is the face of many new social enterprises in Australia. Perhaps you do not know that the Big Issue is a fortnightly magazine packed with current affairs, entertainment, photography, comment and mischief. It is sold on the streets of towns and cities throughout Australia by people experiencing homelessness or long-term unemployment. It helps people help themselves. As vendors they are allocated their sales territories and keep half of the $4 cover price of every magazine they sell.

The Big Issue does not push a party-political or a religious line. It is just an independent magazine committed to all forms of social justice. As an independent national magazine it publishes quality articles and images on a range of subjects, including arts and entertainment, current affairs, street culture and lifestyle. Each fortnight the magazine tackles the tough issues while keeping a sense of humour. So the Big Issue is a hand up, not a handout. If you are one of the people who were fortunate enough to watch the series on the ABC recently about the Choir of Hard Knocks you will know that one of the people who featured strongly in that program is a vendor of the Big Issue.

In Australia more than 3,000 vendors have joined the Big Issue family and sold the magazine as a way of getting back on their feet and gaining confidence. By selling the Big Issue, people who are experiencing homelessness, unemployment or serious disadvantage give themselves a break and hopefully start to improve their circumstances. The Big Issue is affiliated with 55 papers in 28 different countries. Every member of the International Network of Street Papers is committing to supporting the homeless and the unemployed and producing a high-quality publication that raises awareness about social issues.

In Australia the Big Issue was launched in Melbourne in June 1996 as an independent monthly magazine. It soon went fortnightly and is now being sold and distributed across Australia and right into regional Victoria. The Body Shop and Australia Post are key sponsors in Australia, and there are many other smaller sponsors and individual supporters and advocates who back the organisation. The Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick, who died this week, was one of the first to mix profits with social responsibility. She was a long-term supporter of the Big Issue in the UK, as well as several other social enterprises that promote fair trade and environmental sustainability.

TheBig Issue in Australia also runs programs that help people to get back on their feet—particularly, as I said, people who are experiencing homelessness and long-term unemployment. While the key project is the magazine, there are also various support programs available to vendors, including youth projects, life skills training, and the Street Socceroos team, who first represented Australia at the 2005 Homeless World Cup in Edinburgh and recently won the bid to host the 2008 competition in Melbourne. We will be seeing the Homeless World Cup in May 2008. It should be fantastic. As the vendors always say, when they get the chance: the magazine is a good read and a good deed. So I hope that everyone in this chamber, next time they see a vendor on the street corner, will take the time to stop and buy the magazine.

TheBig Issue is what is called a ‘social firm’. The social firm model originated in Italy in the 1960s and is now quite widespread throughout Europe and the UK. A social firm is a not-for-profit enterprise whose purpose is to create employment for people with a disability. Modifications that are required for employees in need of support are built into the design of the workplace. A social firm has a supportive work environment and up to half of its employees have a disability. Employment is based on the premise that every worker is paid the award rate or a productivity based rate. It provides the same work opportunities to the disadvantaged and the non-disadvantaged employees. It provides all the employees with the same employment rights and obligations.

Recently I was in Scotland to investigate some of these new enterprises that are particularly committed to improving the quality of life as well as the social and economic integration of people living with a psychiatric disability. I was really amazed. I found a wide range of social ventures, including a guest house being run by a group of people with schizophrenia—that was an interesting experience—environmental waste management businesses, landscaping, intensive hothouses for vegetables, community gardens, timber recycling from demolition sites, packaging, mail distribution, hospitality and catering, natural products, local newsletter production and even theatre groups.

It was quite uplifting for me to see the way in which these ventures are structured to provide support for their employees who are living with mental illness. Flexible work arrangements, mentoring and support all feature in these workplaces. I saw men and women, young and old, who were feeling useful and valued for the first time in a long time. It was transforming their lives and allowing them to feel that they were genuinely working rather than just doing busy work or occupational therapy. Within the fields of psychosocial rehabilitation movements, employment emerges as a key area for ensuring that these people are able to remain in the community as active citizens and not merely the receivers of palliative care, tinged with rejection and exclusion. They often feel they are written off as receivers of palliative care; they believe that they are getting palliative care. The multiple functions that productive activity and employment are able to play in the lives of these individuals and the accumulated evidence concerning their capacity to improve the personal and social functionality, autonomy and quality of life of many of these individuals make employment a basic objective of rehabilitation programs.

But, at the same time, the role assumed by employment in our societies as a basis for true citizenship—and we define ourselves as employed or unemployed—in providing financial independence and social recognition, as well as the particular difficulties experienced by the majority of people who have severe mental disorders, is reflected by high rates of unemployment. That makes this group a collective, which, in societies aiming to base themselves on welfare state models must be the focus of very specific employment programs and policies. This is really important for policy formulation in Australia, because we have not been doing that very well. We need to be aware of the international considerations of these issues and models of care that are being developed across the world to improve the employment of individuals with severe mental illness. Here in Australia we have the emergence of social firms. There are a few. The Victorian based Social Firms Australia and its partners are committed to developing a social firms sector in Australia. I will talk again about Social Firms Australia and their achievements. But one of the most difficult issues in trying to build a social firms sector here in this country is the convoluted arrangements that we have around tax regulation and the Charities Act, which is based on that old charity welfare service model. In Goulburn, for example, the Phoenix Foundation runs the Goulburn Brewery. They make a great stout that is the envy of many commercial breweries.

In Melbourne we see Cleanable, which is an enterprise established by Westgate Community Initiatives Group. It is a commercial cleaning service. There is also Project 174, a design business specialising in glass and marble mosaics and murals. We should be able to do a lot better in this regard. Not long ago, the Parliamentary Friends of Schizophrenia had a speaker and a presentation about the centrality of work, the value of recognising the productive capacity of people with mental illness, the importance of this and about how the deficit and welfare model is currently the norm in Australia. So let us adopt a new approach for this particularly difficult group of our workforce. It is long overdue. We need to consider how we can ensure that these people are able to engage more broadly in our communities.