Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014. This bill purports to be a solution to climate change and to provide work for unemployed youth. On both counts the coalition's Green Army bill is ill-conceived and lacks vision. The bill does not provide the foundations to seriously combat global warming or youth unemployment. It is very unlikely to deliver genuine, lasting environmental outcomes, and it fails to support young people in finding meaningful work. Where is the vision in a program designed to temporarily deflect from the serious issue of abating climate change and slowing the effects of climate change? The Green Army bill appears to be little more than a clean-up program devised to keep youth off unemployment benefits for a brief period of time, with no thought to what happens to them afterwards. It is very likely to entrench young people in unemployment and poverty while diverting energy and resources away from more effective environmental programs. The bill devalues the work of those who have in fact been trained for and pursued careers in environmental protection and, due to the voluntary nature of the individual training component, offers no genuine pathways into ongoing employment for the participants of the program. For those who participate, there is no guarantee that this will be any more effective or less degrading than the previous incarnations of this program, such as Green Corps or Work for the Dole.

This program is also seriously compromised by the coalition government's cutting of funds to natural resource management and Landcare. The most the Green Army bill can hope to achieve is a temporary improvement while failing to effectively abate climate change or create a career for its participants. For all these reasons, the Greens do not support this bill. I am particularly disturbed by the government's approach to land management and climate abatement programs. The Green Army Program funding allocation is not all new money, and it should not be counted as new money when in part it replaces funds that were previously available to natural resource management groups and Landcare groups to undertake high-quality conservation work. In Senate estimates the Department of Agriculture confirmed that there was no money left in the Landcare bucket for new Landcare grant programs between now and 2018. The net effect of this program will be to transfer funding from skilled natural resource management workers and volunteers with a long-term focus to unskilled work-for-the-dole style volunteers and short-term projects. This is a devastating blow for local Landcare groups around the country, and it is an insult to spend $525 million on the Green Army while destroying the Landcare program which has been delivering environmental outcomes for over three decades.

It is now becoming extremely clear that the carbon abatement scheme will be focused on tree planting—and not planting native trees that will last 100 years and are based on biodiversity principles but rather moving towards 25-year plantings in plantations. Maybe we will be going back to the old MIS days. By passing this bill, we are effectively just creating a labour force to plant trees in the landscape. We need to be doing better than that. We have a much more mature landscape management process in this country than that.

Apart from our broader concerns that this bill is just a smokescreen to cover up lack of action on climate change, we also have very specific concerns about the nature of this program and the way it will operate. While it may seem an improvement on its previous incarnations of Work for the Dole and Green Corps by introducing the option for flexible accredited training options, it still fails to guarantee appropriate training and support to the participants and applicants. Training is in fact an optional extra to be negotiated with each individual rather than a core feature of the program—which you would think it would have been, given all the government's rhetoric. This has the potential to be flexible and responsive to the individual needs of the program participant, if in fact it is done properly. However, as the National Union of Students noted in their submission:

We are concerned that young people looking for work will be in an unequal bargaining position when trying to negotiate training outcomes with providers.

It may be extremely difficult for young people who have been disengaged from learning and from the work force to be able to know in advance what their training needs might be and what will lead to a positive personal outcome when they first enter this program. This, coupled with the fact that there is no incentive within the program funding for program coordinators to introduce another level of complexity to their program by encouraging participants to develop a genuinely tailored training program for delivering specific outcomes, means it is unlikely that they will be motivated to negotiate these outcomes.

Nor are there periodic reviews of the individual participation agreements which could provide an opportunity for participants to seek additional training. These have not been built into the process. Rather than offering training as an optional extra, service providers and team supervisors should be contractually obligated to ensure that participants are fully informed of their training options and actively engaged, and they should be required to be provide training and to participate in training processes.

We are extremely concerned that participants in the Green Army Program will not have access to an appropriate number of hours or basic employment protections that other trainees are entitled to. Suspending access to income support payments is extremely problematic if the program does not at least meet the income provided through the social security payment. Because there is no guarantee of minimum hours, it is possible for individuals under the program to be worse-off than if they were on Youth Allowance. As the Australia Institute submission points out:

The program plans to pay people for up to 30 hours a week for up to 26 weeks but we do not know if the hours are to be regular nor how they are to be agreed between the ‘employer’ and participant. It would be a cruel outcome if participants were motivated to join but found they were earning less than they had been on Newstart because the hours were not there. Likewise someone who is sick or has other sudden family caring responsibilities may suffer a drop in income. It is not clear that there are leave arrangements that would be available to ordinary workers.

Debate interrupted.