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

I rise today to talk about two celebratory events this week. One is Op Shop Week and the other is to do with hearing. I will address both of those today.

This week, from 24 August to 31 August, is Op Shop Week. The aim of Op Shop Week this year is to boost donations to charity op shops. More and more Australians are turning to charity op shops to buy clothes, and good quality donations are always in demand, but never more so. I would encourage all my parliamentary colleagues and the Australian community to donate good quality clothes and items they no longer use.

The outfit I am wearing today is my op shop outfit. I purchased it on the weekend from one of our top-quality op shops in Perth. In Perth, also, we in fact make a whole month for op shops. We have re-styled 2014 and in fact the whole month is addressed to op shops. You are supposed to buy and dress in a different theme every day. Today's theme is fringe, but unfortunately I could not find a fringe outfit to wear.

Op shops have been an important part of the Australian community for a long time. I remember my mother saying during that school holidays that we were going 'opportunity shopping'. We would go down to the local op shops and have a great time. Just around the corner from where my sister lived there was a white store she used to visit to dress her three children.

Australians donate two billion items a year to op shops. There are more than 3,000 op shops across Australia and more than 70,000 Australians volunteer their time to support charity op shops. Some people shop in op shops because they know there are good bargains there. Others shop there for sustainability reasons and some shop there because they have no choice other than to buy clothes and other necessities in op shops.

This year op shop week comes as the need for them and the importance of the work they do is thrown even further into the spotlight because of the impact the budget may have on the most disadvantaged in our community. Charities and op shops are going to be relied upon more than ever if those budget measures are passed by this place. The budget makes great holes in the safety net for the most disadvantaged Australians. Government has been waging an ideological war—I can find no other term for it—against the most disadvantaged.

So it is even more important that we consider the most disadvantaged in our country. It is very important that we make sure we support organisations that provide support for the most disadvantaged and that we remember that charities also provide very important emergency relief. That is why we need to be conscious of giving supports to op shops. Please support op shops every week of the year but particularly focus on them during op shop week.

As we look at the unemployment figures we see that a number of people are going to be adversely impacted by the government's budget. Last week when we were looking at the figures in the Community Affairs Committee's inquiry into the social security bills we saw that in that week there were nearly 150,000 job vacancies advertised. But, looking at the number of people on Newstart, youth allowance and DSP, who the government are more and more going to be pushing onto Newstart, there were 1.5 million people applying for just over 150,000 jobs. Clearly, people are going to be in very difficult circumstances. I think that the community is outraged at the way the most disadvantaged in our country are being treated and they are expressing that to the government.

This week is also Hearing Awareness Week. The theme is, 'How Loud is Too Loud?' I attended a breakfast this morning that the Hearing Care Industry Association has every year in this place to focus attention on those with hearing loss and hearing impairment. Already, one in six Australians is affected by hearing loss. As our population ages, we are anticipating that there will be an even greater proportion of Australians affected by hearing loss or hearing impairment. In fact, it is projected to increase to one in four Australians by 2050. Hearing loss is one of the most commonly reported long-term conditions in the Australian population: 13.7 per cent of males and 7.4 per cent of females reported hearing loss in the last National Health Survey.

Hearing loss costs Australia $11.75 billion annually in lost productivity and other impacts. Clearly, this is a very, very important issue. Only one in four people who could benefit from a hearing aid have one. There is an average of seven years between a person needing help with hearing and actually seeking help. Hearing impaired adults are often unable to afford hearing health services. This can seriously impact on their lives and seriously disadvantage them in their life outcomes. Their ability to participate in training, education and employment can be limited and their family and social life can be very severely disrupted. This places them at a higher risk of developing health and interpersonal issues arising from communication difficulties and social isolation. Those impacts obviously then affect their life outcomes.

There is a large number of people who have hearing impairment or hearing loss who are unemployed or underemployed. Without hearing rehabilitation, hearing impaired Australians can be expected to suffer losses in remuneration due to underemployment or, as I said, not being able to find a job. They can experience discrimination at work and find it harder to engage with work. We know what the impacts of being kept out of the labour market are.

We know that there are a large number of Australians who, as I said, are suffering hearing loss or hearing impairment who are of working age. The employment rates for hearing impaired people between the ages of 45 and 65 are lower than comparable people in the broader population. It is 20.5 per cent lower for men and 16.5 per cent lower for women. These figures show that we have a significant issue here with employment and engagement with employment for people who have a hearing impairment. These are the sorts of people who are going to get caught up in the government's push to dump, for example, younger people off income support altogether and to force people to work for the dole and those sorts of measures without actually addressing their hearing impairment.

There is no doubt that the Commonwealth Hearing Services Program is an outstanding program. We have found that in our Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into hearing in Australia, with the Hear us report that we did. It does absolutely provide a world-class service to eligible clients, who are now young people under the age of 26. I am very proud to have chaired the inquiry that actually recommended that the Commonwealth Hearing Services Program be extended to people beyond the age of 21. It was only a couple of years ago that only people up to the age of 21 could get access to those services—now, it is up to 26.

Unfortunately, this leaves a whole group of adults who are not able to access hearing services. I have just explained how people are isolated from employment, so they do not have the capacity to buy hearing aids. Hearing aids have really improved with technology. It is absolutely amazing what they can do with hearing aids now, but that technology means that they are very expensive. So people, particularly people on low incomes, are not able to access these programs and are not able to do so if they are underemployed. If they do not have the resources to access the hearing aids, it is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is because then their hearing is keeping them out of the workforce or keeping them underemployed. Without being able to earn the money to get the hearing aids, they cannot get additional training or get the jobs that they are qualified for.

This morning, we heard two very good examples from two women who presented to the breakfast and told us of their experiences with their hearing loss and hearing impairment. It definitely has affected people's ability to find work and stay connected to the workforce. We desperately need further investment in hearing health and, in particular, helping those people who cannot access hearing aids. The government is talking about wanting to improve connections to employment and getting people into the workforce. For someone who has hearing loss or hearing impairment, do you know what you do? You fund the hearing aids and then you will see people blossom and be able to connect with the workforce. Instead of penalising people, those are the sorts of things that help people gain employment.

I cannot talk about hearing and hearing loss without talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I have spoken a lot in this chamber about the impact of otitis media on the hearing health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Otitis media is at pandemic levels in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This impacts on the rest of their lives. It impacts on their early learning and it impacts on their school experience, which connects through to their life outcomes. If it is not dealt with, there is social isolation.

I have also highlighted in this place the impact that it has on people's connection to the justice system and the fact that a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the justice system have hearing loss or hearing impairment. We need to actually deal with that hearing loss and hearing impairment when children are small with early intervention and deal with OM, which obviously needs to be dealt with. But when somebody has already suffered that impact, we need to be making sure they have support for their early learning and early access to numeracy and literacy programs. All the evidence shows that you can have the most significant impact by making sure they catch up before they go to school. The average Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child who is exposed to OM has spent the first 32 months of their 60 months of life with an ear infection. We definitely need to address otitis media, and some very good programs and very good research are being carried out. We also need to invest in specially focused early learning and early intervention with literacy and numeracy programs. If we are to improve a child's life outcome, this is a key area in which to make that investment. It is not just about ticking a box in terms of a child having access to an early childhood centre; they need specially targeted programs.

As we found out during our Senate inquiry, the hearing and language section of the brain is formed by the time a child is around six months old. So, if a child develops a hearing loss or a hearing impairment very early, which is what happens with otitis media, the brain has already allocated that space to other things. In other words, we need to retrain that part of the brain for literacy and numeracy.

Otitis media is a pandemic. It is a massive public health problem. We need to focus on adequately resourcing Aboriginal health. We must understand that, if we are to close the gap, we need to make it a national priority to invest critical resources in childhood health and in early literacy and numeracy programs so that when children attend the first day of school they can hear and are ready to learn, just as their colleagues who have not had otitis media and who do not have a hearing impairment are able to do.