Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

In question time today, with Senator Colbeck's answers to questions, the plight of Australia's young people was well and truly revealed. Australia currently has a very high rate of youth unemployment, yet all the government can do is point to programs that are demonstrably failing. Take, for example, the question that Senator Smith asked this afternoon in relation to the rate of youth unemployment. We have a growing rate of youth unemployment in many places around the nation. The government claims they have injected 100,000 new jobs for young people into the system over the last 12 months. Well, the distressing fact is that there are 260,000 young Australians who are unemployed. Of course, in that period, people have moved in and out of the labour market. With 260,000 young people unemployed and more than 600,000 unemployed, those 100,000 jobs will in no way address that issue, particularly as young people age and a new generation of young people move out of their school years. There is a structural problem here that is growing, and it is deeply connected to other trends in the economy.

What happens when youth unemployment rises? It is very much interlinked with wage stagnation in Australia. As the Grattan Institute report quoted in these questions reveals:

Slower wage growth particularly hurts young people. Unlike older people, they are less likely to have other sources of income … and so rely more on wages.

People who enter the workforce at a time of low wage growth are particularly hurt because they miss out on the stronger wage progress people normally make in their first decade in the workforce.

This government has been giving excuses and twiddling its thumbs on the question of wage growth in Australia, frankly, for years now. You'll point out that you've created more jobs and that the economy is continuing to grow, but you absolutely do not deal with the economic fundamentals in question—that is, that people's take-home household income is declining and wage growth has declined—and you have no strategy for addressing these.

Indeed, in the very PaTH program that you have been lauding in your answers and that we've critiqued in our questions, you can see that only 30 per cent of participants have been offered a job at the end of their internship. That is a disgraceful set of figures and shows that this program really isn't working. In this case what's likely to be happening is that employers are relying on the wage subsidy in order to justify taking on these placements. I can see a role for wage subsidies, but decent and reliable employment has to be available to young people and all Australians so they can meet their cost-of-living needs. But what we see in Australia are a growing number of young people who are in economic distress and cannot meet their basic cost of living. The very same report, the Grattan Institute's Generation gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians, talked about pretty basic issues like food security, about the number of young people who don't have enough income to feed themselves. These issues are intrinsically interlinked. (Time expired)