Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Lambie for the question. I'll deal with the amendment simultaneously. In terms of analysis, the government, in the targeting of this program, has relied very much on the experience of past recessions and the modelling and analytical work undertaken in that regard. The experience of the last recession was that it took a long time for youth employment to recover, far longer than for employment levels overall. Indeed, it took a full decade after the 1990s recession to get the unemployment rate down from where it started to six per cent, but it took 15 years to get the number of jobs for young people back below where it started. We also have data and analysis that show that if those young people stay for a prolonged period of time as recipients of the social safety net then they are likely to be stuck, potentially, in that so-called welfare trap for an ongoing period. That's what we are deliberately seeking to avoid here.

We responded in the immediacy of the pandemic with economy-wide wage subsidy measures, as has been acknowledged. As we transition out of the immediacy of the pandemic—and we've seen more than 460,000 Australians back in jobs in recent months—we seek to target and tackle what we know are some of the high-risk problems we face, and endemic and prolonged youth unemployment is seen as very much a high-risk problem. That's why this program is targeted in that sense.

It's also why the government opposes Senator Patrick's amendment, which would remove this program's intended target of addressing the unemployment of young Australians. I do note that the program operates alongside a number of pre-existing government programs—programs like Career Transition Assistance, the Restart wage subsidy and the skills checkpoint—intended to provide support to some of those older workers in different industries that Senator Lambie referred to. Those programs are intended to provide ongoing assistance, recognising the disruption that some older workers face in their careers due to impacts of health, economic restructure—all the different factors, which we know are real. That's why we had, pre-pandemic, those types of programs in place, but this one is targeted very much at ensuring we don't end up with a long and prolonged tail of youth unemployment that potentially leaves people struggling for much of a lifetime in terms of their entry point into the workforce.