Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on a matter of public interest. I understand that, as I speak, hundreds of workers at the Mount Lyell copper mine in Queenstown, on Tasmania's west coast are being told about their future.

Youth unemployment is destroying a generation of young Australians. It is creating a jobless generation. It is condemning young people to a bleak future. Tasmania, my home state, has the highest youth unemployment rate in Australia. In parts of Tasmania, including the north and north-west—areas represented in the other place by the Liberal members, Mr Nikolic, Mr Whitely and Mr Hutchinson—the youth unemployment rate is more than 20 per cent. That is one in five young people who do not have a job. The state-wide figure is almost as bad, at 17.4 per cent. The number of young Tasmanians out of work is expected to grow. Some predict youth unemployment in Tasmania could reach 33 per cent by 2016.

As the Brotherhood of St Laurence said in February of this year, youth unemployment has reached crisis point. The Executive Director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Nicholson, said it is a disaster. Mr Nicholson said:

What it means for all these young people is that they're at risk of never being able to get a foothold in the world of work. And in our modern economy that means that they're really being sentenced to a lifetime of poverty.

A lifetime of poverty—the actions of those opposite show little understanding of the seriousness of the situation. This is an issue with wide-ranging social and economic implications, an issue with no simple solution. To even start to address the crisis that confronts us, we need to invest in a system that is flexible and can support people in the way that they need, a system that can address underlying market failures and structural issues, a system that creates opportunities and does not endlessly punish. Yet all the government offers young Tasmanian job seekers is punishment, broken promises and cuts. This is a government that is too ready to blame young people rather than do the hard work necessary to confront the issue. Does this government really think so poorly of the one in five young Tasmanian people in the north and the north-west who are currently unemployed? We only need to look at the latest ANZ job ads survey, which shows that newspaper job advertisements declined in Tasmania by 3.4 per cent in June.

Nobel prize-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz, who is in Australia at the moment, told a forum in Hobart last week that young people are our greatest assets. In his many books and newspaper articles, Professor Stiglitz has talked about the loss of human capital because young people do not have jobs. When young people do not have jobs, it destroys the social fabric of a community. In Tasmania, and indeed Australia, our young people are being underutilised. Their energy, their enthusiasm, their ideas, are being lost and ignored. They are not being given the chance to change the world. We know that having a job can transform a person's life. We know too that being rejected for a job can be soul destroying. One young Tasmanian told me of his despondency at submitting so many job applications and not getting a job. He has a university degree and is working in a cafe. The work is casual and he desperately wants a full-time job, to begin a career. He wants to rid himself of his HECS debt, but he knows that is a long way off. He has even questioned whether he should have gone to university at all.

We must work together to ensure we do not leave behind a generation of Australians who have not had a job. But action taken by the Abbott government, such as their decision to axe the $130 million per year youth education programs—including Youth Connections, Partnership Brokers and National Career Development—will make matters worse for young Tasmanians who are doing all they can to try to get a job. People working on the Youth Connections program have told me that they have worked with many young Tasmanians in the north and north-west since their program began. They tell me that they were registering 20 young people a week. A third of these young people had been disengaged from education or employment for longer than three months. There are many good stories to tell about the young Tasmanians who have taken part in this program. I want to talk about just two of their success stories.

Shantelle and John are a young couple from Burnie who are expecting their first child and have been part of the Youth Connections program. Shantelle and John were not at school or training, and not in employment, and they were not accessing any support services. Youth Connections supported Shantelle with an enrolment at Don College for year 11. She wrote of her experience with Youth Connections:

Lynsie is awesome. I do not like school and if it wasn't for Youth Connections I wouldn't be where I am today. I'm now doing home school. I do all my work and send it back. Everything is back on track.

Shantelle and her partner, John, are now living in private rental accommodation and are happy and settled. John is now working part time and is starting a contract soon. It beggars belief that the Abbott government has axed such a vital program as Youth Connections, which has turned around the lives of so many young people.

In May of this year, the CEO of Mission Australia, Catherine Yeomans, spoke about the need for intervention programs that support young people to re-engage in education and training opportunities. Ms Yeomans said the budget delivers a double whammy, by not only making it harder for young people to access payments but also taking away funding for programs that could help them to re-engage with education, training or work. She said:

At a time when we should be investing in programs that help young people to connect with training and employment, the government is instead going to axe successful and vital national initiatives such as Youth Connections, with no replacement programs to ensure disadvantaged youth don't fall through the cracks.

Government's desire to boost workforce participation will not be possible without the right supports in place to help young people make the transition.

The results of Youth Connections speak volumes for its success. A Youth Connections National Network survey found that, two years after completing Youth Connections, 81.5 per cent of respondents were still in education or employment. Who will nurture and guide these young people when Youth Connections is axed?

The Youth Network of Tasmania wrote to me after the budget to tell me how severely disadvantaged Australia's young people would be. They wanted Youth Connections reinstated and were also worried about the changes to Newstart and how young people would survive. YNOT, the Youth Network of Tasmania, said:

For many others, these changes will put many young people on the path to poverty and homelessness.

YNOT are strongly opposing the government's reforms, reforms that are essentially making one of the most vulnerable groups in society more disadvantaged than ever before.

Young Tasmanians have spoken of their grave concern for what the future holds for them. One young woman, Rhi, told me that she is concerned about the changes to Newstart and what they would mean for her. She has a university degree and has recently completed TAFE qualifications in child care. Rhi told me:

I have been applying for jobs and getting interviews but haven't been able to find full time work. I have a part time job but this isn't enough to live off and I am scared about what will happen if I lose this job.

I don't want to keep studying for the rest of my life but if I lose my job there is no way that my parents could afford to support me for 6 months.

This government want to punish young people when they do not have a job and, at the same time, are cutting the supports that have been successful in supporting them into work. Not only does the budget cut nearly $1 billion in support payments under the Tools for Your Trade program but it also slashes a further $1 billion in investment in skills and training.

The Abbott government have taken the axe to vital skills and training programs such as the Australian Apprentices Access Program, the Australian Apprenticeships Mentoring Program and the Apprentice to Business Owner Program. The government have tried to appease community backlash about these cuts by announcing a paltry $5 million for apprentice mentoring and sought to establish the Trade Support Loans scheme.

One Tasmanian man contacted Labor offices to say he is raising his grandson who is lucky enough to have a bricklaying apprenticeship. His grandson is in his first year of his apprenticeship. He is worried that his grandson will not be able to purchase his tools without the support of the Tools for Trade program. He does not want to see his grandson take out a loan when his income is so low.

Senator Eric Abetz is the Minister for Employment, but we have not seen much of a response from him to this crisis in youth unemployment. In fact Mr Abbott and Senator Abetz are all but abandoning young job seekers. This government wants to cut payments for six months to young people who find themselves unemployed. How will they live? According to Senator Abetz, they should go fruit-picking. He said 90 per cent of fruit-pickers came from overseas and he asked why young people could not do seasonal fruit-picking. Senator Abetz said:

There is no right to demand from your fellow Australians that just because you don't want to do a bread delivery or a taxi run or a stint as a farmhand that you should therefore be able to rely on your fellow Australian to subsidise you.

The response to the fruit-picking was swift. The Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association explained that the fruit industry required a great deal of skill and commitment. And that gets to the crux of the argument: we need job creation in Australia.

The Abbott government were big on promises before the last federal election but they have not delivered. The Tasmanian Jobs Program was a centrepiece in the promises those opposite offered Tasmania in the lead-up to the election. Senator Abetz was even spruiking the program in this place yesterday.

Under their Tasmanian Jobs Program, they promised to generate 2,000 jobs in two years. But, at the current rate, that target will take around 15 years to reach. This program, part of the government's Economic Growth Plan for Tasmania, is a resounding failure. What makes this failure even more embarrassing for the government is the $90,000 bill they have racked up running a media campaign across my home state of Tasmania.

So far 60 people have been able to access this scheme. It is clear that this program is a failure and needs to be redesigned but, instead of acknowledging this and doing the hard work needed to address youth unemployment, Senator Abetz, through a spokesman, said that the 60 people employed under the program was a 'good result'.

This scheme provides a one-off payment of $3,250 to companies that hire people who have been unemployed for more than six months. Only last week, Geoff Fader for the not-for-profit Group Training Australia was reported in local media as saying that the scheme is too bureaucratic and:

… small businesses did not have the ability to deal with the level of bureaucracy involved in hiring staff.

He went on to say:

… our interest is about an investment in young people and the economy of the state—

People want an investment in young people and the economy; an investment that is sadly lacking under this government; an investment that Labor made with its $100 million Jobs and Growth Plan. It was a plan that had 31 projects across the state. Yet, in spite of the great promises made by Mr Abbott before the election and his agreement to match this funding, as I understand it, less than 10 of the 31 projects have so far been funded.

Though we have all come to realise that what Mr Abbott was willing to say to get into government and what he is willing to do once in government do not always correlate. Tasmanian Liberal members should be fighting for the funding to be delivered to the projects in their respective electorates. They should be fighting for Tasmanian business and Tasmanian job seekers. And we should all be fighting for our young people so they do not end up as the jobless generation. We owe it to these young people.