Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I say to the member for Grey that I appreciate his contribution. I am not sure that I accept all of it, and I certainly do not support this legislation. I think we need to remind ourselves of what this legislation will do: it will extend the application of an ordinary waiting period of seven days to recipients of parenting payment and youth allowance. The ordinary waiting period currently applies for Newstart allowance and sickness allowance recipients.

These changes, to occur shortly, raise the eligibility age for NSA and sickness allowance from 22 to 25 years from 1 July 2016. The age requirement for the youth allowance will also be adjusted up from the current ceiling of 21 years to 24 years. It is really difficult to understand how anyone in the government can be supporting this legislation, other than that they see it as a way to save money and belt young people. The legislation will introduce a four-week waiting period for new claimants of youth allowance and the special benefit payment who are aged under 25 years. That will operate from 1 July 2016. It will abolish the low-income supplement from 1 July 2017. It will pause indexation of the income-free areas for all working age allowances other than the student payments and for parenting payment single from 1 July 2015. It will pause indexation of the income-free areas and other means test thresholds for student payments from 1 January 2016.

I have been listening to the contributions being made to this debate and I have been struck by the apparent sympathy for young people coming from the other side. But with the very vindictive nature of this legislation that will apply to young people it is very difficult to understand. We know that unemployment for young people is getting worse and not getting better. For young people between the ages of 15 and 24, the unemployment rate currently stands at 13.7 per cent and at 19.3 per cent if they are between 15 and 19. A report from the Brotherhood of St Laurence's My Chance, Our Future youth employment campaignsays:

The chance of finding a job has been declining since the GFC. The probability of finding a job fell sharply for 15 to 19 year olds: by early 2015, less than 15 per cent of the unemployed in this group moved from unemployment into employment from one month to the next.

This is portraying the difficulty that young people who are currently unemployed are confronting in moving from unemployment to work on a month-by-month basis. This ought to be causing people here some concern. It certainly causes me a great deal of concern. I know it worries the parents across this country of young people under the age of 25 who are eligible or old enough to be in the workforce.

The Brotherhood of St Laurence's report The teenage dream unravels: trends in youth unemployment from March 2015 says:

It can’t be said enough, amid a steady rise in the overall unemployment rate, Australia’s youth continue to bear the brunt – and teenagers are faring worst of all.

If that is the case—and we know it to be the case because the data is self-evident—then we have to be very concerned about a piece of legislation that will actually hurt young people. It will not be an incentive to go back to work or find a job; it will be a massive disincentive.

For those of us who have the good fortune to be parents, we know what the challenges may be in looking after a family, raising young people and giving them an opportunity. There are parts of Australia where these opportunities are very, very difficult to find. Young people looking for work who may have left school or even a tertiary institution find it immensely difficult. If those young people with some tertiary education are lucky enough to find work, often it will not be in the field of their study. Yet they will take these jobs because they want to work. It is very clear that Australian young people want to work. I think it is quite obnoxious for there to be a view that somehow or other young Australians are afraid of work. That simply is not the case. I will just go to the Bills Digest, which says:

There is no substantive evidence to suggest that young Australians lack the will to work. A number of surveys of young people show that a majority want to work or to work more hours, but face a number of barriers to their doing so.

So it is entirely false to be living under the assumption that somehow or other there is a whole host of young Australians who do not want to work.

I travel a lot, I have been in this job a long time, I meet a lot of people and I have to say that I rarely find anyone who does not want to work. People want the income security that comes from a job. They want to be able to make purchases. They want to be able to look after themselves and potentially look after families, if they are fortunate enough to have one.

But this legislation will ensure impecuniosity for some young people. It will, I daresay, force some onto the streets. There will be more calls about young homeless people, because these young people cannot afford to rent or have access to property because their parents are not wealthy or because they do not get on with their parents, for whatever reason, and cannot live at home. What happens to these young people? What are we proposing they should do? Well, they will go without. This, in my view, not only is stupid but could force them to do things that we all would wish they would not do.

So I say to the government that I think these measures—the waiting period for income support, in particular—are of real concern. I, like many others, can see no justification for these measures at all. Despite the protestations of government members, who say it is all fair and it is all hunky-dory, 'Don't you worry about that,' it is not fair. It is not fair. It is patently unfair. We in this parliament say we want people to be able to look for work and we want to make sure that they are not welfare dependent. But I, like a lot of others, believe that these sorts of measures will lead to welfare dependency for many people—many, many people.

It would be all right for us middle-class Australians in this place, living on a very good income; we can afford to survive for a month with no income, potentially. But imagine if you have nothing. Many Australians would not be able survive for a month without income. Many working families would just not survive without an income, and members of many of those working families might well be under 25. We are now saying, 'That may be, but as far as we and the rest of the world are concerned we're going to legislate to make sure that you go without an income in these circumstances if you're under the age of 25.'

The government can talk about measures to create opportunities for young people, but what is clear, in terms of this government, is that you cannot provide an opportunity that makes good sense when you do not want to have good sense, because this piece of legislation does not make good sense. I refer to National Welfare Rights Network Policy Officer Gerard Thomas—and I am indebted again to the Parliamentary Library for this—who has insisted these measures 'would lead to greater levels of welfare dependency, not less'.

What do we expect young people to do if they are either unwilling or unable to seek family support in a period when they might be unemployed and not have income support? What do we really expect? These measures are really a disinvestment in the future of Australia. They do not encourage young people to take the challenge and make the effort to seek out opportunities for education, training and employment.

I am assuming that the government believes that, somehow or other, people in this category do not have costs that they must meet, that they can rely on others to provide for them—that they do not have to provide food; that someone else is paying their medical expenses; that, if they are fortunate enough to be in accommodation and if rent is payable, someone else will pay their rent and someone else will pay for their gas and electricity; and that someone else, presumably, will pay for their transport costs when they go looking for a job.

Let us be very clear. Pushing young Australians aged between 22 and 24 from Newstart onto the lower youth allowance is, effectively, a cut of $48 a week or almost $2,500 a year. Think about it. Just imagine the family budgets of working Australians—not us in this place—being cut by $2½ thousand a year. It is not appropriate, and we should not be supporting it. None of the major welfare organisations believe there is any support for these measures. ACOSS, the National Welfare Rights Network, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Mission Australia: none of them believe that these proposals are appropriate.

People need to understand what this measure means. I cannot for the life of me understand how government members cannot see that this is going to have a dramatic impact on their own communities. It is going to affect the lives of thousands of families and, particularly, thousands of young people and their families. It will concern their parents, their teachers, their friends and all the people they engage with. I think it is critically important that the government review this measure.

I know there are young people who are prepared to travel to look for work. A young person came into my office last year looking for work. She was a graduate of the University of Melbourne. She and her partner had both arrived in Alice Springs looking for work. I put her on for a stint in my office, and she proved to have some very, very good skills. But she remained there only for a short time because she picked up some full-time work elsewhere—and I encouraged her to take that job. Her partner also had full-time work. They have settled into work and, only recently, have taken out a home loan to buy a place in Alice Springs. These are young people who have the same attributes as many, many, many other young Australians: they want to work, they are prepared to travel for work, they are prepared to look for work and they are prepared to work. I do not think the message conveyed by this legislation gives young Australians any confidence that this government actually understands what their needs are or appreciates the circumstances in which they live.

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