Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a fairytale we have just been subjected to in the House of Representatives. The Labor Treasurer who took us from zero net debt to $667 billion of debt and deficits approaching $50 billion a year was saying in this House that somehow we cannot achieve a surplus. The perpetrator of all of this just walked out the door. The reason we have high youth unemployment and unemployment in an unsuitable zone is the past seven years of a very bad Labor government, which in part was led by the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, who has just left this room.

It is very difficult to understand how he could come here today and criticise this government putting forward the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015, which attempts to deal with the youth unemployment crisis that is facing our nation. This bill sends the right signal to young job seekers, young people of ability who are able to get a job. We are going to take some measures to ensure that it is not the case that they go straight from high school to the Centrelink office.

We have some points of difference with the member for Lilley. He does not see a problem with young people being on welfare. This is the view of the modern Labor Party. Once upon a time the Labor Party were the party of the workers. The trade union leaders had actual trades. I am not sure how many trade union leaders over there even have a trade these days—in fact, probably very few or none. They represented workers against their bosses. But what we are seeing at the moment in Labor's opposition to this legislation is that Labor has truly become the party of welfare, the party of the handout.

It was ironic for the member for Lilley to tell us that he supports a hand-up when we see youth unemployment at high levels, with young people taking welfare, and the Labor Party seems to think that is some sort of career choice—some sort of good deal for young people. The real form of poverty comes from sustained periods on welfare. The way out of poverty is for people to get jobs. The way to get jobs is to get a strong economy—to have a government dedicated to getting a strong economy, not to redistributing wealth, as the member for Lilley likes to say. That is taking wealth from the productive and handing it around. That works for a period of time, but you get to a point in a welfare state, which we are at now, where we have an enormous government debt and a government deficit, and the member for Lilley is content to say: 'Well, let's just keep on spending that money. There is no problem. We have no difficulty going forward.' That is not the reality of what any federal government will now face from this point going forward. It is a reality crunch which tells us that we cannot afford the current welfare state model and that we need to take measures to help get people back to work and to have a stronger economy generating more jobs and more prosperity.

I want to commend the Minister for Social Services for putting the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015, which is before us today, because this is a very balanced, very fair piece of legislation. Yes, it has taken some time to work with the sector to get to a bill of this nature, and it does very fairly deal with people who are unable to seek work, through many different facets. We have taken account of issues such as disability, impairment, single mothers or people who are pregnant. We are being very realistic in this bill about the circumstances, difficulties and dilemmas that young people face. But it is, of course, the right signal to say to young people: 'We expect you to be fully focused on getting a job all of the time.'

When you look now at all of our major cities, including many of the electorates that the Labor Party represents and that the member for Lilley would know about, we now have problems of intergenerational welfare, where whole families have been on welfare not simply for one generation but for more than a generation. This, of course, is no good way for these people to live. They do not want to live on welfare. They would like to get jobs and get moving. They would like their lives to progress. Real poverty comes about from intergenerational welfare. Real prosperity comes about from a strong economy providing jobs and people being able to access those jobs, and that is what this bill is about. It is about saying to all those able young people, 'Get a job when you leave high school; don't get into that welfare poverty trap,' because we know that, when a person gets onto welfare, they are more likely to stay on welfare. They are more likely to get trapped on welfare. They are more likely to lose their skills and focus over time the longer they spend on welfare.

Of course, the government, the Australian people, the Australian taxpayer and successive Labor and Liberal governments have provided free public education and access to university for almost anybody that wants to seek it in Australia, with a generous HECS loan system that is being reinforced by this government to ensure anybody can access university. We are prepared to pay for people to go to university to get a degree. We are prepared to pay for them to get another degree, to retrain to get a trade or to go through the VET sector. The government is prepared to pay for any young person to continue their training or retraining or whatever they have to do to find the right trade or get the right skill to go and get a job. Given that that is the attitude of the government, of the Australian people and of the taxpayer, all the measures in this bill before us are saying to those young people: 'That is what we want you to be doing. We don't want you to be claiming welfare.'

When you think about the situation in Australia today, there are plenty of small businesses all around this nation that would like to add more workers, and more young workers in particular. But we have the member for Lilley lecturing us about industrial relations unfairness. How is it fair that a very small business, a cafe, has to pay a higher penalty rate on a Sunday than the local McDonald's across the road? It makes no sense. It stops that small business from employing as many young people as it might like on a Sunday. It means that there are fewer shifts or, in many cases in regional areas, that small businesses are unable to open and take on a young worker. Without the flexibility in the labour market that small business needs—and I reiterate that I am talking specifically about small business and how the inflexibility of the industrial relations system affects it—how does this help young people? The answer is that it does not.

So we have a Labor Party that is rigidly opposed to labour market reform, except of course if you are prepared to offer a massive payment to an individual union, we have learnt. If, under the table, you hand over millions of dollars then you will get some productivity, some movement and some difference, but not if you want to take on young people for more shifts and, as a cafe, open your doors on a public holiday in a regional area. You will get zero flexibility from the Australian Labor Party. You will get not one iota of movement. That would generate hundreds of thousands of extra shifts and extra jobs across the country, but of course there is no big business that can offer a multimillion-dollar payment to a union to facilitate that. That, of course, is what we really see going on in youth unemployment in Australia today.

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