Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This is not a serious attempt to deal with youth unemployment. It is not some way of improving the opportunities for Australia's young to be able to get out there, take up meaningful, long-term employment and make a contribution to the broader economy, the community and their own families and improve the options in their own lives. This Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015 is really just a continued attack on young Australians.

No-one could seriously believe the proposition that withholding support to Newstart allowance by a month is in some way going to generate a massive lift and uptake in employment by young people. Bearing in mind the 2014 budget, this is a move from what was contained in that budget, going from a six-month wait down to the 2015 budget one-month wait. But in its wake, does it actually do anything to improve the ability of young people to get a job? The answer is no. This is really just a budget cut that appeals to the prejudice of some who believe that if young people really want to get a job that they can go out there and find it and that it will be there waiting.

I think it portrays two things: firstly, that unemployment right at this point in this country is higher now than it was during the GFC, and so it is harder to find work. In terms of youth unemployment we know that there is a massive difference between the general unemployment rate and youth unemployment. The second issue is that it is not simply a matter of young people clicking their fingers and finding a job. A modern economy, particularly ours, which is going through transition—and I do want to linger on that a bit longer later in my contribution—demands modern skills. It demands a lot more in training people and getting young people ready for the legitimate expectations of our employers, rather than believing you will just simply get it.

And so, of itself, just believing that this simple measure alone will assist young people is laughable. It will not be the case whatsoever. Getting young people working, particularly in this day and age, requires a very thorough and a much longer-term view about what is required to get them ready for employers. I believe, again, that it is to the benefit of the young person that they be able to be flexible enough to transition from job to job through the course of their work life. But also, their employer rightly expects that the young people who turn up to the door will be able to meet the inherent requirements of the role that they are seeking.

As I said, it is a bit surreal to believe that this bill, of itself, will be a major spur or incentive to drive young people on to get employment. Basically, it is the latest cut to young Australians. We opposed last year's attempt to leave young job seekers with nothing to live on for six months. As has rightly been reflected on by others, in the course of four weeks you still have to eat, you still have to pay bills and you still have to meet the requirements of living in a modern society. So it is a very punitive action, which is not actually designed, as I have said repeatedly in my contribution to this point, to address the types of things that will improve the opportunities for young people to get work.

I see it in my area—and I reflect on some of the comments that have been made. The member for Mitchell, during his remarks—as have others—talked about the scourge of intergenerational unemployment. I see that in my area. This is actually a salutary lesson about the perils of long-term unemployment, when people get stuck in long-term unemployment and when they do not find jobs quickly enough. If they have been through a period of transition—in some cases we have had big, wholesale redundancy programs go through some of our major employers and those people with specialised skills do not have the ability to move rapidly, freely or flexibly to other employment—and if they are not picked up and out of that trap of long-term unemployment, they can sit there for years.

I have seen it in my area—the children of those people watch their parent just basically count down the days without going into a job and then that becomes the new norm within that family. I am certainly motivated, and recognise that welfare of itself is not the solution to people's longer-term prosperity. A lot of people in my area know that to be the case as well. But, at the same time, you cannot eat grass. You cannot live simply on hope and nothing else. You do need to find a way from time to time to get you through, as long as that does not become an ongoing source of income support—that being welfare. That is an important point to bear in mind.

I come back to that point: we need to avoid people getting into the situation of long-term unemployment. But for younger people there is a whole string of things that do need to be undertaken to ensure that they do not get caught in that trap. I have seen this on the ground with some particularly good programs—some things that have made a real difference. For instance, Youth Connections. And I saw this through Marist Youth Care, operating out of Blacktown but also working in my neck of the woods. I saw them train up young people and put them into temporary positions where they got their work experience. They then went on to employment, particularly young Aboriginals in my area who have been able to do the social work course through Marist Youth Care. They get into employment and go back into their own families, who have battled with long-term unemployment. You see them spur their families on to get out there and break the cycle of unemployment. People within the family can get trained up or skilled up, opening up options for them to change the situation they are in and see what they can do. It has been hugely successful in transforming people's lives, not just in getting employment but also in changing their outlook on life. And this is not just in the area of social work. I saw Marist Youth Care, working in tandem with Mission Australia and Beacon Foundation, get young people trained up in a variety of different roles on the site of a major development in my area, the Sydney Business Park, through the application of Youth Connections funding. Other major employers like IKEA have taken on young people who have been identified through that process. In a major store that IKEA has just opened in Marsden Park in the Chifley electorate, nearly 73 per cent of the employees are from local suburbs. A lot of them are young people, trained up through programs funded by the federal government, like Youth Connections, that help get young people job ready. As I said before, you cannot expect to click your fingers and get into a role. You do need to get trained up and make sure that your skills are relevant to what your employer needs—and I saw that happen in my area.

What happened to a program like Youth Connections that made a difference on the ground? If you had invested in that type of program you would have thought that it would survive. No, it did not—it actually got cut. The funds for Youth Connections in our area were cut. Marist Youth Care, to their very great credit, relied on other sources of income within their organisation to maintain the training program, but they had to run down their funds to do so. This is wrong. You have a choice between making a punitive cut—as is evidenced in this program, which will not be able to dedicate anything more toward getting people trained up in an effective and meaningful long-term manner—or investing in skills. The general community gets that this type of spending is not a cost; it is an investment in upskilling young people in our community. People get that it is an important longer term goal that has the benefit of making sure that the skills are there for employers that need them to maintain economic activity in this country.

It is even more important when you take on board this point: manual and unskilled jobs—the jobs that you could just walk into that existed in times past, the jobs that frame the view of some people that believe that young people can just get a job if they want to, if they just go out and seek it—the jobs of that era are going. They are disappearing before our eyes. Technology is disrupting this. These jobs will not be there in the future. The demand is on us in this parliament to think ahead about the jobs of the future and get people trained up. You need to be able to skill those people up with a very long term view. It starts in schools, in getting people ready to be able to negotiate their way through technological change, and having the skills that can allow them to integrate technology in their learning and in the way that they work. That is why we have been talking so much about coding being taught in primary schools. It is not so much for the mere fact that you learn coding; you start to get the development of computational thinking and start to recognise how technology works, framing the way you think about the world in that way. That is why that is important.

If you were serious about skilling up young people, you would not be denying them years 5 and 6 of the Gonski funding, which represents a massive cut to education. This government will not fund years 5 and 6, the $30 billion cut that we go on about in the budget, which translates to $270 million over 10 years in my electorate, making it amongst the worst affected. That will not skill young people up. That will not help them get on a pathway for the next level of training that they need—vocational training, for example. To date, the government's track record in that space is not one that it can be proud of. There were $1 billion in cuts to apprenticeship programs in the 2014-15 budget. The government replaced apprentice support with apprentice debt, they rebadged and cut funding to the Australian apprenticeship centres, they abolished the Joint Group Training Program and they have not put forward any new ideas for training people for the jobs of the future. This is contained in a media statement by my colleague the member for Cunningham, the shadow minister for vocational education.

So there were cuts to school funding through Gonski and cuts to vocational education. What about tertiary education? What about getting people through higher education to build their skills up there? On this side of the fence, we have been talking about the need to build STEM skills—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—and get a focus and a push on there, because these are the skill shortages that are crippling our country. I spoke about it when I was on the other side of the House and I am speaking about it on this side of the House. We do have big skill shortages in the digital economy and it has been repeated recently through CEDA's work, Deloitte, the Crossroads report by StartupAUS—you name it. A whole stack of people that are at the leading edge of technology in this country are saying that we simply do not have the people here that will help power the development of this sector in the years to come.

When I was in the United States earlier this year I was staggered to find that 20,000 Australians are working in Silicon Valley, who we could well do with here. It is understandable that they go over there for the experience and skill development, but 20,000 over there means we have 20,000 fewer here, and we are not training them up. So what happens in terms of higher education? We have seen the types of reforms that the government have flagged. They dispute our claim that this will lead to $100,000 degrees; we actually have good evidence to back up our concern. Regardless of what you think, it is clear that prices for degrees will go up, and if you are trying to have more people go into higher education to build up their skills that price signal will be an impact. It will weigh heavily on people as to whether or not they will be able to take on those degrees. From my point of view, the danger is that universities like the University of Western Sydney, recognising that people may not have the capacity to pay, will have to make a choice either to pass the fee increase on or to simply make cuts to the quality of education and therefore provide a lower standard, a lower quality, a second-class education to the people of Western Sydney. That is something I am genuinely fearful of. The whole issue of youth employment and getting people ready for work is not a simplistic one.

People may have a different opinion on some of the things that I have said tonight in this contribution. But it is undeniable that, if you want young people ready for the world of work, if you want them to be able to exercise the full range of opportunities before them, you need to do make a genuine, long-term investment in their skills development to make sure, not only that they have the skills for the workforce but, importantly, that they have a capacity and a flexibility to change; because, as we all know, it is not like days of old when you would get a job in one place and retire from there with a gold watch. Those days are well and truly gone. Now, you will go through a number of different jobs, you will require a number of different skills, and you will need to be flexible as you move. We need to get young people ready for that.

The type of legislation we are debating does not fix that. This type of legislation is just punitive. It is designed to attract a prejudice or to mask a budget cut. It will not meaningfully lead to the types of skills development that we need to ensure that people do not need to rely on welfare. And I am all for not relying on welfare; I am all for having meaningful long-term prosperous employment.

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