Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

It is 10. Get your pencil out and do the maths. It is 10 per electorate over four years—that is two to three per year, starting with one and growing. When you look at that as a group of 10 projects using volunteers who are unskilled, who are not necessarily fit and who are doing a job they have never done before, that is actually a very small amount of effort in the environmental work in an electorate. But consider what a council would do—what my Parramatta council would do—with 10 projects worth $200,000 each. That is what they are worth each, if you divide the $300 million by the number of projects. I know that when this program is implemented—if it is—then a lot of that money will go into the administration of the program. However, if you look at it as 10 contracts worth $200,000 each, I know my councils could achieve a great deal of local environmental work with that amount of money and do it with professionals in a way which had an ongoing life. When you look at the program rolled out in total, that would be 10 projects at $200,000 each per year in each electorate, working on the figures we have been given. And, again, imagine what a local council could do with that, including taking on apprentices or having the organisations that deliver those projects taking on apprentices—real pathways to employment and real environmental work being done by experts.

Environmental work has to be done by experts. It is actually very difficult, and it takes years to get the canopy, the under-storey and the groundcover right when you are refurbishing bushland. And it takes more years again to get the mix of insects and bird life back to an appropriate level to sustain life in the bushes. It is highly skilled, and it is ongoing. It is like trying to stay healthy—you do not do it just for this month or just for this year and then give it up; you do it for all of your life. And you do environmental work for the life of the forest. In my electorate of Parramatta, and I suspect it is the same for all of your electorates, there was a growing group of highly skilled small businesses that specialise in environmental refurbishment. It is what they do. I have one in my electorate that specialises in native grasses. That is how detailed it is—just native grasses. It is quite remarkable. But I have several of them that are engaged by council to refurbish bushland, to provide advice. They are engaged by businesses to deal with the land around their factories and premises—highly skilled small businesses that have trained for years and that work incredibly well, and it is a growing specialty. And as more and more Australians realise that what we want back around us is our native bushland, it is going to be an area of small business that continues to grow.

One of my concerns with this influx of cheap, untrained labour into what is a growing, highly skilled area is that we will see councils effectively cost-shifting from the professional services that are currently going to small businesses to the low-paid Green Army of unskilled labour. We will see a crowding out of an incredibly important part of our small business economy and a part of our economy that we need to grow if we want this country to be environmentally as strong as it could be. For me, that is a great concern, and I do not see anything in the legislation or anything coming from the government side that gives me confidence that there will not be protections against councils cost-shifting from their current budgets to professional small businesses to a Commonwealth-funded cheap labour force. And unless you can provide me with those sorts of protections, I will be up here screaming on behalf of my small business community that is about to get done in by cheap labour that is unskilled. I will be up here every day until the government can provide me with some guarantees that it will not happen. And I tell you, with what you are talking about at the moment, it will happen. And there will be several quite good local businesses in my area—as there will be all across the country—that will find it very difficult to get work because of this influx of unskilled and low-wage labour.

I want to talk about the previous Green Corps program, which I have heard talked about here quite a bit—the Howard government one—and what it did. I have heard about the 14 million trees, I have heard about the fencing, I have heard about the weed removal—all really important stuff. But anybody who knows anything about environmental refurbishment knows that if you pull the weeds out today and you do not have an ongoing program, they will be back next year. Really simple—they will be back next year. Pull them out today, pull them out this year—they will be back next year. If you want to implement a good local environmental policy, it has to have life beyond one year. It has to have life beyond one project. It has to have somebody or some organisation that has a responsibility for that area of land with ongoing contributions towards its maintenance. And there is nothing in this program that does that—this is one-off stuff. One year—plant some trees, no-one takes care of them, drought comes along, down they go. This is naive at best. Talk to an expert about environmental management, or about refurbishment of the land, and they will tell you that it is something you do forever. It is not something you do for only one year. Rip out the blackberry today—in two years it will be back as bad as ever. I guess then you can send another group in, because you will be doing this for a while, so perhaps you can just keep repeating the same actions over and over again.

I want to quote a statement by Glenn Albrecht, professor of sustainability at Murdoch University, commenting on the Green Corps program under the Howard government. He talked about the 14 million trees, he talked about the fencing and he talked about the 50,000 hectares of weeds. And he said this:

If it's really just weeding and tree planting, similar to the sorts of things that were done under the Howard government's programs, a lot of that work, particularly in periods of savage drought, was simply undone because there was no long-term follow-up.

That is a statement from the expert. What we have here is a program that at first glance appears to be an incredibly inefficient use of taxpayers' money in terms of local environmental work, a program that is one-off, that does not provide the ongoing environmental work that is required to sustain the improvement over time, that brings low-pay wages and unskilled labour into an area of growing skill without any guidelines or protections to ensure that local councils do not simply shift their costs from the professional side of the business to the amateur side of the business. And I tell you, that is what we are going to see happening.

So I will be watching this program very carefully over the next few months as it works its way through this House and the Senate. There is so little detail in it at the moment that deals with the real issues and how this program will work that it is very difficult to find genuine support for it. I will be watching it very closely, and I would hope that the members of the government would also consider whether or not this is the most effective use of $300 million of taxpayers' money.

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