Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014, which amends the Social Security Act 1991 and the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999. I will stick to the bill. I think it is an insult to the constituency of the member for Richmond that she dismissed one of the greatest youth employment programs that this country has ever seen, particularly given this is a second iteration. I had the privilege of being responsible for the old Green Corps program, which was brought into being under the Howard government. It was a stunningly successful program, which dealt with environmental degradation, supporting biodiversity and a whole range of initiatives right across the country, and it also dealt with cultural heritage. I will never forget the teams I saw employed in the main street of Bendigo helping to rebuild the old iron lace which is a feature of the very old goldfield buildings of Bendigo.

I think it was very sad and cynical that the member for Richmond tried to use this opportunity to bolster up, I guess, her Green party support credentials. After all, she did only receive 33.5 per cent of the primary vote in the last election and she needed the preferences from the Green candidate's 17 per cent of the vote to get her over the line. She spent a lot of time in her speech being critical of the National Party and suggesting that the National Party is the enemy of the environment. Need I remind her that the National Party candidate won the highest number of primary votes in that Richmond campaign. Quite clearly, her locals had a different opinion about the policies and the calibre of the National Party team who wanted to look after the people of Richmond. I am sure those constituents now regret the final outcome of that election.

Let me also say that the previous speaker got it very wrong. I am not sure whether she has not read the details or whether it was just part of her whole cynical approach of saying that this government does not have at its core a profound understanding of the needs of the environment, to sustain the environment and to protect our internationally-acclaimed biodiversity. Amongst other things she said was that this Green Army Program would have no safety protections, that there would be no health and safety measures for participants engaged in the program and that it would not be subject to any special regulations, by-laws and requirements of state and territory governments in respect to their work health and safety laws. Well, that is just rubbish. It is, of course, totally wrong.

As was the case in the old Green Corps, the project sponsors will have to share responsibility for providing a safe workplace, safe access to worksites—all of the measures in Australia that are an appropriate response to people working out of doors or in a heritage location. The member for Richmond was also wrong in claiming that there would be no training outcomes, no certification, or no understanding or acceptance of the efforts made by participants during their training. If the member for Richmond had taken a couple of minutes to read the details of this program, she would have seen that the people who are to undertake this program—it could be for up to six months—will have all of the competencies that they achieve recognised under the Australian National Training Framework. They will get a certificate I or II, depending on what they have done. So her comments are just a nonsense. I hope the member for Richmond is listening to my remarks, so that she does not go on misleading her own young people, who I am sure are lining up—in particular those who are looking for a gap year, are currently unemployed or are not sure if they might want to pursue a full-time career in natural resource management. I hope they get some better support from her if they want to participate in this fantastic new Green Army Program. She really needs to reassess her current response to this program, or her constituents are going to be even more dissatisfied when it comes to the next election.

We have a situation in Australia where unless we have a government sponsored program like the Green Army we are not going to have the work done in places like the great Barmah forest, the biggest red-gum forest in the world. The forest is in my electorate of Murray, so, not surprisingly, I am very concerned about the weed infestation there, the feral animals and the loss of Indigenous heritage values in that place.

The previous speaker, the member for Richmond, said, 'This is a shocking program, because it is going to mean that all sorts of people will go and substitute paid workers for these young people undertaking a Green Army project.' What rubbish! Clearly, she has to get out more and understand the current neglect of national and state parks or public open places, where none of this work is being carried out, because the local council or the state government has other priorities or they do not have the funds. This program moves into those spaces and places in Australia where we do not have any permanently paid workforce doing the job.

We do not have anyone at work continuously or even part time in places like the great Goulburn riverine precinct where, unfortunately, because of new environmental water-holder flows that are being pushed down from the Eildon reservoir, we have massive bank erosion and gouging. Where once the Goulburn River rose and fell according to the seasons, because of the massive flushing through the releases of the Commonwealth environmental water-holder we have destruction of our riparian zone such as we have never had before. So we need replanting of the understorey and the canopy trees all along the Goulburn River. We need to reinstate a lot of the bankside herbage. There is no-one to do that, other than a group like the Green Army. This is going to be a fantastic program in that it offers 17- to 24-year-olds up to six months in a project which has been put forward by their own community. It could be put forward by the local government, it could be a Rotary club or it could be a group of individuals.

The projects, of course, will be carefully assessed on their value, on whether they are real work. We are not talking about painting white rocks; we are talking about real environment and heritage protection work. The projects will require skills and will include training. There will be about nine members in each group and they will have one supervisor. I would hope there would be a fifty-fifty split of young men and women in these groups. In my area I already have a lot of interest from our local Indigenous communities. They see this as a fantastic opportunity for young Indigenous men and women, who are starting to get more of a sense of their own cultural inheritance and their own responsibility for managing the biodiversity in some of their own places like the Cummeragunja old mission station.

This is going to be, following on from our old Green Corps, one of the best opportunities a young person has to try out a career in natural resource management or simply to have a sense of what it is like to get up every day, join a team, do real work and actually do work that is going to give them a sense of contribution to their community. In my area, I am very sad to say, we have up to 20 per cent youth unemployment, particularly in places like the fringes of Shepparton. Many of the unemployed young people are looking for work, but it is not there, or they are so disengaged that they have simply given up. Their lives are spent in a cycle of boredom, helplessness and hopelessness. As a result, we have a huge ice epidemic in my area and also a huge problem with binge drinking. A government like ours understands that putting a six-month program in front of these young people as an option is an enormously valuable thing to do.

It was so disappointing to hear someone carrying on as the member for Richmond did. I know she was desperate to get her green credentials in front of the Greens party to thank them for their support for her in winning her seat. But to misrepresent this program as she did was such nonsense. She said that it would not lead to training credentials and that it was not going to have properly managed occupational health and safety measures, and she suggested that it was going to be about the substitution of other people already employed in full-time or part-time work. I want to reinforce that this program will be the biggest youth environmental program that the country has ever seen. It will give such a boost to the young people who are lucky enough to become a part of it. I do not think you can put a value on work experience of this type for a young person whose alternative is not to be employed at all or not to know precisely if an outdoor job in natural resource management is for them.

This is a superb program. It will, of course, cost us. These young people will be paid the equivalent of a training allowance and the supervisors will be paid appropriately, so there is a cost involved. While there is a cost to us, the benefits and the payback to the environment and the community are enormous. I commend the minister for making sure that this was not only a campaign commitment from us but is being pushed along at a very fast rate. We have a number of projects ready to go right now. In 2014-15 we expect 250 projects, with 2,500 young people engaged. Already in my area projects are queuing up and young people are asking, 'How can we be a part of this great new program?'

I also want to make the point that this is about cultural heritage conservation as much as it is about the more traditional habitat protection, improving water quality, and foreshore and beach restoration. I will never forget a cultural heritage combined foreshore and beach restoration project I went to see when I as managing this program under Green Corps. It was along the foreshores of the western district, around the Warrnambool area. Beach erosion was exposing a lot of Indigenous kitchen middens and tool chips, a lot of great implements and examples of the culture of the people who had gone before. A lot of Indigenous young people were part of that Green Corps team. Can you imagine the excitement of that young team, who were being engaged first of all in identifying and then in protecting and learning about the cultural heritage of their ancestors? It was a stunning project, and one that was not just a six-month on-and-off experience for those people, because the protection of those foreshores went on long after the project had ended.

I remember being down in Tasmania and walking along the kilometres of walking tracks and boardwalks that had been built through some of Tasmania's magnificent wilderness, some of it quite close to places like Hobart. These are public places that had been inaccessible to individuals in wheelchairs or people pushing prams or using walking frames. Through the building of these boardwalks and walking tracks, we are now able to access some of the most magnificent vegetation and ecosystems in the world. This was the work of a local Green Corps team, as they were called in those days. It was hard work. It was not easy. These young people had to build the tracks, cart a lot of timber in and learn how to construct long-lasting timber structures. They built bridges over steams. It was an extraordinary effort, and those boardwalks and the walking tracks associated with them are still there and they are a major tourism boon and benefit to the people who visit.

This business of Green Corps, now called the Green Army, fosters teamwork, local ownership and a community spirit. One of the sad things that comes with unemployment for a young person is isolation, a sense of being friendless, a sense of being completely alienated from the community where you live. Young Green Army people are able to step into a team that is like-minded and is training together. They wear the same uniform, they travel together to the location of the work, and they eat their lunch together. They also engage with the volunteers who have often put up the project in the first instance. One of the things that impressed me most with this program, in its first iteration, was that—say it was a Rotary club or a Lions club that had put up the project—they did not just simply leave the team to it and come back when it was finished and say that it was okay and then move away. They would actually engage with the young team—perhaps have a barbecue. They would get stuck into it and work alongside the team. They would be saying: 'Thank you. Alone we could not have built the new walking track, done the weeding, or regrown of the vegetation, or completed the clearing of the olives in the swamp that they were doing. We have a team of young people from our own community doing the hard work and we thank you for it.'

I commend this program. I think it is magnificent. I think it covers all the bases when it comes to what we need to do to re-engage some of our youth and to give an opportunity to other youths who may simply want to try a new career direction. This program is for them. It is going to deliver many real outcomes for communities that need feral animal work or heritage protection, so I strongly commend this bill to the House, and I say 'shame' to the previous speaker, who either misunderstood or deliberately misled us about this program.

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