Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in favour of the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Youth Jobs Path: Prepare, Trial, Hire) Bill 2016. I was very interested to hear some of the comments from the member for Lyons. I note that he commended schemes like this in terms of how they would work in the industries with which he has experience and that he has concerns about how the scheme might play out in a range of other industries. I would say two things in response to that. First of all, the parameters of the scheme will not allow many of those fear-mongering claims to occur in practice. Secondly, it reveals maybe a lack of understanding about the number of unemployed youth and the number of firms and businesses in the industries he listed that would be perfect for finding jobs for unemployed youth. As I will discuss a little later, there are over 400,000 shopfronts in this country that fit the description of the industries that the member for Lyons listed. If they were all to attempt the sort of churn that he described, the churn would last for the first tranche of 12 weeks and then all the unemployed youth in Australia would have work experience, opportunities and things on their CV, which would be a fantastic result.

We do have a serious and lingering problem with youth unemployment in some parts of Australia. While unemployment is relatively low in my inner Brisbane electorate due to the economic opportunities that are present there, we can and must do better to address it. In particular, I think it is worth noting the contribution of the Hon. Grace Grace, a state MP in Brisbane, who is supposed to be the Minister for Employment in the Queensland Labor government. I think it was earlier this year that she said, 'There's not much that you can change.' Truly, that was not a heartening moment for the tens of thousands of young people looking for work around Queensland, especially in areas like Cairns and Townsville, where youth unemployment really is a crippling problem.

I do not think it is a case of saying youth unemployment is nothing new or that it is good enough to bury your head in the sand, or to put this problem in the too-hard basket. I think there are things that we can change to help reduce youth unemployment and I am willing to support proposals such as this bill to try to help. I have played a role in providing training to job seekers, creating traineeships and work experience, and fostering new jobs. All of that experience suggests that this proposal is likely to make a real difference. That is because I understand how sometimes, especially for many entry-level jobs that are available right now, recent experience and a foot in the door of the job market can contribute as much to someone's prospects of getting a job than to any formal qualification.

When I worked with the retail sector, I used to conduct regular experiments everywhere I went around the country—in conference halls, boardrooms and conventions—where I asked people about their first step into the job market, where they got their first experience and first opportunities from. It was always remarkably consistent how over half of the room had got there foot in the door of the jobs market through businesses like retail and hospitality, and more often than not a small business, that had given someone a go, given them some work experience, something to put on their CVs and, most importantly of all, some job-ready foundation skills like customer service or sales that they could then apply for the rest of their careers wherever those careers took them. Experience and opportunity were the key to many of those stories and it is experience and opportunity that we are trying to create with the proposals in this bill.

Employing youth provides self-esteem and self-worth and it provides financial independence and dignity for youth unemployed. The Turnbull government's national plan for economic growth and jobs will facilitate this economy's transition to broad-based growth over the next decade and beyond. The $840 million youth employment package provides an enterprising new approach to youth employment and we aim to help up to 120,000 vulnerable young people over four years to take advantage of job opportunities as the economy diversifies and transitions. The youth employment package will help get young people ready, give them a go and get them a job. Before I dive into the specifics of the bill, I would like to speak to the timely nature of this bill for my home state of Queensland.

The next tranche of Queensland's lockout laws will begin by February. Labor's lockouts are costing Queensland the equivalent of 6,000 jobs, mainly for younger workers and at a time when the Queensland economy obviously does have some lingering and local problems in some areas with high youth unemployment. The cost to the Queensland economy is estimated to be around $150 million a year and many of the young people who work in our pubs, clubs, live music venues and the night-life economy have already found their hours and their shifts reduced. Many will suffer further cuts to their hours and their take-home pay when the next tranche takes effect. So I suppose I want to make the observation that while the Turnbull government is getting on with its job of fostering employment and empowering our youth, our state Labor counterparts appear to be doing the exact opposite.

The Turnbull government recognises that one critical aspect of the youth unemployment issue is that youth can often be a proxy for experience. Young people, often due to a lack of experience in the workforce, can face higher difficulties getting the start they need in the workforce and more can be done and more must be done to help young people who are finding it hard to get into the workforce. Young Australians need the right assistance and encouragement to learn new skills, become job ready, get a job and keep the job. In formulating this bill, the Turnbull government has gathered feedback from businesses all around Australia, large and small, and the preliminary findings of that investment approach analysis, international best practice and domestic experience have all been taken into account to design an innovative Youth Jobs PaTH program that will truly make a difference. The pathway will encourage employers to hire young people by enhancing their employability, providing them with real work experience and increasing incentives for employers to take them on. The program will also help to incentivise and instil confidence amongst vulnerable young people to make the transition into employment.

The government's innovative Youth Jobs PaTH program will help young job seekers to move off welfare and into employment. I truly believe that. The three stages of the Youth Jobs PaTH are (1) to prepare—with detailed employability skills training; (2) to trial—an internship placement of up to 12 weeks with financial incentives to participate for both the businesses and the job seekers; and, finally, (3) to hire—including more accessible and increased wage subsidies for youth.

For the first part, we will help young people gain a foothold in the labour market by providing intensive, pre-employment skills training within five months of registering with jobactive. The first three weeks of training will focus on skills such as working in a team, presentation and appropriate IT skills, for instance. A further three weeks of training will centre on advanced job preparation and job-hunting skills.

Next, the government will introduce up to 120,000 internship placements over four years to help young job seekers who have been in employment services for six months or more to gain that valuable work experience. Job seekers and businesses, with the help of employment service providers, will work together to design internships of four to 12 weeks duration, during which time the job seeker will work 15 to 25 hours per week. Participation in an internship will be voluntary for both job seekers and businesses.

In addition to gaining valuable hands-on experience in a workplace, young people will receive $200 per fortnight on top of their regular income support payment while participating in the internship. Businesses that take on interns will receive an up-front payment of $1,000, as the previous speaker mentioned, and will benefit from the opportunity to see what a young worker can do and how they fit into the team before deciding whether to offer them ongoing employment, in much the same way as the former speaker described in his former industries and career.

Stage 3 of the new jobs path provides increased and streamlined wage subsidies for youth. From 1 January 2017, Australian employers will be eligible for a youth bonus wage subsidy if they hire a young job seeker who has been in employment services for six months or more. The most job-ready young people will attract a wage subsidy of $6,500, and a larger $10,000 wage subsidy will be available to businesses that employ job seekers who face real barriers to employment. Businesses will have the flexibility to employ young job seekers either directly through labour hire arrangements or combined with an apprenticeship or traineeship. As part of these reforms, existing wage subsidies will be streamlined, making them easier for employers to access.

In addition to creating Youth Jobs PaTH, the government is investing an extra $88.6 million in supporting job seekers, including young people, who wish to start their own businesses. This is an exciting and timely initiative which complements the government's National Innovation and Science Agenda and should help more young Australians to capitalise on the opportunities presented as Australia's economy transitions. The government's National Innovation and Science Agenda recognises the importance of innovation and the ideas boom, especially for young Australians, in this new economy. Australia's future growth and prosperity relies on having a sufficient workforce to fill the jobs of tomorrow. To do so, we will need to increase workforce participation, especially by supporting young Australians to get jobs.

In closing, I want to make the point very, very strongly that sometimes experience and an opportunity can make all of the difference for our young unemployed. While many people think first about the industries and the jobs where specific qualifications or tickets are needed to perform various jobs or roles, in fact many of the opportunities and jobs being created right now are in the services industries like retail and hospitality. These are the industries where experience and skills can play as big a role in earning you work and a foot in the door as any specific qualification. For the most part, qualifications are not needed to get a foot in the door or a promotion in these industries. These service industries like retail and hospitality, which are capable of creating all of the new starts and the opportunities for so many young people, are predominantly small businesses. These industries are already doing more than any other sector to provide jobs, opportunities and prosperity for the young, for women and for the least skilled, and we will be relying on them even more than ever as some of the so-called fast lanes of the economy have slowed.

As I have previously mentioned in this House, there are roughly 400,000 shopfronts, cafes, food outlets and stores around our country. About 10,000 of them are in my electorate of Brisbane. The majority of them are family-owned small businesses. Collectively, they are the biggest source of jobs and opportunities for Australians. More than one in 10 Australians work in them right now. If every shopfront, as I mentioned, could be encouraged to employ two more workers tomorrow, our unemployment rate would be zero and our youth unemployment rate would be zero, meaning that the majority of young people, as well as our mature-aged Australians, Indigenous Australians and the disabled who are looking for work, would find the dignity they want and deserve. While I do not believe that this bill will be able to achieve all of that, I do genuinely believe that this is a step in the right direction to achieving it—that it can help some of those businesses to have the confidence and the support to employ a young Australian.

If the government can keep coming up with solutions like this, we will have done more than any other recent governments to overcome the potential long-term welfare traps associated with youth unemployment. A few weeks ago I emailed the details of this proposal to small businesses all around Brisbane, and I am very, very pleased to say that the response was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. I support this bill, and I commend it to honourable members.

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