Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Was anybody here for her speech? Anyway, I am happy to relate it back to the bill because I am talking about the sorts of rorts that can go on under programs just like this. I will arrive at my point if you will allow me to just take this slightly circuitous route.

We had a program that did not create a job, that subsidised commercial activity that was going to go on anyway, that dragged all this demand forward and that did not do the industry one lick of good, because I can tell you it cost jobs in the end. I saw LPG conversion companies go out of business because all the work had been done in this massive boom that did nothing but push prices up. And you can bet that there were a few bottom feeders who entered that industry just to get their hands on the subsidy.

Here we have this program, which puts a $1,000 incentive into the business and then a wage subsidy after that, where we have a group of vulnerable potential interns. We know youth unemployment is at extraordinary levels and that it is often regionally based. I know exactly what the member for Corangamite is talking about when she talks about the challenges of this and the desire to do something, but it has actually got to be the right thing to do. Nobody on the government side of the program has gotten up and said, 'Well, this won't be rorted. Don't worry about it; we've got all these protections in there.' What you are setting up here is a program with no protections. For a start, in this bill there is no definition of 'an intern'. I could set up an intern pathway company where I partner with small business to take the interns from one place to another, and maybe I would get a fee and everybody would be a winner.

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