Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 10 March, along with the member for Chifley, I attended the launch in Blacktown of the Marist Youth Care’s highly successful Aboriginal Trainee Support Worker Program 2011, by the Minister for Indigenous Employment and Economic Development.

The program is now entering its third year, following an extremely successful retention rate of 81 per cent over the past two years. The program provides trainees with a recognised industry qualification and practical skills so that, when they become youth and support workers, they will be fully equipped to take up real jobs. As the minister noted, he has observed an amazing positive change in participants from the time they start the program to when they finish it. It is truly transformational. The Blacktown LGA, which falls across the electorates of Greenway and Chifley, has the largest Indigenous population in Australia for an urban centre. The need for effective Indigenous employment programs is therefore very high. All trainees are unskilled and have been long-term unemployed. They have been nominated by their community as ideal participants for Marist Youth Care’s extremely successful program. Over the next 12 months this government will provide $100,000 in funding through the Indigenous employment program to assist Marist Youth Care.

I would especially like to congratulate graduands Troy Duke of Glenwood and Rhukaya Lake from Quakers Hill, who successfully completed the 2010 program. I would like to thank Marist Youth Care, and make special mention of CEO Cate Sydes, for the fantastic work they do in granting Indigenous Australians the dignity of work in my community and the wider community. I wish all of the 2011 participants all the very best.