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

I rise tonight to acknowledge an extraordinary organisation in my electorate that in recent years has done amazing work with young people who have become disengaged from the community to bring them back into the education system and the workforce. That organisation is called Youth Connections. This extraordinary organisation will unfortunately, after the Abbott-Hockey budget last night, disappear at the end of this year. There has been a savage cut to funding for Youth Connections programs all around the country, and my community and many young people in it will be the poorer for it.

This is an amazing organisation. It works with young people who have fallen in the gap—kids who may have left school and have become completely disengaged or involved in drugs or petty crime and are essentially on a path to nowhere. This is not a compulsory program. These young people volunteer to work with Youth Connections and their programs. They work with them for one and sometimes two years. The success rate of this program is quite phenomenal. They have a success rate of 80 per cent—80 per cent of people who go through the program end up in education or employment, not a week later, a month later or at the end of the program but two years later. Two years after participating in this program 80 per cent of the young people who engage with this organisation are back in the workforce or continuing their education. That is an amazing achievement and it is one that deserves support from a government, not a savage cut.

In Parramatta we have quite a high youth unemployment rate. It is around 16.8 per cent. It varies across the suburbs: in some areas it is much lower and some areas it is much higher. This Youth Connections organisation in a community like Parramatta is absolutely vital. The cost of Youth Connections in the Parramatta-Auburn-Blacktown area is about $700,000 a year. They handle 215 kids at a time within that budget. That is higher than the 195 students they are contracted to take. Again they are punching above their weight and above the level of funding that they receive. I calculate that the cost to the taxpayer per year of this service for each young person is about $3,500. I would contest that that is quite a reasonable investment for the taxpayer to make. For $3,500 they can take a child who is on the pathway to a life without purpose and can bring them back onto a good track—back into the workforce or back into the education system. The savings to the taxpayer over the life of that person would be far in excess of that. This is in many ways false economy. This is cutting a program that works, that makes a difference and that generates an extraordinary return in savings to the taxpayer—and we will see it, unfortunately, disappear in my community at the end of the year.

In addition to that, we also saw the government introduce in the budget last night some quite punitive changes for young people. We saw the changes to Newstart. We saw a policy that sees unemployment benefits for people under 30 delayed for six months. A person in their late 20s who went to university and did a postgrad, got a job, got married, got a mortgage, had two children and is retrenched at the age of 28 or 29 because their company goes offshore, or for other reasons, will now suddenly find themselves having to wait six months before they are eligible for Newstart. My fear—and I have been talking to some service providers in my community and they share my fear—is that we will find in years to come people in their late 20s essentially without funds and homeless. We will have a dramatic increase in the number of people in their 20s who find themselves in appalling circumstances with literally no money.

These are two things that this government did in the budget last night which will have an extraordinary detrimental effect on the young people in Parramatta. I seriously urge the government to reconsider this. It is a serious matter if you suddenly find yourself unemployed in your 20s, literally without funds, and there is a six-month wait. I ask them: where do they go?