Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to speak on this thorough and considered report of the committee chaired by the member for Bruce because, like many people in this chamber, I have constituents whose experience with ParentsNext was terrible—not just unsatisfactory but terrible. I want to start by quoting from the foreword by the member for Bruce, where he says:

The Australian Government has a responsibility to support and empower parents to achieve full social and economic participation. This is not merely a moral imperative, but an economic priority. ParentsNext grew out of earlier efforts to help young teenage parents, and then highly disadvantaged single mums with positive net outcomes. The Committee's conclusion is that the continuation of a 'program' (we say pre-vocational service) to support vulnerable parents is essential.

ParentsNext, however, is now locked into a punitive frame and does too much harm for the good it also does. Unfortunately, the positive experiences were overshadowed by evidence of harms caused by onerous participation requirements and a harsh compliance regime. The Committee also heard that the program has an undue focus on paid employment, which may not be appropriate for many parents who have made the reasonable choice to focus on caring for their young children.

I read out those two paragraphs because I couldn't agree with them more. In my opinion, they sum up the problems with the ParentsNext program, although I would add to that last sentence, where it says, 'the undue focus on paid employment … may not be appropriate for many parents who have made the reasonable choice to focus on caring for their young children', that it's also not appropriate for young parents who made the decision to focus on their education.

In my electorate of Dunkley, we're very proud of a program that I've previously spoken about in this place, called the Young Parents Program, which started in February 2013. It started as a community partnership co-funded by Anglicare's Communities for Children and Chisholm Institute, and it now also has federal funding. It's delivered by the Frankston Mornington Peninsula Local Learning & Employment Network as the lead agency, which is where the federal funding comes from.

The Young Parents Program is tailored to meet the needs of young parents, young mothers and young women between 15 and 25 years of age who have disengaged from secondary education and have done so not entirely because but predominantly because they've got pregnant and had a child, often at the tender age of 15 or 16. The young people who are involved either have a child up to four years of age or are expecting a child. I've been there many times. Some of them have two children. But what the Young Parents Program does is allow the parents and the children to share the same space—it has child care there—with the support of three program staff: an educator, an early childhood educator and a family support worker. The participants are funded for two years of attendance in the program, where they are able to complete their VCE with a vocational major, the qualification at either year 11 or year 12 level.

That is a commitment to their future and their children's future by re-engaging in education. We know that there's almost nothing more important for a young person's future than engagement in education, and that's the same if you're a young person who also happens to be a mother. I know a number of the young women who are part of this program and who have graduated, and it has given them confidence. It has empowered them to know that they can be good mothers as well as learn, get jobs, and succeed in their own right.

Just a few weeks ago, I went to the open day. A number of the young women there have become nurses. They have finished TAFE courses to become enrolled nurses, which, when you think of where they were when they were 15 or 16, is an extraordinary achievement.

What I've also had to do, though, for some of the young women in that program is negotiate with ParentsNext on their behalf. There was a particular young woman who was exited from the ParentsNext program—and exited from all of her support payments—because she was at the Young Parents Program getting her education and missed appointments with ParentsNext. So, as a result of taking the decision to further her education and further herself and the life of her young child, she was exited from ParentsNext. It was extraordinary. Finally, she had to come to my office with the help of the Young Parents Program because she was desperate for that financial support that had been taken away from her in a completely punitive way. How was she to survive? For me, that is an example of what the committee chair talked about in his foreword to the interim report, in which he said that ParentsNext is 'locked into a punitive frame and does too much harm for the good it also does'.

Undoubtedly, there have been participants for whom ParentsNext has been a godsend, and there is no doubt that programs to assist young parents, particularly young mothers, to get education or training and to be in the workforce are important. It's just about how they're designed and how they're implemented. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that not only did the parliamentary committee recommend getting rid of ParentsNext and replacing it but that the economic inclusion committee also recommended that the government abolish the ParentsNext program and send its resources 'to a co-designed set of voluntary support programs for vulnerable families, particularly low-income parents with young children who want to re-enter the workforce or access more financially secure employment'. It further recommended that voluntary support programs 'should be designed with a fully funded evaluation strategy, to inform ongoing service improvements'. Those recommendations are pretty redolent of the recommendations in the committee's report. The women's equality task force also recommended abolishing the ParentsNext program.

I'm very pleased to say that that is absolutely what the Albanese Labor government—through Senator Katy Gallagher, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Women, and Tony Burke, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—have committed to do. That's because women around the country have stories similar to the one that I've just told about the program being punitive, counterproductive and causing harm. I'm very proud to be part of a government that committed to listening to women's experiences, committed to making decisions that make women's lives better and fairer and that empower women to have opportunities—a government that is not only listening but is then taking the next step and introducing policies to allow that to happen and getting rid of programs that stop it.

From 1 July 2024, ParentsNext will be no longer, and, from 5 May this year, all compulsory requirements for participants in ParentsNext were paused. This is a government that listens, cares and acts, and I'm confident that, with a properly designed replacement for ParentsNext and with a government that listens, cares and acts, never again will a young woman who is doing all that she can to get her education, while also looking after her young child, be exited from support programs that should help her do that.

Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a member of the Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services, I thank the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations for this referral and the member for Bruce for chairing the committee.

ParentsNext grew from good beginnings. Its initial aim, when it was trialled in specific local government areas, was focused on young parents who had not completed high school to help them complete Year 12 and young parents under the age of 23 who had been in receipt of income support for more than two years and weren't working or studying. These were the Helping Young Parents program and Supporting Jobless Families program, which grew into ParentsNext.

We know that people who have not finished high school find getting employment much more difficult and then getting well-paid employment with a career path even more difficult. We also know that children growing up in poverty are much more likely to live in poverty themselves as adults. We know that children growing up in jobless families not only experience poverty but are more likely to be unemployed themselves as adults. So the initial ParentsNext, when it began, really focused primarily on young mums, since 95 per cent of those in ParentsNext are women, with an aim to addressing some of the drivers of poverty for women, for single parent families and young families on parent support more broadly. And it grew from there.

The program, as we examined it last year and earlier this year, is a targeted pre-employment program that aims to help parents in receipt of parenting payment to plan and prepare for employment before their youngest child begins school. As its targeted cohort grew from the targeted LGAs, its focus also grew and, again, with good intentions.

Evidence shows that prolonged disconnection from the workforce can lead to a loss of job specific skills, currency of experience and currency of qualifications. It can also lead to a lack of confidence to re-enter the workforce. So the key policy drivers for ParentsNext were about reducing joblessness, welfare reliance and intergenerational welfare dependency, increasing female labour force participation and closing the gap for First Nations people's employment. It aimed to do this by targeting early intervention and assistance to parents at risk of long-term welfare dependency, helping parents identify and reach education employment goals through participation in activities, noting this was a pre-employment program, so there was no expectation that participants would actually achieve a job during this period. However, if they wished to do so, that could certainly be part of their plan. And finally, the program aimed to connect parents with local services to help them find employment.

It was an absolute honour to meet with so many participants and hear their stories. We heard from ParentsNext providers, academics, not-for-profit groups and advocacy groups, but I specifically want to call out the participants who shared their personal stories with us. It's extremely valuable to hear from them. And I recognise the time commitment from people who, by definition, are time poor, juggling young families amongst their other commitments, but also the emotional commitment that goes with sharing your personal story, the highs and the lows, with fundamentally a group of politicians who have come into town and are people you don't know.

The ParentsNext report describes the evidence we heard as polarised, and I would definitely agree with that description. Participants either loved it or they hated it. It was life changing or it was punitive during a particularly vulnerable period.

We heard some fantastic stories from women who said that they would never have left the house if this program hadn't been encouraging them to reconnect with their community. We heard from women who said that the program had helped teach them parenting skills and connected them in with other young mums to overcome isolation and give them some support for them and their young children. We heard of women finishing year 12, getting qualifications, getting current marketable work skills and gaining confidence that there is a pathway for them once their children go to school to get back into the employment market. We heard of women who were able to escape domestic violence because of their need to attend ParentsNext, which gave them an excuse to leave the house.

We also heard the bad stories. We heard of women whose payments were cut off because the baby was sick and they missed a playgroup session. I recognise the member for Dunkley's story of a young woman who was cut off for missing an appointment while she was actually at a ParentsNext education session. These were not unusual stories.

We had people who told us that all the joy of parenting was sucked out of their life when, suddenly, they had to attend parenting sessions or playgroups as a reportable activity, and that they felt like everyone was watching to make sure they turned up and did the right thing. They felt they were being monitored in their parenting role at a time when they were still learning how to parent.

Many of the providers also told us about their misgivings. Providers told us that starting the program when the baby was nine months old was just too early. Frankly, we could find no rationale for why it started at that age. We heard that young mums and young families should be able to enjoy that important bonding period with a new baby, when everything in your life changes and your focus is on learning how to be a parent to your new child. They told us that the work of parenting should be recognised and valued as work, whether you're on income support or whether you can afford to self-fund staying at home. I think we would all agree that parenting is really important work and can establish good attachment, which is such an important underpinning for emotional self-regulation as adults and a sense of security and confidence. This can be a wonderful time, but it can also be a very difficult time. Providers told us that the notion of having to cut a young parent off payments, knowing that they had one or more young children at home dependant on them, was abhorrent and the antithesis of what they as providers and their staff had actually got into the employment business to achieve.

The report into ParentsNext was handed down in February and made 30 recommendations. Most significantly, the committee recommended that ParentsNext be abolished at the end of its current contract and be replaced with another prevocational service. This is partly because the ParentsNext program brand has now got such a tainted reputation that we really felt that we needed to move away from that while not losing the basic benefits of assisting young parents to reconnect. The report recognises that reconnection to employment is an important part to address poverty: women's poverty, poverty of young families and children's poverty. It's important to be able to help young mums and young parents get employment post child.

We also recommended that a co-design process be undertaken for this new service so that we could actually get input from the participants, the academics and the providers—the people with the lived experience from all sides—about what will actually work to help these people at this vulnerable time. Importantly, we recommended that, in the meantime, mutual obligations be suspended immediately, and I'm pleased to say that this has already happened. This is the punitive framework that the chair speaks about in the report. We want the positives of what this program can provide without the punitive framework that makes early parenthood a misery and risks cutting off income for families with young children. I commend the report.

Debate adjourned.