Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

To resume where I left off yesterday on my contribution on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014, we believe that the Green Army program should be considered as ordinary income—and participants remain eligible for income support—or there be mandated a minimum number of hours per week that ensures that the amount received by the participant is not less than the amount that they would receive under youth allowance. There is also a denial of basic compensation if participants are injured at work. Participants in the Green Army program are not regarded as employees or trainees. Participants will not be entitled to the protection of workplace health and safety laws, workers compensation laws, superannuation, leave, job protection, antidiscrimination protection or fair dismissal procedures. They will exist in a vacuum.

Clearly this program is not a genuine training program and will continue many of the disempowering and exploitative practices of other earlier programs. Given that many program participants are likely to be highly vulnerable, with some having just left school, they should be afforded the strongest possible workplace protections. Workers who are injured at work should be able to receive compensation for that injury. Workers who are harassed, bullied or discriminated against should be able to turn to the relevant Commonwealth ombudsman, and the structure of this bill does not offer these guarantees. The Australian Greens will not support any 'workforce' program where the workers are not legally workers and have no workplace rights.

The Australian Greens recognise that providing ongoing training and support and designing and implementing programs that will lead to genuine outcomes requires administrative funding for both the sponsor and the service provider organisations, yet the program guidelines do not demonstrate that this funding will be adequately provided. A lack of administrative funding will prevent organisations from delivering quality programs that would have genuine environmental and social benefits.

Even if all these practical design flaws were addressed, there is still no reason to believe that this program will lead to work readiness or genuine environmental outcomes. In fact, during the consultation phase of the program, the department was quite clear in stating that this is not a job readiness initiative. After participants come out of the six months in the program, they are likely to be even less work ready than they were when they entered it because a job seeker participating in this program will no longer be actively looking for permanent work or connected to their job service agency, so they are going to be caught between the two.

The department has also acknowledged in the information it provided about the project guidelines that the skills obtained by the participants are unlikely to lead to employment in the environmental area. This is because they will just basically be planting trees. This scheme is extremely unsuitable for young job seekers. A training program should lead to clear employment prospects, but, given that accredited training is not necessarily a part of this program, there is absolutely no guarantee that participants will build their skill level to that required for further employment.

Even if these concerns were addressed, the readiness to move into study or employment is not particularly useful if there are neither jobs nor transition pathways available to the program participants. The reality is that this government is putting more pressure on environmental funding, and it is likely to reduce rather than increase the number of employment opportunities available to young people in natural resource management. At this point, I flag that I am moving a second-reading amendment:

At the end of the motion, add:

but the Senate

(a) notes the recent reduction to Landcare funding;

(b) regrets that the Green Army Programme funding allocation will in part replace the funding that was previously available to Natural Resource Management groups to undertake high quality conservation work and that the net effect of this program will be to transfer funding from skilled Natural Resource Management workers with a long term focus, to unskilled, work-for-the-dole style volunteers and short term projects; and

(c) condemns the Government for introducing a program that will reduce the funding available for conservation in Australia.

The dismantling of the Biodiversity Fund, which would have injected millions of dollars of program funding into NRM, is a prime example of this.

Nor has it been shown that this program could lead to genuine environmental outcomes. Previous programs that directed unskilled workers to undertake environmental works have been largely unsuccessful in delivering significant and lasting environmental outcomes. The examples that I have seen which have in fact had positive environmental outcomes have been delivered by very dedicated conservation, Landcare or NRM type groups that put in a lot of volunteer hours themselves to make them work. I do not think that the model that is going to be presented here with the Green Army will ensure that sort of commitment from a lot of the organisations involved, and I seriously doubt that we are going to get strong environmental outcomes out of this process. The Murdoch University Professor of Sustainability, Glenn Albrecht, is reported as having said:

If it's really just weeding and tree planting, similar to the sorts of things that were done under the Howard government's programs, a lot of that work, particularly in periods of savage drought, was simply undone because there was no long-term follow up …

The Green Army may increase the number of people working in the landscape, but, by its very nature as a supposed training program, it cannot replace the work of skilled environmental workers. But, if the gutting of the Landcare management program continues, the Green Army is likely to just allow program sponsors to replace what would otherwise have been done by that workforce with Green Army workers on cheap, casual wages but with fewer on-costs, and the workers do not even get the benefits of proper training or support that will in fact make them job ready. This is a keep-people-busy program rather than a training program.

By replacing rather than expanding our pool of environmental workers, the government will further undermine the quality of Australia's conservation workforce by taking away well-paid jobs and replacing them with low-paid, unsafe jobs. This should not be a program for providing an alternative, cheap workforce for rural and regional employers, but that is what it is going to be. It will soak up available NRM funding, which will not have either an environmental outcome or a significant job or training outcome for the people involved. It will look like it is doing something, but you will not get those environmental outcomes. It will not be strategic.

Another point that has been raised with me is that people in the bush are very concerned that in fact they would not even see assistance from the Green Army because it will be hard to get these workers out past peri-urban projects. So you will also see a distortion of where the Green Army actually goes.

In conclusion, it is nothing short of exploitative to direct potentially tens of thousands of unskilled young people into short-term projects which will not lead to permanent employment, simply to cover up the fact that this government is not prepared to take genuine action on eitherproviding positive incentives or genuinely supporting young people with training and helping them overcome their barriers to employment. It will not provide genuine action on environmental issues.

This is particularly disturbing, given that the government are also cutting back on both higher education funding and supports available to help young people enter the workforce on a permanent basis. It seems that they are having a go at every end, which will make life harder for young Australians who are trying to find work and who are trying to acquire skills. This measure keeps people off income support for a period but does not enable them to genuinely gain the skills that they need if they do want to enter NRM or Landcare. This bill is not supported by the Greens. There are too many fundamental flaws in the scheme. It is a repeat of schemes that have not provided significant outcomes for either the environment or young people. It should go back to the drawing board. We should have genuine training requirements built in. The Landcare groups and the NRM groups that are expected to deliver this program should have their funding returned to them. We need to invest in Landcare.

The Minister for Agriculture, Minister Joyce, said that the Green Army is a replacement for Landcare or an addition to Landcare. It is not a replacement for Landcare and Landcare groups are furious about that. They need proper funding, not funding taken off them to give to the Green Army. The Greens will not be supporting this bill.