Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had a forum last week in my electorate that involved a number of participants from Salvation Army job providers and a whole range of other people associated with young people getting jobs in our community. One of the things that they talked about in that process was the concern that they had about what this bill, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014, would mean for young people and the lack of training and other progressive opportunities beyond the Green Army program. The main thing they talked about was what the program will actually deliver to the young people who are involved in it and what the outcomes were that they would achieve. There are a number of questions that they still have in relation to that.

We believe that environmentally based work and training programs can be effective. They can be an effective pathway to work for many job seekers and they can provide environmental benefits, but they need to be implemented in a proper way where the people involved not only have a good outcome but also have a job to go to at the end of the day. There are a number of questions that remain unanswered in relation to this.

We agree that we need opportunities to get as many people into work as we can, that every individual who can work should be given that chance, but we know that can happen only with appropriate support. That is one of the things we are not sure about with this bill. Does it have appropriate support for young people to gain the skills to have the support they need, to have supervisory experience given to them by trained supervisors? There are a number of issues on which we would like some answers.

One of the main issues is about what it is going to do to young people in terms of coverage under the workplace health and safety act, the compensation act and a range of other questions which are still not answered. There needs to be access to formally recognised training delivered by a registered training organisation under the Australian Qualifications Framework, which gives confidence to participants that they will get appropriate training. We did not get that sense of confidence from people who support job seekers, certainly not in my community, and this is one of the major problems we see with this bill. There is no confidence out in the community in people who are responsible for looking after job seekers to provide them with support and give them confidence to go forward. There are a number of matters in this bill which need to be rectified in relation to that.