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Speech to Jobs Australia Conference, Melbourne - Oct 29
04-November-2010
I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the members of the Government are entering from stage left and the members of the Opposition from stage right, but I guess that’s just how it is! And Rod, a green and gold tie, no, it needs to be blue! Although I’m a rural member of parliament representing most of Western NSW and the Southern Murray Darling Basin, I’m a member of the Liberal Party not the National Party. Thank you very much for having me. Can I also acknowledge the traditional owners. Can I thank Jobs Australia and David Thompson and can I also recognise the two fine publications that have been launched today. I don’t have anything to launch.
I want to talk about the Opposition’s policy and I also want to in a way introduce myself because I haven’t been the Shadow Minister for Employment Participation for very long- just a few short weeks. In that time I’ve tried - and will be doing more - to engage with the sector and understand what matters to you and what you’d like to see from us in terms of policy development. There aren’t many advantages of being in Opposition, but one of them is that as much as possible we can start from a reasonably clean slate and look at reasonably innovative ideas. I want to do that.
I think a person’s approach to jobs and work comes a lot from personal experience. I just want to reflect really briefly on a couple of the formative parts of my background that I bring to this work.
One is that in the early 1980’s when I first entered the job market, the unemployment rate was 11% and I suffered a very real fear of not having a job and was out of work on two or three occasions and it wasn’t a good experience. But I also want to just remember a time when I worked in the shearing sheds of Western NSW and Queensland. It was not quite a fall from grace but certainly quite a rapid change in direction. Prior to that I’d been an air traffic controller and a commercial pilot. And I found myself as a rousabout and a shearer’s cook for two and a half years in most of outback Australia.
I was a young person but this experience taught me some very important lessons in life. In the shearing shed you get all sorts of people. But many of them, in fact most of them have come from difficult and challenging backgrounds. I can remember the heir to Bundaberg Rum and certainly he was always attached to a bottle of Bundaberg Rum and he never really got it together but he was there every morning at the start of the day. I can remember the kids, many of them Indigenous, who came from impossibly difficult backgrounds and they were there at 7.30am on the board at the start of the day. I remember the cooks that did the job I used to do and some of the odd stories they told but I remember us all sitting at the huts at the end of the day, all joined by he discipline and the dignity of work. And for those people having that framework around their lives meant more to them than any welfare payment and kind words or any notional gift. The fact was they were part of a team and it didn’t matter how tough it was, I can tell you because if you’ve worked in a shearing shed you are there at 7.30 in the morning and you are there at 5.30pm and if you’re the cook you’re there a lot longer!
Now the not-for-profit sector which of course you comprise has such a critical role to play in helping Australian job seekers into jobs. Many job seekers would have struggled to re-enter the workforce had it not been for the efforts of many of you in the room today.
Australia has been a trail blazer in regards to employment services. We were the first country in the world to contract out employment services. And there was a need for bold decisions and brave government and I believe that the Howard Government delivered in this.
Now, I’ll be quite honest from the outset here and say that some of the changes that occurred with the shift to Job Services Australia bear rethinking. And I will touch on these a little later on.
But I’d like to start with something that is of real concern to me as it no doubt is to everyone in this room. And that is the level of youth unemployment in this country. It is at terribly high levels.
We do need a long term strategy to address the increasing numbers of young Australians who are not engaged in employment or education. These job seekers are at serious risk of becoming marginalised from the labour market. And it is critical that these young Australians are given support from the moment they leave school, ensuring they either find suitable further study or a job.
We all know that youth bears the brunt of economic downturns. The question now is what we do to ensure that those who have been affected are supported into employment, instead of becoming further disengaged from the workforce. Because the reality is we may face a generation of young people losing their way.
A national youth unemployment rate of 16.7% for people aged 15-19 is a major concern to me. 140,900 young Australians are unemployed. In Victoria, in north-west Melbourne, where we are right now, unemployment for these teenagers is 55% which is a national disgrace.
They need our help. They need support to gain skills that make them more employable. And we do need to work together to help them break this cycle of despondency and despair.
They need the confidence and the resilience to bounce back when they get knocked back from a job. It’s a very hard thing to do, but we need to encourage them to keep on trying.
And if we look at our own children or the children that are in normal and happy families in the higher socio-economic groups, and the kick in the guts they get when they have a knock back and I imagine and I have seen how much harder it is for somebody who is already feeling a bit sidelined and a bit out of the action.
But not everyone wants to study more after leaving school. Yet there has been a strong push by the Labor Government to push some of these people onto a training treadmill. For many school leavers they don’t want to do a Certificate II or III course- they just want to enter the workforce, take home a pay check and get on with their lives. What we can do for these teenagers is ensure that in the time they are unemployed, we are giving them skills that will make them job ready.
Now Work for the Dole provides a structured environment that resembles work. Job seekers can learn skills that will boost their employability and assist them in getting a job. It teaches teamwork and communication and provides the experience that many job seekers need.
I don’t need to tell anyone here today of the Coalition’s commitment to mutual obligation. In our view it is fair that those who are supported by the welfare system give back to the community that supports them. However, there have been a few attempts in my view by this Government to wind back mutual obligation.
In particular the decision to have a 12 month time lag before a JSA job seeker is enrolled in a Work Experience activity is a real problem. These activities should be helping to make job seekers job ready, yet job seekers are now not engaging with a work experience activity until after a year of unemployment. Under the former Howard Government, job seekers entered Work for the Dole or equivalent after 6 months unemployment.
I note that the Minister spoke to you this morning about Julian Disney’s review of Job Seeker Compliance. I met with Professor Disney when I was in Sydney recently and I was very impressed with his review, the detail and his incredible understanding after focussing for that period of time and I’ve asked him if I can come back to him for future advice on this.
But my concern with any winding back of mutual obligation is that it sends the wrong message to job seekers. In return for unemployment benefits, we should expect people to be actively seeking employment and attempting to get off welfare. Now for the vast majority of job seekers, this is their goal. They are conscientiously sending in application after application in their quest for a job. There are some job seekers who are less engaged, and they may need a reminder that mutual obligation is a two-way street.
As a part of that reciprocal responsibility, the Government will support them and provide them the assistance they need to find a job. The onus is on the job seeker then to actively engage in the job search and application process.
This leads me to the next topic that I want to raise. One of the Coalition’s criticisms of the Job Services Australia contract is the lack of early intervention for job seekers. There is virtually no support for job seekers who are newly unemployed.
Early intervention for job seekers is absolutely vital. People need assistance from the outset. From that moment when they lose their job, or enter the workforce, they need help. We need a better strategy to assist people than the meagre offerings provided to stream one job seekers.
And I can’t stress that more strongly. I met with my friend Graham Long at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross recently and was shocked to hear stories of people who now present themselves at the Wayside Chapel. Often they make quite a few visits before they talk to anyone but they’re watched closely by the staff , who are wonderful people as they are in all those services. There are others in that part of Sydney and our major cities. But to hear from those workers at the Wayside about people who have fallen so far so fast from jobs, homes, relationships- a so-called normal life, to be coming there for help when they have nothing really makes me determined that we make sure in our policy development that we help those people earlier on in this process.
Now, I know what you really want to hear is the Coalition’s policy agenda. Certainly, focussing on more early intervention is on the radar. We want to ensure that we can reverse the increase in long term unemployed. We’ll look at work experience activities that provide skills that increase a person’s employability. We’ll look at ways to ensure more young Australians are leaving school ‘job ready’.
As far as employment services goes, the Coalition is committed to ensuring greater stability and assurance for your sector. The Job Services Australia tender did throw the sector into a degree of chaos, and I applaud you all for your resilience and effort in establishing your Job Services Australia business. However, the chaos that occurred was regrettable, particularly when it affected job seekers and disrupted their servicing. Under a future Coalition Government, where contract rollovers and guaranteed business for providers who are performing well are a possibility, then I certainly believe we need to consider these options.
Certainly the Coalition has a number of other policies which will complement our employment participation agenda.
Going into the election we announced a Paid Parental Leave scheme that had we been elected, would have seen parents eligible for 26 weeks paid leave, at their actual salary or the Federal Minimum wage, whichever is greater.
Unfortunately, Australian families will not be benefiting from our generous scheme in the immediate future and I haven’t given up discussions with the Independent Members of Parliament about a paid parental scheme that I think more mums will take up as an option and then Australia will have more babies and our productivity will increase, etcetera, linking the social and the economic arguments together.
I should note that I also have another portfolio in Opposition and that it that I also have responsibility for childhood and early childhood learning. This is an industry currently in turmoil, as they await the roll out of the National Quality Framework, which will see a sharp increase in the cost of child care, as a result of the introduction of more stringent staff to child ratios for many and new qualification pre-requisites. I’ll be working harder to develop our child care policies that collaborate with our employment participation agenda.
I’ve given a rather brief outline of our policy direction, but for the most part, I want to engage with you, the providers. I would like an open, frank dialogue- if there is something you don’t like, I want to know. I also want you to tell me what works well and where we can improve. You are at the coal face on a daily basis and I would like to share your knowledge. I want to hear your stories and your experiences and use them to help me develop beneficial and credible policies for the future.
Please email me and I will respond personally- like many Members of Parliament I’m horribly attached to the Blackberry and when I have time I love to hear directly from people wherever they may be. My constituents or people that operate in my portfolio areas. Unless I do that it’s very hard to stay connected on a daily basis. I’m still very keen to come and visit you where you are. If you think that you are part of a model or a delivery system that works really well, please invite me to come and have a look at it and convince me of the good aspects and the need to keep them so we can work on policy into the future.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you and I’d love to chat with you over a cup of coffee now- I think I’m the only thing between you and a coffee break.
Thank you.