Mr COBB(8.27 p.m.) —It is with great pleasure that I support this initiative by the Minister for Schools, Vocational Educa tion and Training (Dr Kemp) and the government to bring this measure before the House. In fact, approximately 10 years ago I called for a similar measure in this House. I am pleased to see it has come to fruition here today.

To kick this off $21.6 million has been set aside in the budget. Of that, $15.5 million will be used to set up in the first instance 70 pilot projects around Australia and $6.1 million will be put towards administration and towards monitoring and assessment of the initiative so that we can get it right and expand it in the future.

The government intends that the pilot projects will be largely supervised by community organisations. A modest amount of money is also set aside for child-care costs of those who are married with children participating in the program. Also the participants will get an extra $10 a week over and above what is colloquially known as the dole.

In the first instance there will be only 10,000 participants in this scheme. Once the program is bedded down and running well, I would like to see another nought, at least, added to that number. But we have to start somewhere. I would like to see the modest element of training that will go into this program expanded as the program develops over the coming years.

In the first instance also it is restricted to those between the ages of 18 and 24. Eventually, I would like to see it extended to other unemployed people in the community, particularly those over 40, because I believe they can also participate to their benefit in these programs. It is also in the first instance limited to those who have been unemployed for over six months.

There will be a small element of compulsion in the program for those who do not want to participate. We are told that these people are out of work, that they are seeking work and that they want to be paid for the work. That is what the government is doing. We are going to offer them work and we are going to pay them for it. I do not think there is anything remarkable about that. If you are in the work force and do not turn up for work, you do not get paid and nobody even bats an eyelid at that. So why should it be any different for these people?

In the first instance the work done will be for the community benefit. There may be some room in the future for these people to be employed in the private sector, but that is something for further down the track. We have had various job creation programs over the last decade or so. The new work opportunities program was the most spectacular as far as spending taxpayers' money goes. In some instances it was costing, in the end, $143,000 for every person placed in the work force. Much better was the wage subsidy scheme, which was only costing a little over $4,000 for every person who found a job.

The frustrating thing with this legislation is that we have to wait until September before it can be implemented, even though it was announced earlier this year. That is because we have to change the social security legislation to make it legal for these people to be paid. The reason for the delay is not so much getting it through the lower House—we are in agreement on that—but the delays that will take place in the Senate. The Labor Party are against this even though they are forced to go along with it because it appears that well over 90 per cent of the population are in favour of it. They will do everything in the Senate to delay it.

Mr O'Connor —What? A pilot scheme for an intractable problem?

Mr COBB —We have just seen from that interjection the sort of hostility towards this program despite the lip service the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Beazley) has given to it. They would love to oppose it outright but they dare not because they know the Australian population are in favour of it.

In the first instance we are going to have 70 community based pilot programs. What I particularly like about the scheme is that it will have a regional and rural focus, particularly in towns with high youth unemployment. The community groups that can supervise the programs include bodies like Apex, Lions and Rotary as well as chambers of commerce and charity groups such as the Salvation Army.

The dole, if I can use that colloquial term, is roughly equivalent to two days pay for unskilled labour. Those in the age group 18 to 20 will be required to do two six-hour days a week, and those between the ages of 21 and 24 will be required to do two 6½-hour days a week. They will receive the dole payment plus an extra $10 a week to cover the cost of incidentals. They will still have three working days a week left over in which to go out and look for work. If they participate in this scheme it will help them greatly. It will give these unemployed people a sense of self-worth. In many cases it will restore their dignity and pride. When they receive their cheque at the end of the week they can hold their heads up high. It will look a lot better on their CV when they knock on an employer's door looking for work. It will help break the cycle of unproductive activity and isolation that particularly young people can sometimes fall into.

The work that they will be doing is worthwhile work—projects on the environment, projects on the restoration of community buildings, various community services work and charity work. This sort of work would not otherwise be done. It will not be displacing anybody from a job at all, so those in jobs need not fear these sorts of schemes. It is work that the community badly needs doing. There are many simple things that could be done. Charitable organisations and community groups can have people mowing pensioners' lawns, attending to hospital gardens and even doing simple things like going along to people in nursing homes and sitting down and spending a bit of time with these lonely people that the busy staff do not have time to spend with. There are simple things like reading the sporting pages of the paper to someone who may be interested in sport, or telling them about various things that they might have questions about. It would help those elderly people immeasurably as well as give young people a sense of what it is to care for elderly people in our community. Projects like that—and I only mention one or two—would be very valuable in our community and would give the participants on both sides a great sense of satisfaction about what they were doing.

According to the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare, the health status of people who are out of work is often not what it could be. Young males out of work are 64 per cent more likely to report fair or poor health than people in work. Amongst young females it is even higher; the percentage there is 82 per cent. So we are even helping the health of these people by getting them out into the community and involving them in a way that has not been done before. The community benefit from this is immeasurable. We have, tragically, over 800,000 people in this community unemployed—looking for work. So we can see the potential of these sorts of schemes in the work force.

I stress that this is only a first step, and it is only one of many steps that we have to take. One thing I would like to stress with this scheme is that I understand we will not be counting the participants in the scheme when it comes to doing the unemployment figures. These people will still be counted as unemployed. We will not be doing it in any way to fudge the figures, as has been done in the past where we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money in a desperate attempt to get the figures down in an artificial manner. There is not a set amount of work out there in the community to be done: there are virtually unlimited amounts of work to be done and these people can participate in that sort of work.

I would like to spend a minute or two talking about the deferred pension bonus that was announced in the budget brought down by the Treasurer (Mr Costello) only a couple of weeks ago whereby people do not have to retire at the age of 65 but can continue to work on to the age of 70 and receive a deferred lump sum payment because they will not be drawing on the taxpayer by drawing a pension.

It is said by some critics that those people will be displacing young people from going into the work force. That is not an opinion that I happen to agree with, because a person of 65 is often at the peak of their working life with all their decades of accumulated experience. A great example of that is one that I came across when I was going through uni versity. I studied at university with Sir John Eccles's son. His father had won the Nobel Prize for work on the mechanism of nerve transmissions. Sir John turned 65 and he had to be retired. He wanted to continue in the work force but could not do so in this country. It was a great tragedy. The Yanks snapped him up in a flash and off he went to America. He worked there for another five or 10 years, contributing greatly to our knowledge in scientific physiology. That is probably a dramatic example, but it is these sorts of people whom we are losing from our work force and they are not displacing young people from the work force at all. So I think it is a very commendable initiative, and in no way is it threatening the jobs of the young people at all.

In the time remaining to me, I would like to talk about a particular initiative in my electorate called the Barwon-Darling Alliance formed by three councils in my electorate—the councils of Brewarrina and Bourke, and also those of Wilcannia, Ivanhoe and Menindee which are called the Central Darling Council. They have put together a proposition to the government to run shire council-supervised projects for unemployed people in their electorates. I think this work for the dole scheme and also the CDEP scheme, which is run out of the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio, have great application in what they are proposing.

In effect, they are saying that in these remote rural communities there is very little work at the end of the day for unskilled people, and I think we have to recognise that. In Brewarrina, a town of about 1,500-odd people, 50 per cent of the population is Aboriginal. In Bourke, it is probably only about half of that in proportional terms. But, of the thousand people who live in Wilcannia, about 80 per cent are Aboriginal. Let's face it: there are no jobs as things stand at present for those Aboriginal people, and I do think that there is a case for some significant element of government subsidy to give these people some sort of pride and dignity and to get them doing something. We have to recognise that the outcomes for them at the end of the day, as far as getting a job goes, are not good, but at least this will give them some chance. When we assess these programs we have to realise one central factor: that the social benefit that will flow from getting these people into work programs is well worth the taxpayer's dollar and it just cannot be measured out of one portfolio. We just cannot go to Senator Amanda Vanstone's portfolio and say, `We are going to spend $30,000 on taking an unemployed person and putting them through one of these job programs for 12 months,' while expecting to get a high job outcome at the end of it. If you got one in 10 into a job at the end of these programs, it would be a miracle.

You have to realise that that cost to the taxpayer is repaid manyfold if you look at the full equation—what I call the whole social benefit equation. I am talking about the benefit that would flow to other portfolios. For example, the state Department of Community Services would save a lot of money from getting these people off the streets and into some sort of job training program. With the state Attorney-General's Department or the state Ministry for Police, you have only to prevent one court case and you have probably saved something of the order of $50,000 or more. If you looked at when these programs in new work opportunities were actually conducted in Wilcannia, you would find the crime rate in that town dropped in some instances by 80 to 90 per cent.

I realise that new work opportunities programs were very expensive to the taxpayer in other areas of Australia. I have acknowledged that, and I do believe that they should be changed, as the government is doing, but in remote rural communities, particularly with a high Aboriginal population, these sorts of programs have their place. Whether you call it new work opportunities, work for the dole or a CDEP scheme, these programs have great merit because they get the crime rate down, they stop vandalism in the towns and they give a great sense of morale to the towns. I have seen the results of these programs in Bourke, for example, where they were doing up the local cemetery, planting trees, doing painting and putting in guards around trees in the town whose branches were being broken off. Those programs alone, if continued, do more for reconciliation amongst whites and blacks in a community than virtually anything else. When the Aboriginal people can participate, get some dignity and get some ownership of these programs, they do not then go on to vandalise the projects that they have participated in. That in itself is a worthwhile consideration.

So I would like Minister Vanstone, Minister Herron and other relevant ministers to consider these things and to take them into account perhaps while talking amongst themselves. I know it is difficult to get two departments to talk together, such as the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. That is difficult enough, but even more difficult is to get a federal program to talk to a state program. You could get the state Attorney-General's Department and the state police minister's department and the state Department of Community Services together and say, `Let us look at the full social benefit equation and let us put together who will benefit from it.' Perhaps there could be not just a financial input from Amanda Vanstone's department—if she is going to run these programs—which is a high cost to her—but also a contribution from other federal departments and other state government departments. I am talking about New South Wales here, but this would apply right across Australia in remote areas in some instances. If we pretend to call ourselves a Christian community, we cannot let Aboriginal people having rates of unemployment in these towns in excess of 95 per cent in some instances.

I commend my suggestion to the House. I take my hat off to General Manager John Page and Mayor Angelo Pippos in Brewarrina, to Alan Valey and Wally Mitchell in Bourke, and to Peter Hee and Robert King in Wilcannia for the submission that they have put forward. I hope that it will be looked at in a positive and favourable light. I commend the work for the dole project and the government for bringing it forward. I can see it expanding even further and being married into other programs and doing something for the genuine unemployed people in this country.