Mr CHARLES (4:45 PM) —I am going to talk about youth employment too. I want to address five basic issues. The first issue is wages, which directly relates to this Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment) Bill 1998 . The other issues are literacy and numeracy, education, skills and careers advice.

I am going to resist the temptation to spend my 20 minutes trying to counter the words of the member for Grayndler. That would certainly be appropriate, I can assure you. But I would rather say something positive than spend my time on the negative, trying to de-bunk some of the rubbish that we heard about the motives associated with this particular piece of legislation.

This is not the first time that the coalition government has attempted to legislate to make sure that we retain a historic system of age based youth wages. History will tell us that we have, for a very long time, paid young people according to their age. We have done this for a very good and proper reason—young people generally lack the experience and the maturity of adults until they get the experience in the job place. So employers have a real bias, and that is that if the wage rate must be the same they would rather employ someone with higher skills, more experience, greater maturity and greater willingness to do the job. In the absence of a discriminatory—if you want to call it that—wage system which attempts to advantage young people, we may have a worse youth unemployment situation than we have today.

I am certainly not happy about the level of youth unemployment in Australia today. I have not been happy about it for a very long time. I cannot recall being happy about it in my time in this parliament.

Junior rates have contributed to giving young people an opportunity. But it is the Labor Party, through legislation, that attempted to take away those rates in 1997. With an amendment we did manage to string it out until next year, but in the meantime no-one has come up with an equitable solution that will provide opportunities for young people to work and that takes account of their experience and maturity without basing at least minimum wages—not maximum wages—on age. So I would contend that this legislation is designed to assist young people.

But it goes further than that. The legislation will now require the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to promote inclusion of junior rates in awards and agreements. We are attempting to create a culture shift. There are so many young people who are already dependent on junior wage rates in this country that it is important that we do not shift the goalposts and all of a sudden have the unemployment rate even worse and further disadvantage young people who do not have the skills, maturity or education to start up higher on the ladder. All of us have to start at the bottom somewhere.

I will comment on one thing that the member for Grayndler said. He talked about people on this side of the House being born with silver spoons. He said that he had a paper round and that he had to work at McDonald's. I had a paper round for years and years. I worked in a potato field picking up potatoes. I worked as a carpenter's helper, I dug ditches and I worked as a builder's labourer—on and on it goes. So what? What does how you grew up prove? What does it prove if you had to pay your way through school? I paid my way through school too. So what? What does that prove? Does that make me any more competent to talk about what is in the best interests of our youth and our country than somebody who did not have to work, somebody whose parents paid their way through school? It has nothing to do with it whatsoever.

McDonald's is a good example, today, of a company that makes the system work. In 1996 and 1997 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training held an 18-month-long inquiry into youth employment. We talked to McDonald's Australia, the retail industry, Woolies, Coles and lots of other people. One of the things that McDonald's told us was that not only do they provide extensive training programs for the young people who worked for them, but that their operation in Australia is entirely different from what it is in the United States or other countries. Young people get a go in McDonald's in Australia while in other countries they really do not. For example, in the United States, McDonald's operations fall under the Federal minimum wage act so McDonald's hires largely older people who are retired from the general overall active work force or who have not been able to find other employment. They hire mature people more than they hire young people.

So McDonald's Australia has created a positive discriminatory policy towards young people. I have talked to lots of young people who are 18, 19 or 20. They are still working at McDonald's, so it is rubbish about being tossed out. That is not right. It may happen in shops somewhere because they are all individual employers.

Everybody we talked to in industry said, `When we have resumes from several kids and we do the interviews and we are down to the final selection process between two young people on the short list and their skills and qualifications are reasonably the same, then, if one of them has McDonald's experience and the other one does not, the chances are that the one with the McDonald's experience is going to get the job.' Why? Because of attitude. McDonald's teaches attitude. That is the first thing employers look for when they go to hire a young person—attitude.

The second is literacy. I talked about junior rates and how important it is for us to maintain those rates. Likewise, it is very important for us to make sure that young people are literate and are numerate, using whatever it takes. I have argued the case for reform of early childhood literacy development in this place for almost nine years. It is true that in any inquiry you undertake anywhere you go, any employer you talk to or any employment representative body will tell you that we have a literacy problem. They will tell you that young people who cannot read and write properly are disadvantaged in the job market, and severely disadvantaged. Any social worker that you talk to about the kids that they have in their care or that they talk to and work with will tell you that, of the street kids that they come in contact with, in the very high 90 percentiles those kids have literacy and numeracy problems.

That goes all the way down the social strand. If you find young people in correctional institutions and you talk to the officers involved, they will tell you that almost universally those young people have poor reading and writing skill. And it is not their fault. I agree with the member for Grayndler—it is not their fault. It is our fault. It is the teachers' fault. It is the education system's fault. While ever we fail to teach any young child how to read and how to write at an appropriate level, we have failed that child. It is very difficult to recover the situation once a child passes on through school and reaches an age when they can potentially leave school. We know, and the statistics prove it every day, that the young people who leave school before the end of grade 12, who leave at 15, 16 or even 17, are going to be disadvantaged in the job market for a very long time. There are some who will get lucky. There are some who will go back and find an adult education class and will learn how to read and learn how to write. They may go on and do well, and they may then attend further education. They might go to TAFE or they might go to university. They might ultimately wind up in very good and very well paid jobs. But in the beginning they are going to find it hard. If you talk to employers, they tell you it is the second most important thing on the list when they go to hire young people.

There is a huge change, a sea change, in our country and indeed internationally in the nature of jobs and the nature of work. We do not have any more the great breadth and number and percentages of those employed being in unskilled labouring type jobs. They no longer exist. There are some but there are not many, and certainly they are not growing. In that sense, since the nature of industry is changing, it is even more important that young people have a good grasp of our language in our country, which is English.

That changing of the nature of work also leads me on to the next point, and that is education generally. People in the future, we are told, are going to have five, six or seven jobs through their working lifetime. I am on my fourth. Who knows, some day there might be a fifth. In the future it will be the norm, not something unusual. People will not go to an industry or a category of work and stay there forever. Some will, but not many. The kind of work will change. We know that knowledge based industries are on the increase. We know that entertainment and leisure based industries are on the increase. We know that the hospitality industry is a huge and still growing job market, particularly for young people but for the adult population as well. We know that the information technology sector is growing so fast that we cannot keep pace. The information technology sector requires individuals who can read and write and who can do maths well. It requires them to be well educated and well trained.

Education does lots of things for people. Through a general education course one learns a little bit about society, a bit about history, a bit about the arts, and some mathematics to be able to explain things in mathematical form and to be able to calculate readily. You learn about literature and about science—many aspects of science and engineering. But I have always thought that the basic reason for education was to provide us with a method of learning how to learn. Sure, you can pump yourself full of facts and if you have got a very good memory you will remember what you were taught in school. I do not know that I remember very much about either Latin I or Latin II. I am not sure I remember all the rules associated with English grammar. I am not confident that I can tell you anything about calculus or theory of statistics, or indeed some of the advanced thermonuclear courses that I took. But I bet you I could find the books and read the books and in a very short time I could go back and pick it up and be back where I left off when I left school.

That is one of the most important things about school: that the education provides people with the ability to learn how to learn. In this world of the changing nature of work, of advancing skills and of the need for new skills and changes and new professions, we are told that people will need to be more adaptable. This means that lifelong learning, which has become a bit of a cliche, is probably necessary. Probably those who want to do well will have to continue to learn all their lives. That will probably become increasingly important to them.

Along with general education comes some skills education. There are many areas of work still available today which are largely skills based rather than knowledge based. We even find in some industries that employment opportunities for young people—and sometimes for adults—are going begging. In 1997 there was a shortage of something like 5,000 chefs in Australia. I recently read an estimate that there will be a shortage of 7,000 chefs in Australia by the year 2000. Somebody ought to be telling young people that, although it is hot in the kitchen, the working hours are terrible and it can be dangerous—you can get scalded, burnt or cut—there are jobs available and they pay well too. Those are good, paying jobs.

This leads me to another issue I want to talk about: careers advice. We have an absolutely appalling history when it comes to letting people know what kind of work is available or will be available in the future. Regardless of their level of remuneration, how on earth is anyone going to decide what they want to do with their life if they do not know what is going to be out there? There is no sense in telling all our young people they should get a university education—and this happens all too frequently. There is no sense in basing the structure of the high school curriculum on tertiary entry requirements in total. (Quorum formed)

In summary, I support this legislation for youth wage rates. It offers opportunities for our young people. Requiring the AIRC to include junior wage rates in their determinations with respect to both awards and agree ments will be a positive culture change for the future. (Time expired)