Mr ALLAN MORRIS (1:23 PM) —That speech from the member for Moreton probably demonstrates why the current government has the biggest swing against it of any first term government in living memory—the biggest swing against any government in this country for 40 or 50 years and perhaps even longer. The speech was a mixture of half-truths, deceptions, errors and sheer fraudulence.

If the member for Moreton were to tell the youth in his electorate what he has told the parliament today, he would not just be misleading us but also be misleading the people who really deserve to know the truth. If he were to tell them that we support the idea that you pay people the same regardless of their skills or experience, that would be blatantly untrue. He knows that as well as we all know and in the same way that his government does.

In recent weeks, when asked about the pay for the defence forces, the government have made it clear that the defence forces would be paid on rank and ability. We think the same should apply, whether it be the defences forces, 16-year-olds, 18-year-olds or 20-year-olds. Whether they be male or female, we think the same should apply. Equal pay for equal work has long been an aspiration of the vast majority of Australians. The government is saying: unequal pay for equal work.

The member for Moreton knows full well that what the government is putting forward is not about the people currently on youth wages but rather about bringing in a youth wage in unskilled industries—the building industry, for example—where an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old would be paid at a much lower rate for the same physical work, the same low level of skill which exists in many of those jobs and the same level of risk to life and limb as an adult. He knows that what this government is putting forward could well lead to the displacement of adult workers by youth workers on lower wages.

This is just one more twist to the age-old theory of conservative politicians of trying to find a lower wage structure to put pressure on wages. Whether in the case of unemployment under Fraser, youth wages or whatever, it is the age-old system of putting pressure on wages by creating a surplus. This case is much more nasty and invidious, because you are really putting son against father—and daughter against mother, but particularly in the case of males.

Take the building industry where the father is a builder's labourer and the son turns 16 or 17 and is looking for a job. He goes onto the same building site and works for a quarter of the wages. Who gets retrenched? Which job goes? The 45-year-old father goes and he will never work again because there are going to be a lot of young men at 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 who will be forced to do the job for a fraction of the wage. The honourable member knows that; I know that. Did he tell his Moreton youth advisory group that? I guarantee he did not. And for that he stands condemned. That is what government members are doing around the country. They know it and we know it. I find the dishonesty of that absolutely appalling. This is from a party that is supposedly pro-family. This is supposedly a party that stands for family values. Nice kind of family values that is where you say to a family, `We don't care what your skills are. Just so long as we know what your age is, that's how you'll get paid.'

The Youth Allowance Consolidation Bill 1999 , as has been said by the member for Lilley and the previous speaker, is an integration into the social welfare legislation of the youth allowance amendments from last year. It is therefore important that we go back and remember what the youth allowance legislation did. I am sure the majority of Australians do not know, because it did not affect the majority of Australians. Like most of the other changes that took place from 1996 onwards, what we have seen has been the targeting of pockets of people. Quite frankly, people know what happens to them; they do not know what happens to others.

When the member for Moreton actually talked about the number of people being better and no worse off, what a deceitful way of talking about it. What a dishonest way of putting forward what actually occurred in that period between March 1996 and July of last year. In the 1996 budget, there were in fact substantial cuts to support for young Australians via Austudy. When he talks about how people were better off, some of those things making them better off were actually cuts from the 1996 budget. What he did not say was that there was a whole stack of young people who actually lost all access to income support. He has got some really interesting conundrums there. On the one hand, he was saying that, somehow, we were supposed to have encouraged young people to leave school. Let us go back and look: from 1983 to 1996, school attendance rates for year 12 went from 36 per cent under John Howard as Treasurer to something like 67 per cent to 70 per cent in our term. It is currently declining, not increasing. That more than doubling of school retention ratios under Labor was very stark. There was no Austudy for young Australians at school back in 1983. There was no payment at all. There was a dole payment if they left school, but there was no payment to stay at school in 1983 when the Liberals and Nationals were previously in government. So let us be very clear. The idea he has put forward that, somehow, the Labor Party was encouraging people to leave school is blatantly dishonest and wrong.

The removal of income support for under-18-year-olds, unless they were in full-time education or training, was even more dishonest, because the government admitted that there were not sufficient places for those young people to attend, and if they stayed at school there were no extra funds for state education departments to actually have teachers to teach them. So they took away the money from those young people and made no provisions for increased spending to accom modate them in full-time training or education.

The government made those young people and their families carry that cost. The savings made there were on the backs of poorly off young people. Worse than that, many of the young people who leave school at 15 and 16 are people who have difficulty with education, who have real special needs. They may have a mental health problem; they may have a learning disability; they may have a dysfunctional family; they may have been victims of abuse at some stage in their lives. There is a whole range of reasons why that 25 per cent to 30 per cent leave school at that age without going on to year 12.

Taking income support away from them did not address any of those needs at all. We also saw cuts in all the other welfare and family support programs at the same time, between 1996 and July of last year. So the idea that what the government was doing was somehow beneficial to young Australians is fundamentally wrong, and it knows that. The fact is that it did not affect most Australians; it affected a relatively small number. The idea being put forward by the government is that these people were getting the benefits dishonestly or unfairly, and that was reinforced a moment ago. Weren't we just told how that five per cent who lost income support were in fact from families who failed the means test?

That was not the case. A substantial number of those young people were in fact from families whose young people were under 18 and, regardless of income, that support was not means tested at all. They were from low income families whose children were unable to continue at school for one reason or another, and they got no support. I think that nails the lie that we have been getting over and over, and it indicates the lengths to which members of the government are prepared to go to perpetuate a lie and a fraud on the Australian community.

I was interested to note that the minister took exception to some of the comments made by the member for Lilley regarding Centrelink. I thought the member for Lilley's comments were in fact very moderate, given the problems that we all know about. In the last three years we have had a lot of new members of the government who have spoken over this time but who have not sat through debates in the previous parliaments when the current government was in opposition. They did not hear their now ministers making speeches for some years about what they would do and how caring they were nor did they hear the promises they made in this chamber—they are all in the Hansard but no-one goes back to those any more. So I guess I was a bit tolerant of those new members in the last parliament because they were not really a part—you could understand their naivety and their inexperience. It is now three years and they can no longer play off that kind of mythology; they can no longer pretend not to know because they have also just gone through some elections as well.

I actually think that they thought it was normal for their offices to get the kind of angst and the kinds of complaints that they were getting. Let me tell you, it was not. I would be interested to know the number of Federal Police calls to members' offices in the last three years and in the three years before. From my office experience, I can absolutely guarantee you that the difference is more than noticeable; it is dramatic. The amount of anger, suppressed frustration and rage that we get in our office now is vastly greater—immeasurably greater—than it was in the previous three years. Those new members of the government perhaps did not know that and I was always a bit tolerant of their naivety.

I noticed last year that there was a bit of a veto on departments talking to parliamentarians and on information about possible violence on members' offices being made known. The grounds for that were, supposedly, so there would not be any copycatting. The real grounds, of course, were not that at all. The real grounds were because the government was so embarrassed by it. We all know that that was particularly the case with Centrelink.

The Centrelink role in the Youth Allowance issue in July of last year was monumental. The people who worked in Centrelink—who were administering this program and who will now be administering the amendments to it—deserve medals. Mind you, many of them have now gone. Many of them did not survive that process. The cuts in recent times will mean that young Australians now approaching Centrelink are going to be just as badly off as they were back in July of last year. It seems to me that the government is saying that Centrelink is somehow a business that seems to have to have some profitability or some way of accounting rather than it being a service to the community that meets their needs—especially when one hears that four out of five phone callers do not get through.

I had a circumstance last year where a student counsellor at a university advised me that over two days he had made 52 phone calls to Centrelink, never got through and eventually gave up altogether. He made 52 phone calls over two days and did not get through. So when we hear that four out of five do not get through now, that does not surprise me, and it certainly reinforces what we are told.

This is not just about young Australians, it is also about others. I talk to pensioners who go to Centrelink offices and are forced to wait in queues. They have the indignity and embarrassment of standing in a queue for a very long time and then being told their appointment is going to be some weeks away because they cannot talk to anybody at that time. This is not the fault of the staff and it is not the fault of the person seeking assistance.

Centrelink was designed to save the government money, not to provide a better service. All the nonsense we get from the government about Centrelink, its service models and its service functionality is absolute nonsense, and we know it, because our officers are dealing with more and more cases. The idea that that was normal should now be better understood by the members opposite.

They know that last July they were besieged with Centrelink complaints, youth complaints and angry, upset people and families. We know that it is dishonest to come in here one year later to pretend this is somehow all okay, because we and they get similar levels of complaints. We deal with the same people in the community. Whereas in the first term of parliament they may have been able to pretend that this is normal, they can no longer do that. Of course, those people who were removed and whose support was reduced by the youth allowance—and who will be further affected now—turned to the Job Network. What a fiasco!

The following is quite interesting. In recent times I have been making inquiries because I produce a directory of Commonwealth services available in Newcastle. These are services that taxpayers pay for and which they are entitled to access and know about. With the change from CES and so on with the Job Network it seemed to me that, given that Employment National is government owned and it is actually taxpayers who eventually pay the bills there, I should include Employment National. Well, I am sorry, I am not supposed to.

Employment National does not want to be seen as being owned by or in any way connected to the Australian people. They do not want to be included. They are not a public service; they are not part of government services. They see themselves as somehow being totally separate, and I suppose in a sense they are because it appears they are not accountable to this parliament either. It appears the separation of functionality and money means that by the outsourcing function that has been done, the accountability and liability of Employment National is no longer to this parliament or has the involvement of any federal members.

I think the exclusion of them from my Newcastle Commonwealth services directory is rather tragic because the taxpayers should know that they are actually paying for it. They should know that a minister, somehow, eventually decides who runs it. The minister may not be able to tell them what to do any more, but the minister does actually decide who is on the board. But they are now outside the framework. So, technically, the Commonwealth no longer has a function in employment services.

With the one hand the government has cut the services to young people, removed the eligibility of many young Australians and put a massive burden on their families in terms of means testing their income up to the age of 21—and up to the age of 25 for Austudy, which is even worse. With the other hand the government has pulled away the Centrelink or actual service support in terms of accessing information, the job placement support and the investment in their development and skills through cuts to universities and job training programs.

Amongst all that, the government says that this is reform. I have heard of words being misused, but the way this government uses the word `reform' means the word no longer has any meaning. Reform is actually making things better. Go and ask young Australians out there—the people on Austudy and youth allowance—whether the system is better for them and they will say no. These were not reforms; these were simply changes, many of which were disastrous for the people affected. We now have this word `reform' as the current euphemism for explaining cuts in government expenditure.

The previous speaker, the member for Moreton, also talked about treating all young Australians equally, whether they are looking for work or are in training. That is an absolute lie. Sixteen-year-olds are no longer treated equally. They have no income at all unless they are in training. If they are looking for a job, bad luck, because there is no money to help them find a job—no money for bus fares, no money for phone calls, no money for CVs, no money for clothes, unless their parents can give it to them, and it does not matter how much their parents earn, because they get nothing. This is just one more of those examples of dishonesty.

I was interested in the comments of the member for Moreton on his judgment in buying a Gemini. I thought they were perhaps indicative of his judgment in general. He indicated how bad his judgment was in his choice of car; I suspect that it has not improved. I have noticed him over the years, and the only thing that seems to have changed is his dimensions. I see no change in his learning or understanding of what actually affects young Australians. The idea of hands-off junior wages that he is talking about, he knows and we all know, is not what that legislation is about.

These amendments tidy up some parts of the legislation. They do not go to the core question of whether or not we share responsibility for young Australians and their families to any degree. They do not go to the question of whether young Australians are part of our community or not—of whether we have any sense of inclusiveness about them. These amendments and this legislation are exclusive and remain so. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Slipper) adjourned.