Ms ELLIS (10:54 AM) —The Youth Allowance Consolidation Bill 1999 is a legislative housekeeping exercise. Its purpose is to incorporate two disallowable instruments and one set of regulations dealing with aspects of Austudy into the Social Security Act 1991; to address technical issues arising out of the implementation of the youth allowance package; and to make consequential amendments relating to the commencement of youth allowance.

The youth allowance was introduced in July 1998. It merged all income support for young unemployed people under the age of 21 and full-time students between the ages of 16 and 24 years into one payment administered by the Department of Social Security, DSS, now called the Department of Family and Community Services. The only exceptions were Abstudy and the Assistance for Isolated Children Scheme.

While this bill is just a legislative housekeeping exercise, the youth allowance itself has had significant ramifications for many families and many young people. Since its introduction, my electorate office has received many phone calls and letters from young people and their families who had been badly affected by the introduction of the new system.

The youth allowance system has cut off financial independence, placed extra burdens on families and put up new barriers to undertaking study or finding a job for many in my electorate. Unfortunately, I am sure we all remember the unacceptable handling of those dramatic changes at the time that they came in. They were huge changes in a very small period of time, which put the Centrelink agency itself under enormous, in fact unbelievable, pressure.

Rarely in this country have we seen the implementation of a policy so badly handled as a result of the timetable and the enormous extent of the changes involved in such a timetable. Phone calls to Centrelink received the engaged signal. People had to wait days for appointments to discuss the implementation and the implications of the changes that were being delivered to them.

The stress that was already going to affect our young community members was exacerbated many times over by the manner in which this interesting brave new world of support for young people was implemented. I ask: how is it possible to deliver any program, let alone one like this, if you intend to cut 5,000 staff and $150 million from the budget in an environment where major policy changes are taking place and you effect that in the very agency that is expected to deliver the goods? We all know problems at Centrelink are occurring on a daily basis and they will continue to occur not only in the area of youth allowance but across the board in all benefits provided until the government realises and accepts the truth about the crisis within Centrelink.

On a more personal level, the Minister for Family and Community Services and I seem to have engaged ourselves in an ongoing debate about this very question of the ability of Centrelink to continue to deliver services to its client base. I tell the House, with no qualification at all, that I will not resile from my responsibility as a local member to ensure that I tell the government the facts, the truth, about how these decisions are affecting my community and particularly the young people in it. I look forward to the day—and I hope it is not too far away, but I tend to be a bit cynical—when I will not be accused of misleading the community and the government. I look forward to the day when the words I say to the government and the minister will be accepted for what they, in fact, are—the absolute truth.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about mutual obligation between welfare recipients and government. The government uses this language regularly to highlight what it believes is the propensity for people on welfare to cheat the system. I reject this assessment and reject the implication that, by opposing the government on this issue, I am and we are in some way supporting welfare rorts.

There is no doubt that the Australian Labor Party want to assist young Australians off welfare dependency—there is absolutely no question about that—but not in the way that has been proposed by the Howard government with their youth allowance. To abolish unemployment benefits for 16- and 17-year-olds whilst also slashing the educational opportunities they have is the wrong way to reform the welfare state. To have the income test placed upon families with 18- to 20-year-olds come into effect at income levels of $23,350 is the wrong way to reform our welfare state.

The government appears to believe that if you force young people to stay at school longer they will happily and successfully emerge from that process well qualified, happy and successful, and will automatically walk into a job or a career. However in the real world in which I operate, and we on this side operate, you cannot assume that by setting these extremely stringent rules you can successfully interfere in the lives and the relationships of families.

The decisions being taken by the government in relation to literacy and numeracy, for example, set more hurdles and direct more blame at young people because they are not in paid work. I have heard the comments of many educational experts voicing their concern over these initiatives. What are they saying? They are saying, quite simply, `Don't re-create the schoolroom problems that some of these young people actually have already sitting on their shoulders. Don't believe that you can scoop up groups of young people—who do, in some instances, have undeniable literacy and numeracy problems—and put them back into a system and a process from which they unsuccessfully emerged in the past.'

Let us look closely at those individuals that we are talking about. Let us talk about them as individuals, not as groups and statistics. Probably the only effective way that we could even begin to attempt to address those literacy and numeracy problems would be one on one, in a specially contrived fashion by which all of their problems, all of their difficulties, all of their concerns that they have carried through school, are addressed as one.

But I do not really expect that any government is going to be prepared to fund at that level in the climate in which we find ourselves. Whilst it may be very admirable for this government to politically grandstand—and that is what I call it—about the problems of literacy and numeracy, the message going out to the community from the government is that the whole reason these unemployed young people do not have work is that they are illiterate and innumerate and they are not trying. This is yet another set of blame and yet another set of hurdles, with not one effective component in the process to fix any of the problems. It is pure political grandstanding, in a really cheap fashion, in my view, because it is attacking the very victim in our community and offering nothing in the real sense of the word to overcome those very problems.

If people emerge out of an education system with a literacy and numeracy problem, you cannot just blame the education system, although that has to carry some degree of blame. You have to look very carefully at the individual people. You have to ask yourself why it is that the education system suited some and not others. What was it that was wrong for these young people, and what do we need to do to correct it? We should not herd them up and stick them in a room somewhere, take their money off them and say to them at the same time, `We're blaming you. We're going to victimise you and you won't get another thing until you learn'—in almost the same environment which previously they passed through unsuccessfully.

I implore the government and the minister concerned to really think about this. At the same time as the government is affecting the outcomes of youth allowance payments, it is doing this to youth. Frankly, I deplore that attitude. It is not good enough. It is not constructive. It is not helpful. It is cheap political grandstanding.

I understand that the process for assessing literacy and numeracy is going to be left to the agencies commissioned to carry out these classes or these remedial programs. So how you are assessed in Newcastle may be quite different from how you are assessed in Canberra or Perth, or Darwin or anywhere else. I despair at that as well. Where is the true academic thinking behind teaching when you have a different set of rules dependent upon where you may be, not dependent upon needs as an individual?

I quite often despair when I think of some of the decisions and the attitudes, particularly, that are coming forth from this government in a so-called attempt to address some of these extremely serious issues. These young people are our adult citizens of the future, and I believe that we have got to treat them a whole lot differently from the way we are under the current regime.

It is not the fault of our young people that they cannot secure employment. Instead, we as a society collectively have to look very carefully at what we are doing. We are not providing the employment base and the work environment which encourages them to find work. Even the best of training programs—I want to talk about that very briefly—are no good if there is no employer out there to welcome these young people into a job anyway. Hypothetically, you could create very well-qualified youngsters who still had no jobs. To talk of literacy and numeracy is fine, but I know university graduates who are not illiterate or innumerate but who cannot get work. Let us face it: there are two sides to this whole dilemma.

It was very interesting yesterday to be at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research lunch in this place. The emphasis by a very wide range of extremely well-qualified economists was on what we should do about unemployment. I do not remember seeing Work for the Dole on their list. I do remember seeing a very strong mention in their five-point plan of good, successful, recognised, well-funded training programs, all of which have been completely decimated, in every form, by the current government.

The government walked into power after the 1996 election and decided that anything—good, bad or otherwise—that had been done by the previous government was not to their liking, so out it went. Millions of dollars worth of, in some cases, extremely good training programs were kicked out, purely in a political grandstanding fashion, with no consideration whatever of the success of any of it. What is interesting, though, is that some of the lesser funded but still existing programs that are beginning to emerge or to be talked about strangely reflect some of the things that were in fact in those previous programs.

What this government has got to do is be honest, absolutely honest. It is no good blaming the young people. It is no good saying, `Because you are illiterate and innumerate it is your fault.' It is no good removing financial support from them at the same time as you also force them to stay in a school environment, which, I might add, is now being seen in most parts of this country to be completely unprepared for it. The stories that I am now hearing—as, I am sure, many of my colleagues are—are that it is all very well to say to these kids, `Back to school and stay there,' but you have got to make sure the education system in each of those states and territories, in country towns, in regional and rural areas, can cope with that. That is not happening either.

It is a really cheap shot for any government to stand up and say, `We are going to very effectively attempt to fix the unemployment problem for the young people—our heart tells us it is the right thing to do,' while their head, in fact, is leading them down so many wrong paths that it is distressing. I know that from my own electorate when I get a phone call from a young girl who is crying hysterically because Centrelink cannot handle her Austudy application and information inquiry, or from a young man whose family is in unbelievable financial stress. How stupid is it that a 23-year-old man, who has been overseas for 18 months working around the world gaining wonderful experience, has to ring me up on return and say, `Until I can find work, I am dependent on my parents'? That is an actual truth. When he rang me I thought: I do not believe this, he must be making it up—this is ridiculous. But it is the truth. He was a graduate of school, went overseas, worked, came back very much enhanced by his experiences, needed some support while he resettled and tried to find work, and was told he had to be financially dependent upon his parents. This is madness.

All I can say in conclusion is that I really hope that those more sensible members on the other side of the House, particularly all of those on the back bench who we know share many of our concerns, are given every power that they need to debate this strongly and vibrantly within their own party room. Someone has got to tell the ministers running these insane programs that they are wrong.