Page 1452 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 14 May 2014
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support for young people up to 29 years for six months of every year and then force them into work for the dole. It will deny them Newstart allowance until they are 24 and move more young people on the disability support pension to Newstart or the youth allowance, which according to ACOSS is a cut of at least $166 a week.
This is punishing the young people who are already missing out on experiences that will set them up for a good life. A good transition from education to work is one of the best indicators of life-long workforce participation. It is like the Liberals get some sort of sick satisfaction out of humiliating people who are already at their most vulnerable. It flies in the face of evidence to suggest that work-for-the-dole schemes are going to help people. Work for the dole keeps young people out of JobSearch and devalues the work that they do.
You do not build people up by putting them down. What makes this worse is that this despicable, punishing scheme treats young people struggling to get a start in the world as failures. It treats young people as failures. It is a part of the budget that is slashing a program that worked. It comes at the same time the federal government is slashing funds to youth connections, a program that works across the community to connect young people with homes, education and training, mentoring, health services and counselling—the kinds of services that address the structural issues that keep young people out of work.
In a country as well placed as ours it should not even be a question of whether we help people into work without making them live in poverty. It is a disgrace that we have a budget that does the opposite. It is a budget that removes the help and increases the poverty. At its core, this budget attacks jobs, it attacks health and it attacks education. It attacks all the people in our community who receive income support and it ignores the role it plays in providing a decent quality of life for the majority of Australians.
Joe Hockey is attacking jobs. He is cutting 16,500 public service jobs. He and Tony Abbott are basically saying that if you are a public servant, you are a second-class citizen. Your town, our town, does not deserve help to readjust to job cuts. You are expendable and the long hours you have worked for many, many years were unnecessary and selfish. 16,500 jobs—the jobs of our neighbours, friends and family who today are waiting to find out if they are going to have a job and a future.
The Liberals are attacking health. The sad thing is that I do not need to tell anyone in this place that there are people in our community who just cannot afford a co-payment. It is going to be the mums at my school in western Belconnen who, getting towards the end of pay week, cannot get time off work when they have got the flu because they will not have the money until payday. It is going to be the older members of our community who are to sit at home and worry about symptoms until their pension comes in. It is going to be people putting off the visit until the problem is much more than it should be.
The federal Liberal government are attacking education and they are turning their backs on needs-based education funding and an evidence-based model. Looking at this budget, it is pretty easy to see that the federal Liberals do not believe in a fair go.
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