Strathmore Secondary College Rezoning

In March Strathmore North Primary School students visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and I spoke to them there about the meaning of the War Memorial.

I told them if that if they ever needed my help my Electorate Office was in Munro Street Coburg.

This morning Josh, a Grade Six Strathmore North Primary School student, rang my office and said, ‘Is that you, Kelvin?’ to Anthony Cianflone from my office who picked up the phone.

Josh referred to my offer of help when the school had visited Canberra, and explained that he was adversely affected by a decision of the Department of Education to rezone the boundaries for entry to Strathmore Secondary College- the new boundary excluded children from his area of Strathmore North.

As it happened, the State Member for Essendon, Justin Madden and I had attended and spoken to a large rally of parents and children at Strathmore Secondary College concerning this issue just yesterday. Justin had raised the issue directly with the Victorian Education Minister, and I had written to him yesterday.

 
The good news for Josh is that the Department of Education has acted to re-instate the Strathmore Heights region to the Strathmore Secondary College neighbourhood boundaries. The change of heart is a tribute to the energetic and united response of Strathmore Heights residents, extending as far as primary school children remembering and acting on an undertaking from their Federal MP!

TAFE Funding Crisis

Why on earth are we spending $8 billion on a Freeway through Royal Park, and cutting TAFE funding by $119 million, leaving seven out of fourteen public TAFES in deficit?

The best infrastructure investment we can make is to educate and train our young people.

The Rights of Women in Afghanistan

While the results of Afghanistan’s election will not be known for some weeks whoever becomes the next President must ensure a commitment to ongoing improvements in human rights, particularly the rights of women.

Amnesty International has indicated, in an assessment of the rights record of President Hamid Karzai’s administration over the past 12 years in Afghanistan, that the modest gains in women’s rights are being degraded:

·         Endemic violence persists;

·         Discrimination is still a fact of life;

·         The Elimination of Violence against Women Law (EVAW) is an unfulfilled promise;

·         Women human rights defenders continue be at risk;

·         Women continue to be detained and prosecuted for “moral crimes”; and

·         Women’s participation in the peace and reconciliation processes is marginal at best.

While it is important to acknowledge the improvements in Afghanistan for women and girls since the fall of the Taliban, much of this is the result of the work of women’s rights activists. Enormous challenges remain for women’s human rights. The vast majority of girls still leave school when they are between 12 and 14 years old, often due to family pressure, and only around one in ten university students is female.

The Australian Government must urge the next President to reaffirm a commitment to further progress on human rights especially for women.

Budget Pressures Impact Public Service Provision

With the veil of secrecy surrounding the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit report Australians have every right be concerned about what is in store in May’s Federal Budget, particularly when it comes to the provision of public services.
 
Successive budget cuts have made it harder for the federal public sector to continue to provide high quality public services. The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) estimates that 3,600 public sector jobs have been cut since the Coalition Government came to office in September.

A substantial number of the job losses came from service delivery agencies such as the Department of Human Services (DHS). This has had direct implications for the Australian community with users of DHS services seeing:

·         Excessive waiting times in Centrelink queues;

·         Long wait times in phone queues;

·         Increased double-handling of queues and in call queues;

·         Processing back logs in a range of areas.

As the CPSU has pointed out in their submission to the 2014 Budget, “the frustrations and pressures created by these delays is contributing to increasing incidences of client aggression towards DHS staff. This growing problem is extremely distressing and often dangerous both for staff members and for other community members at DHS premises during these incidents”.

It is completely unsatisfactory that wait times are regularly over 40 minutes for Call Centre enquiries, and queues in metropolitan and suburban offices have customers waiting for more than two hours to talk to staff. Medicare staffing has been reduced to the extent that customer queues are regularly extending outside the doors into the street.

We need a Government that is about finding practical solutions rather than embracing an ideologically driven “slash and burn” approach. Further cuts will only exacerbate problems which pensioners, retirees and many young people have in accessing public services.

Back to the Future: Stop the Supertrawlers!

Less than two years ago, Labor put a stop to the Supertrawler with a ban which turned it around before it had even starting trawling Australia’s oceans.

Because of what's called a "sunset clause" in the legislation, it means we cannot stop future supertrawlers doing damage to the sustainability of our fisheries and our precious marine life.

That’s why Labor is moving legislation to remove this sunset clause so new supertrawlers can be banned. It’s being debated this week, but we don’t yet know how the Coalition will vote.

The public was clear it wanted the Supertrawler banned in 2012 and we need to see that kind of support again to make sure we can keep other supertrawlers out of our waters.

The National Rental Affordability Scheme

The revelations concerning the National Rental Affordability Scheme are a spectacular, but in many respects textbook, example of how migration driven population growth undermines government efforts to solve social problems in general, and meet infrastructure needs in particular.

The National Rental Affordability Scheme was established to help low-income or disadvantaged people who were being financially crippled by high rents. It was, and still is, a worthy objective, though it is regrettable that Australia’s rapid population growth has pushed up housing prices, damaging housing affordability and having knock on consequences for rents, helping create the problem in the first place.

The scheme provides incentives of $10,000 a year to unit developers who agree to charge rent at 20% below market rates. Some 20,000 units have been built under the scheme, but it turns out that 40% of them have gone to students, in many cases from overseas. One in two student units constructed under the scheme has been let to foreign students. In Victoria the picture is even more dramatic, with seven out of ten units being let to foreign students.

The theory behind bringing in and educating overseas students is that it brings in revenue, a kind of export income. In practice, as we see here, taxpayers are subsidising it in a major way – the total cost of the scheme is $4.5 billion – and poor Australians struggling to pay the rent miss out.

This is unfortunately all too typical of the impact of population growth on infrastructure provision, particularly in our cities. Money which should be solving infrastructure problems gets diverted into capacity expansion, so our housing, transport, schools and health services never seem to be able to keep up.

Temporary Migrant Worker Rorts

The decision by the Federal Government to allow employers to bring in unlimited numbers of foreign workers under temporary work visas (457s) is a lunatic move which will cost Australian jobs and will bring back the rorts which took place before this loophole was closed.

We already have over one million temporary entrants in Australia who have work rights. We already have well over 700,000 people out of work. We already have a workforce participation rate at its lowest level for years. In my home state of Victoria the unemployment rate of 6.4 percent is the worst since January 2002. In the City of Hume, just north of my electorate, unemployment has risen 25 percent in the six months since the change of government and is well into double figures.

Against this background it is plain crazy to increase the 457 visa program. This program is already way too high. In 2009-10 there were 68,000 457 visas granted. Last year the figure had risen to over 126,000 temporary migrant worker visas. If you allow employers to bring in as many 457 workers as they like once a sponsorship is approved this figure will continue to skyrocket.

These workers are prepared to work for less than Australian workers, which suits employers. But the 457 visa program is a dagger at the heart of Australian workers, who end up working for less than decent wages and conditions, or languishing indefinitely without any work at all.