Grievance Debate

Junction Community Centre

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:10): I am delighted to speak today about a conversation I had recently with the Junction Community Centre in my electorate. The Junction Community Centre does an extraordinary amount of good work in its community. It is a community surrounded by people who are newly arrived, often refugee families; a lot of people who have Aboriginal heritage and are strong in Aboriginal culture; and, of course, it is an area, as with everywhere in South Australia, that deals with a high degree of domestic violence and the consequences of that particularly on women and children.

The matter of particular concern to the Junction Community Centre when I spoke to them the other day was the impact on that centre of this government's cruel cuts to Adult Community Education (ACE). What is ACE? It is for people who have experienced disadvantage, particularly for people for whom school has not worked out, where as adults they have not completed high school and they may not have the literacy and numeracy skills required to go on to further study or to engage in work.

It is for people who are newly arrived migrants, often people who have been refugees, who have experienced years—for children, sometimes most of their lives—sitting in refugee camps, waiting to come to a country like Australia but needing additional skills before they can fully engage. It is for mature age people who may have been able to work for a long time in an area for which they had the skills but who are finding it difficult, in losing work, to find work that matches their skills and they need to develop more before even they are able to engage in further education.

This work picks up those people, offers them IT courses, does literacy and numeracy programs with them, works on budgeting and life skills, works on health and wellbeing, works on community engagement and communication skills—all the elements that are required to pick someone up so that they can move on and engage in society. I was very fortunate when I was minister to be the recipient of a review done by the Training and Skills Commission (TASC), which I believe I have heard this government speak favourably of.

That review looked at ACE and said, 'You know, they need a bit more money.' It was one of the pleasures of being a minister that I was able to sign off on nearly $4 million additionally to go in over four years for the Adult Community Education program, largely delivered through community centres like the one in my electorate, the Junction Community Centre on Grand Junction Road. What has this government done? It has ripped $3 million out over three years.

Not only that, the government said, 'Do you know what? Community centres, not sure that they are necessarily the right place to offer this. Perhaps we'll open it up. Perhaps we'll let RTOs come in and they can do it. Perhaps what we'll do is make sure that it's really clear that the minute they've got that skill they go into that work,' which is terrific further along, but it is not the test to apply to this kind of education. It is the kind of test that excludes. It is not the kind of test that actually results in more people who come from a disadvantaged background being employed; it is the kind of test that stops those people ever going anywhere near further education or work.

It is the kind of policy that says, 'Community centres are not really that important to us.' When I had a conversation with people about this afterwards—some of the people in my office, some of the people who have had an experience of going to those courses and benefiting—we wondered if it was possible to shame this government about that and we thought, 'Probably not.'

We thought probably this government does not feel shame about cutting a measly $3 million out of a program to which that money makes all the difference. It is $3 million out of a $52 million cut that the Minister for Innovation and Skills has made in the most recent budget—$52 million coming out of skills and innovation and $3 million of that out of this incredibly precious program targeted at the most needy people in society. Well, here we go, over to the government: can they feel shame? Can they reverse that? Can they see that, rather than having to wait for us coming back, which is what I always hear from people who are suffering, maybe those people can get relief a little bit earlier? The test is on them.