By Russell Willis
MELBOURNE — Prime Minister Keating promised some major leaps forward for young Australians as a result of the National Youth Summit on July 22, 1992.
The National Employment and Training Plan for young people was announced on July 27, and one of its most innovative steps was the introduction of the Landcare and Environment Action Program (LEAP). This program proposed giving young people work helping to repair waterways, to reclaim land and to ensure their environmental heritage.
The Department of Employment, Education and training (DEET) ran the first advertisements on September 26 for brokers to set up a 26-week LEAP project. Offers poured in from all sorts of bodies. Why not, with the federal government subsidising brokerages $3920 for each participant place they offered?
However the participants themselves were to receive only $3250 if under 18 years old and $3900 if over 18. According to DEET, this was a 26-week training allowance, not an employment scheme, so participants would not be receiving a youth wage.
The training that participants have been receiving is still not part of any nationally recognised curriculum, as not all subjects are TAFE accredited and the qualifications are not always recognised away from LEAP itself.
According to Greening Australia, any successes with LEAP are more attributable to local factors than to any nationally significant training scheme. There are also state differences as to the significance of the land restoration and water management aspects of the LEAP training program, since not all TAFE units are environmentally valuable training subjects.
Some participants in Victoria have found the elementary standard of the communication skills and job support training boring, frustrating and
inflexible.
Instead of training which will make participants employable, one of the brokers described LEAP as a probationary type of traineeship, preparing participants for other training schemes rather than for immediate employment — even though many participants wanted to find work immediately after the program finished. One doubts whether many will be able to leap easily into paid employment.
On LEAP sites around Melbourne, it was obvious that work being carried out by participants was within very middle class suburbs — on creek beautification schemes rather than on environmentally significant projects. Local bureaucracy had threatened the efficiency of even some of these by not supplying sufficient tools or materials.
But the ultimate bureaucratic snub has come from Camberwell City Council, which is considering granting a permit for McDonald's to build a restaurant within 100 metres of where participants have been working on a LEAP site. This commercial venture has shocked these participants.
The aim of setting up LEAP in areas of environmental need and where disadvantaged young people can best access the program hardly seems to be reflected within the middle-class suburbs chosen for the metropolitan LEAP sites. Nor has equal access for young women been evident, with only six women out of 25 participants on two projects.
The program seems to be yet another giant leap for government rhetoric and only a tiny step towards young people's real environmental concerns.