Thank you Stephenie. To Bill Con and John Ralph. My Ministerial colleague David Kemp. To Captain David Elridge of the Salvation Army. Tony Eggleton, the Executive Director of the Council for the Centenary of Federation and the Federation Event is very relevant to the announcement that I am going to make. My Parliamentary colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I am delighted that Bill Con and John Ralph asked me to launch the Foundation for Young Australians, which has has been explained as a merger of the Queen's Trust established in 1977 to mark the Silver Jubilee of the Queen's accession to the throne and the Australian Youth Foundation formed after the highly successful commemoration of the Bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988.
As a merged body, it will inherit a deep and rich experience in commitment to assisting young Australians including many disadvantaged young Australians to realised their dreams. And the merger takes place under the new name to mark the centenary of Federation.
In the time that they had been in existence, both the Foundation and the Queen's Trust have spent large amounts of money. Twenty-seven million dollars in the case of the Queen's Trust and thirteen point five million dollars in the case of the Australian Youth Foundation to assist young people in so many different ways. And we've just had a very interesting and quite remarkable story of how the Queen's Trust was able to assist one young Australian to acquire particular skills and to give her the opportunity of realising her potential in a way that would have simply not have been possible under other programmes and other avenues.
The aim of the new foundation is to help young Australians to reach their full potential by providing assistance to disadvantaged young people, promoting the pursuit of excellence and developing leadership potential in young Australians. Both Mr Con and Mr Ralph bring a wealth of experience in Philanthropy to the new positions that they will occupy.
On behalf of the Government and I know the Australian people and most particularly those who benefited from the work of the Australian Youth Foundation and the Queen's Trust to date. I want to thank both of them and their organisations and those who work in them for the tremendous contribution that they have already made.
We welcome the merger and we particularly welcome it as a very important project to make a practical contribution to the commemoration of the Centenary of the Federation of the Australian Nation. And for that reason I am very pleased to announce today that the Commonwealth Government will provide the new foundation with an endowment of fifteen million dollars. And that endowment will make a very substantial contribution when added to the capital resources currently available to the two organisations that are being merged. It will provide an extremely solid capital base for the activities of the new foundation.
Initially that endowment of fifteen million dollars will be used to fund the Centenary Scholarships for young Australians. This will involve one hundred scholarships for young Australians to undertake under graduate or post graduate study in both academic and vocational areas. And these scholarships will be a valuable centenary of Federation projects.
The scholarships will be of a value of up to ten thousand dollars a year for a period expected to average from three to four years. Priority will be given to disadvantaged young people, particularly from rural and remote areas who otherwise may not be able to pursue studies.
The Government's contribution will bring the total capital base of the new organisation to around fifty million dollars, which will allow to make a very significant contribution to the development and welfare of Australia's young people.
In the spirit of the Government's philosophy on philanthropy, expressed best in the notion of the Social Coalition. This Government contribution will provide I hope an incentive and leverage for support of a very active fund raising activity within corporate Australia. Its an earnest of our practical commitment as well as our rhetorical support for the new foundation. Rederick is one thing in these areas as the people gathered here today know only so well practical assistance and practical contributions seem always to out last the Rederick and both of them of course are very important and the one compliments the other.
Of course the foundation will spend its resources on things other than the Centenary Scholarships. And I might mention one or two examples of the sort of projects that have been funded to date by the Australian Youth Foundation. One of them is called the ÔHand Brake Turn Project' which is a motor vehicle crime prevention project targeted at older teenagers to break the unemployment cycle and to prevent them entering the juvenile justice system. Four hundred young people have already been involved with sixty-nine per cent of them in employment after completing the two year course, compared with only eighteen per cent of them that were employed prior to entering in to the project.
There is another called the ÔDeveloping Tomorrow's Leaders Programme, which is a programme taking one hundred young emerging leaders in their field to spend a week being informed by a range of speakers on issued facing the nation. The sixteen of those programmes will be held in Sydney next month. And there is also the Achiever Awards programme which provides grants to young people to pursue a wide range of study in areas such as the professions, trade and the Arts.
So ladies and gentlemen, the work of the new Foundation, that is the Foundation for Young Australians will appropriately mark and honour the centenary of the Federation of the Australian nation. It will bring together in emerged body the collective commitment of those who've been associated with the Queen's Trust and The Australian Youth Foundation. Both outstanding bodies and it is appropriate that they merge to mark the centenary.
We wish it well, we provide our practical help of fifteen million dollars. We encourage corporate Australia to match indeed exceed the contribution and the practical commitment of the Government to this very worthy and idealistically based new foundation. Providing opportunities for young Australians, particularly those who are in different ways disadvantaged by the way in which other programmes operate is always [inaudible] goal and I am certain that the foundation for young Australians with the additional help that I have announced today will make a very significant contribution.
I wish Mr Con and Ralph well. I thank them for their public spirited contribution to such fine causes in the past and I urge corporate Australia to give its very strong support to this very worthwhile foundation.
Thank you.
[ends]