Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Newstart is too low. The thousands of people around this country who are on Newstart are living in poverty. We have had three reports telling us this. Most recently, there was the Senate inquiry that my colleague Senator Rachel Siewert was successful in establishing, which had the agreement of people including from the government benches telling us in its final report that Newstart is too low. We have got these very important reports telling us that it is too low and demonstrating how it is.

But even some simple mental arithmetic done by anyone who is listening could tell you that it is too low at $246 for the single rate. Once you have put a roof over your head it leaves you next to nothing for the week. I tried to do this mental arithmetic myself and live without a few weeks ago. During that week I spoke to someone who had been homeless and had gone to a homeless service that found him a single bedroom in a rooming house in my electorate of Melbourne—for $180 to $220 for that single room alone. I looked around and found that the cheapest place you could find, a one-bedroom apartment in the city of Melbourne, was $240. Once you have taken rent assistance into account, that is $180 out of your $246 gone, just from putting a roof over your head. If you then agree that you are going to feed yourself on the generous sum of $7 or $8 a day, you are down to $4 left for the rest of the week. That is before you have paid any bills for electricity, water or gas. It is before you have paid to have a phone to keep connected to the rest of the world, or your internet to perhaps go and look for a job. It is certainly before you have done anything so luxurious as going to get a haircut or perhaps going to get yourself some clothes for a new job interview. So it is no wonder that it is not just the Greens, but also the welfare sector and the head of the Business Council of Australia who are saying that it is now so low it is a barrier to people getting back into work, because you spend all your time just trying to survive and have no ability to improve yourself.

Most people would expect that Newstart would be a safety net that holds you while you get back onto your own feet, but it is now so low that it is strangling people. Great numbers of people have told me that you either go into debt, or you rely on others, or you just go without basics like food or like new clothes. If we want to be a more caring society, we have to look after those who fall on hard times. Anyone could, through no fault of their own, find themselves out of a job through restructuring, for example, and there are many people in the south-east of Australia in the manufacturing, tourism and education sectors who are finding themselves in that situation in part because the government has failed to act on the pressures of the mining boom.

You would hope that that person is then able to look after themselves and survive until they get back into the workforce. But this decision is pushing them further into debt and it is making it harder to get back into the workforce. There is a reason that we are here: Labor is not prepared to stand up to big business and raise the money we need to fund the services and the benefits that Australians expect from a civilised society.

Labor in fact pushed single parents onto the dole from 1 January this year. They get an extra $3 a day to look after their kids, which is fantastic and magnanimous. You now have parents saying, 'The cost of sending the kids back to school is so high that I'm going to put my computer, the tool of my trade, into hock or I'm going to go further into debt because it's impossible to make ends meet.' Labor says that it is about getting people back to work. The single parents, who are affected the most, were the ones who were previously working the longest hours because the parenting payment test was more generous than Newstart. They were allowed to work extra hours. Some people are losing up to $140 a week. And when you have a kid to look after that is an enormous slug.

In fact, as we found out last week, Labor are now taking more off single parents than they are going to raise from the mining tax. That is not right and those are not the values that people expect from a caring society. We need to acknowledge that Newstart is too low. We need to then say that we are going to have the courage to stand up to Gina Rinehart and make her pay her fair share. Then we will not need to slug single parents, we will not need to keep Newstart below the poverty line and we will not need to raise the taxes that other Australians have to pay.

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