Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was listening to the member for Makin, my colleague and neighbour, and I thought, 'This cannot all be right.' This Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017 is an extraordinary bill, just in its breadth. Most of the time, this government attacks one group at a time but this omnibus horror bill is unique. The minister should be proud of it because he has managed to assemble all of the government's targets in one bill. It is not often you can come to the dispatch box and say that this bill attacks families, pensioners and students. It is an extraordinary effort on the government's part.

It used to be that governments would sort of try this sort of thing on; get all the tough stuff out of the way in the first budget hoping to have an election budget later on. But for this government, what an extraordinary effort. Given how much trouble they are in, you would have thought that maybe discretion might have been seen to be the better part of valour in this case, but no. I was actually stunned by some of the things that the member for Makin was revealing to the House. I was struck by what he said about young people and he is dead right—I have had young people in my electorate tell me.

I went down to a housing trust place in Elizabeth West, where Jimmy Barnes used to live. They were upgrading an old trust place for future use. They had Boys Town or one of those organisations training young people. These young blokes were very keen. You know when you see young men, 16 or so, getting into construction? They are hard workers and very keen. I think it is a terrible slight on young people to say they are not hard workers because I think these kids really were. But one of those young men had slept at a bus station in my electorate the night before because he had been kicked out of home, kicked out of his girlfriend's home in fact.

I think too often in this place, those opposite think that everybody resides with a happy safety net provided by their family but that is just not the case for many young people. They live on the thin red edge of the money they receive from the government or the money they get from work. They do not often get the opportunities that many people in the community are given. It is a terrible thing to do, to make people wait five weeks and basically face very tough circumstances before they can get unemployment benefits. It will not teach a single person any sort of lesson about a work ethic; it will just impoverish them and prevent them from finding work.

It is truly an extraordinary thing to put in this omnibus horror bill, this pea and thimble trick where they hack away from families in order to, on one side, put a bit of money into child care. The public will not be convinced by it, will not be fooled by it, will not be hoodwinked by it. They will know it for what it is. I have been getting email after email about this bill from different sections of the community, from young people, from pensioners for good reason. As the member for Makin said, this idea that pensioners, who have often worked very hard in the factories of this nation, who came to Elizabeth in post war migration—many people came from the UK or from Italy or from Greece—are now being told that they cannot go on holiday. It is an extraordinary thing to do, to limit a holiday is if we want to limit the trip of a lifetime, the last trip to a home country often. It might be the last trip that they make to see the place of their birth and their family. This idea that we will have a two-tiered pension system is extraordinary.

As the member for Makin pointed out, the clean energy supplement is really a ridiculous proposition. For those who campaigned on this very matter in previous elections to be now hacking it away and basically giving us a two-tiered pension system is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. What a horrific bill to present to this House. You just wonder how much trouble this government will get themselves into with penalty rates, with the Centrelink robo-debt system—they are in trouble over that—with the omnibus bill and with this assault on Australian families. It is one initiative after another—in this case, many initiatives assembled in the one package. You have to scratch your head about how they think the public is going to react to this. They have spent all week, including today, navel-gazing about their own jobs. They are more concerned at the moment about the Nationals whip, Mr Christensen, than they are about anybody else.

Debate interrupted.

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