Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

It is extraordinarily arrogant. I do not know why we bother to have a parliament if the government assumes that, despite the Senate and despite the House of Representatives, every piece of legislation is going to go through completely unamended. It is disgraceful.

Currently, rehabilitation services are provided by the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service; however, as with other areas of social security, the Howard government has been working towards making rehabilitation services contestable so that private providers can tender for contracts. As I said, they have already started that tender process for vocational rehabilitation services.

There are some real concerns about opening this sector up for contestability. One of the issues is that vocational rehabilitation is a specialist service, particularly for people who have mental health issues or significant disabilities or who have been injured at work. Not only does it require specialist, skilled people who have occupational therapy, physiotherapy or social work skills and qualifications but also it requires people who really understand the sorts of experiences people have gone through when they are confronted by those issues—whether they have injured themselves and are trying to return to work, whether they have developed mental health issues or have a chronic disability that continues to cause issues throughout their life. I am concerned that the government is not providing any guarantees about the quality or the standard of services for people who would be going out of the Commonwealth rehabilitation system.

Many of us have seen, when areas are opened up to contestability, agencies enter the market voraciously, sometimes getting things wrong and sometimes not doing a great job. Most of the Job Network providers and employment agencies that we have across the country do a really good job, but some of them do not and, when we open this service up for contestability, significant protections need to be in place for people with disabilities and/or mental health challenges who want to return to or find work.

Unfortunately, this bill does not provide those safeguards and it does not provide those guarantees. Nor does it actually recognise that these are really specialist services. This is not just about going out there for job seekers who are at a certain level. This is about providing really tough job-seeking assistance, and it does require people who have good skills and good qualifications who really understand the experiences of people with disabilities and mental health challenges and those needing rehabilitation and assistance to enter the workforce. I am not convinced that the government understands that. Nor am I convinced that the government has built any safeguards into the system of contestability in order to protect people in the system.

The other area of concern in this bill is the issue of financial case management. You have to remember that financial case management does not have any basis in legislation. Financial case management basically is a by-product of the Howard government’s extreme welfare compliance regime, a regime that even many right-wing commentators have noted is excessively harsh. The regime provides that people who commit certain breaches within the social security system will lose their income—all of their income—for eight weeks. If the penalty is applied to you, you may be eligible for assistance through financial case management. This means that Centrelink or one of its contract providers will actually cover your costs and will pay for your food, rent and utilities in certain circumstances. But there is absolutely no basis in legislation for saying that, if it is not deemed that you can get access to financial case management, you have a capacity to appeal that. This bill puts in place a mechanism by which, if, by the end of financial case management, overpayments have occurred, those overpayments can be claimed back—and you have no capacity, if you are in those circumstances, to appeal. There is no appeal mechanism and no complaints mechanism that you can apply if an overpayment is being sought from you under the financial case management system.

I think that should be of concern to many people in terms of procedural fairness. Many people working in politicians’ or solicitors’ offices find that a lot of people in the social services system are incurring a Centrelink debt and their capacity to negotiate their way through the system to decide whether they can appeal is really quite difficult. Unfortunately, within this bill there are no protections and no complaint mechanisms for those people who may find themselves subject to a claim to have their payments reduced because an overpayment was made under financial case management.

I am extremely concerned by the lack of balance in the current welfare system. Labor supported and introduced the notion of reciprocal obligation into the welfare system. But our version was just that: we asked that people in receipt of social security payments did everything they could to find work and that they actively demonstrated it. In return we said that there were certain things that people could expect—access to training, proactive assistance in finding work and becoming job ready, and high-quality service providers in the local area that they were able to work with in an innovative way to find work.

We recognised that there were some people, particularly those with chronic conditions, mature age workers and sole parents, who had specific difficulties and faced unique barriers to entering the workforce. We recognised that there were people who started well behind the eight balance—those whose lack of education or a lack of a nurturing and supportive upbringing, or in many instances even a home, made their job prospects very limited.

As a former social worker I have worked with many young people whose literacy and numeracy skills were completely inadequate for them to even contemplate entering the workforce. Their capacity to hold a conversation with anybody and to speak to anybody in an appropriate way without causing great offence was extremely limited. The thought of these young people being able to get solid, full-time work without a significant amount of work on them beforehand was completely ridiculous.

We recognised that those with caring responsibilities and people with disabilities may not have the capacity for full-time work. We recognised that there needed to be some flexibility in the system to accommodate individual circumstances.

The government, in my view, have forgotten what the notion of reciprocal or mutual obligation means. They have forgotten their end of the partnership, their end of the bargain, with job seekers. The system now lacks the balance necessary: you need both incentives and penalties to assist job seekers into work; there need to be obligations placed on employment agencies about the way in which they deal with unemployed people; and the government needs to take an active role in removing systemic barriers for job seekers.

The Howard government’s reforms have been all about punishing people, not helping them. I would have been happy to support welfare reforms that provided reward for effort, increased training opportunities and worked out practical solutions to some of the reasons why people are not participating in the workforce. Instead, the Howard government decided to reduce financial rewards for work and made it harder for people to get the education or training they need to get a job. I have yet to meet someone with a disability who is not desperate to get work. Most find it extremely hard to find an employer to take them on. There is little that this government has done to change employer attitudes. I meet many women with children who are itching to get back into the workforce but they cannot afford the childcare fees. Or they do the sums and find they would be worse off after getting work not only because of childcare fees but also because of effective marginal tax rates that mean they are working to fill John Howard’s coffers, not to provide for their families.

This bill, in particular the restriction of the pensioner education supplement, is a continuation of the Howard government’s failed approach to welfare reform. We on this side of the House know that it is dangerous and foolhardy to sit back and somehow think that the resources boom will be the driver of permanent jobs and prosperity for all time to come. We know that it will not. To drive the next wave of prosperity, we need an education revolution, to borrow the words of the Leader of the Opposition. All the evidence shows that the best way to help people out of poverty, to help them into jobs and to increase participation and prosperity is for governments to invest in education and training. This government has done just the opposite, and this bill is just a continuation of the failed and flawed Welfare to Work reforms that the government has been driving.

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