Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The parliamentary secretary interjects that it is the status of the questions. I am a great watcher of questions and when I hear question after question after question asked for a simple response of factual matters which the minister concerned should know and understand as part of his job and there is total obfuscation one can only put one reason on that: either they are ashamed of the figures and the reaction thereto or in fact they do not know—they did not ask.

In fact, it is the case with this particular measure, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Employment Services Reform) Bill 2008, that after months of doing nothing the Rudd government is starting to do a few things. I think Australia would be better off if it stopped doing anything, if it went back to doing nothing. The evidence is that its recent and dramatic responses, while seeming okay in principle, have holes all over them, which of course are being demonstrated by forensic questions from the opposition. Here again we have an initiative based primarily on fixing something that ain’t broke. The old system addressing unemployment, which was totally bureaucratic, was clearly not working and there were one million people out of work. The economic circumstances inherited by the Howard government were such that there was no work for them. When one sets out to address unemployment issues and the administration thereof, the first thing is to get your economy right so that people have a choice of jobs and no reason to be unemployed. It is a fact that at this time that circumstance still applies, certainly in my electorate.

While I understand the need for skilled operators in many areas, take the case of Cooperative Bulk Handling in my electorate, which regularly takes on seasonal workers for the receival of grain at their numerous loading points, the ‘bins’ as we know them. They take people who are not experienced in that work. The training is provided by the employer and probably takes a few hours—they learn to operate certain equipment and away they go. It used to be part-time work for university students, who do not seem to be available or interested these days. But as I found out in talking to the executive of Cooperative Bulk Handling the other day, they are still desperately looking for people who will turn up.

I had a similar call from a hotelier known to me. From my recollection he wanted people to turn up to service his bedrooms and to work behind the bar. I know that there is a bureaucracy now that demands the right to give all these people a certificate—to do what? Make a bed as they should be doing at home? Or, for instance, to work behind the bar? On my experience of 30 years the people attended and said, ‘I’ve never done this job before,’ and you would say, ‘Okay’—and this was the simple response under the award at that time—‘you have the opportunity to work for x weeks as green labour’, which paid a salary three-quarters, I think it was, of the full salary. Of course, let me remind the previous speaker—if he were around to listen—that when he talks about female participation, when I entered the hotel industry in 1956 in Western Australia women got paid the same wage as men. That was a unique circumstance at the time. We never, ever wanted to discriminate between one and the other because we made our judgements on their skills at doing the job.

They usually learnt their job in a week or so and as soon as they showed some competence they went up onto full pay or the otherwise prevailing limit—but anybody who took the limit was clearly unsuitable. There are now all these jobs that you have to get a certificate for when the training period can be a matter of hours. The ‘skills’ in those days required people to be capable of adding up because the cash registers that were available were the press-down type. Today, as anyone would experience going into a hotel and asking how much the round of drinks delivered cost, the bar operative has to go back and press the relevant buttons on the till to find out how much they are going to charge you. If you are drinking with a group and you spend a fair bit of time there, you walk out with a pocketful of small change because they cannot even work out how to handle that at the same time. That is when they have a certificate, so what is the good of that? What have we achieved with this argument of skills when skills are something that can be successfully achieved on the job? All of the people who worked for me behind the bar frequently had no secondary education to speak of at all—but they could add up. They did so in their head and were able to present a customer with a round of drinks of any variety and tell them how much on the spot. When they got back to the till, they knew how to handle that.

Here we are with all these job opportunities and we have the member for Port Adelaide telling us how sympathetic we have to be for people who presently have been unable to find the jobs that are offering. If this legislation passes, we are going to weaken the penalties that apply to people who do not try to get or do not want a job. Much employment is very simple and, while one can constantly talk up skills, one of the major demands I know of is for semiskilled people or people who are prepared to learn basic tasks associated with many opportunities in employment. These days even someone who would apply to one of my farmers wanting machinery operators—people to drive headers and that—can be trained very quickly because things are computerised.

The other day it was brought to my attention by an employer, who was desperate for staff and willing to train them on the job, that a person turned up and said to him—he repeated this story to me—‘I’m here because I have to be here. I do not want the job. The job will mean that, after tax and all the other things that other, committed people pay, I will be literally no better off financially than I am on unemployment benefits. You can employ me if you like but, let me tell you, you won’t like me when I get the job.’ He at least was honest; a lot of others turn up in that circumstance and the next day have a bad back. They manage to injure themselves in the first week and then become another burden on society because, of course, they will be supported by insurance policies paid for by the general public. But this fellow left. He went back to Centrelink and said, ‘I attended.’ I do not think this employer rang up and put him in. They are too frustrated and too busy because they have to interview someone else. That is an example that is ever recurring. Why should there be sensitivity to that individual? Why should the member for Port Adelaide say, ‘You can’t call them dole bludgers’? That is what this bloke was, and there is a legion of those left.

I think these matters need to be understood. When there were a million unemployed and people were desperately seeking work, there was a requirement for compassion. In the present work environment, anybody can get a job. What are we doing? We are talking about bringing South Sea Islanders in to pick fruit—I am not critical of this—yet we are talking about changing the regime of how unemployed people are dealt with if and when they refuse the job as a fruit picker. I wrote down that the member for Port Adelaide talked about calibrating the ‘system’s response’. If you are fit, able and within a reasonable distance of jobs, why do you need to be calibrated? What is the purpose of a Job Network operator calibrating someone who does not want to work? Why should Australian taxpayers and all those people who up until recently were referred to in this House as ‘mortgage stressed’ and ‘both having to be employed just to meet their commitments to a home mortgage’ pay tax to support a person who does not want to work?

There was the tragic case of a family with seven children who received over $700 a week in welfare benefits and their children were breaking into premises to get food. Why? When the authorities checked out that house they found there was not one scrap of food in it. What is the score? Why are we here wanting to fix something that ain’t broke and wanting somehow to prove that that is a positive response from a new government? All of the people I know desperately want workers. They do not mind what workers’ employment backgrounds are as long as they turn up. I have watched it. I have also watched our side of politics do what I think were very stupid things. I still have in my pocket a licence that allows me to drive a heavy truck. I used to have one that allowed me to drive a road train. I did that in the years before I got a letter in the mail to say I was no longer entitled to drive a road train—not because I had forgotten how to do it but because I was not doing it consistently. Next they will be writing to people with pushbikes saying, ‘You haven’t ridden a pushbike for a few years; you’d better go to be retrained before you get on one.’

And you wonder why there is a shortage of seasonal workers. One contacted me and said, ‘For three months every year I was employed driving a heavy truck.’ He was driving a heavy truck—a highly skilled operator who for other parts of the year, as is common in my electorate, took other seasonal work. He knew exactly what his job was with three different employers every year, and one of those jobs was to drive a truck, delivering grain to the silo or carting super back from the works. Now they have taken his licence off him—that was done when we were in office—because he only worked three months a year. It was going to cost him $2,000 to go back and be retrained. For what? When you talk about skills, I can take you out in the country and introduce you to people who are highly skilled—welders with all sorts of equipment they have picked up during their lives—and many of them are forbidden to go onto many workplaces today because they have not been trained.

Then, of course, we had the Deputy Prime Minister telling us about her great training achievements. The member for Port Adelaide told us there are 50,000 people enrolled in training places. He might have told us how many of them are in their fourth or fifth training place so that they can avoid going to work, because I know of people in that category.

There is a fundamental rule in all of this, and that is that this parliament has a responsibility to protect the people who go to work. As for dual households, I have heard all the arguments saying, ‘I’m a single parent and therefore I have special problems.’ My children both work and have exactly the same problems, because they are both at work during the day. They are taxed heavily and they get nothing by way of welfare. The reality is that those people have rights. The average Australian taxpayer has rights and this parliament has the responsibility to see that people for whom work is available and who are physically able are in work. If they are not physically able, they should be on a disability pension. They should not be on unemployment, necessarily.

Profitable businesses have closed in my electorate because they could not get anybody to work in them. That is the circumstance. Try and get an Australian to work in a meatworks these days. Under the silly rules we operate under—and we were no better—you have to bring in foreign workers on 457 visas and pay them more than the award that is applicable to the Australian workers. You can imagine how the Aussie workers feel about that! That is how silly these issues are when we come to employment. But, if there is unemployment, I can name two meatworks in my electorate that will put on another shift when those people turn up, and they will train them. When you see a meat chain in operation, the skills can be very, very basic. You stand in one place—it is not the happiest of work—and you are likely to put a single cut in an animal carcass as it passes by.

Why, then, do we have to get to a situation that makes it easier for people to avoid work? That is the proposal within this legislation. You have heard the previous speakers and you have heard the second reading speech. I am astounded, nevertheless, that they made something of the fact—and the member for Port Adelaide repeated it—that the proportion of people on unemployment benefits who have been unemployed for more than five years has increased. Of course it has. The unemployment numbers have dropped from seven, eight or nine per cent to four per cent, so of course that proportion will be greater. But I find the figures astounding because they are inconsistent with those provided to me that relate to the changes since the introduction of the measures that are now to be changed. In 2006 there were 105,000 long-term unemployed and by 2008 there were 146,000. If you want to start being selective about the number of people unemployed for more than five years, there is no reason in Australia today for a person to be unemployed. There is work available in different categories, but it will not necessarily be in whatever category they choose.

This place should not be changing this legislation. The other legislation is working. If you are going to do as I explained and walk into employment interviews and make sure you are not given the job, if you do not turn up or if you toss a coin and say, ‘It’s a beautiful day—I can go to the beach and it’ll cost me 42 bucks,’ that is a judgement issue. But when you know that you should be out there seeking work or you are going to lose eight weeks pay, that is a different judgement issue altogether—and that is what this legislation proposes. But again, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? If it is compassion for people who will not go out and look for a job when they are available on every street corner, why should we be changing the legislation?

If it is going to cost working Australians more tax—those working families whom we never hear about anymore—and it must cost them more with all this calibration, the additional interviews et cetera, or if it will deny them benefits because the surplus is all gone, then is that fair? Is it fair that we, the Parliament of Australia, support legislation because the government wants to be seen to be doing something where change is not necessary? These are the criticisms I have of this legislation. We do not need it. It weakens the discipline on people who wish to be supported by the taxpayer to go and find work. It is a tragedy, because the other solution is to dramatically lower the payments they get, which makes work more attractive. I do not agree with that. If a person is genuinely out of work, they should get fair compensation. (Time expired)

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