Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education and Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. This bill aims to extend exemptions to parents who are asked to look for part-time work as part of their welfare requirements. The parents in particular would be in receipt of, for example, Newstart allowance, parenting payment, youth allowance or special benefit and they would have school-age children. At the moment they must report at least 15 hours a week of activities to Centrelink, and this new bill that is now before us aims to commence after this financial year.

There is no doubt that this bill is well intentioned in giving additional exemptions to parents who are asked to look for work and to work part time as part of them receiving welfare. It is no doubt well intentioned. The problem is that there is not always a direct relationship between parents being exempted from looking for work or finding work and the very best outcomes for their families. In too many families and in too many households children are raised without any employment at all, whether from one or both of their parents. They have no role models. They have no experience—sometimes for generations—of the whole business of someone having an engagement with the workplace. They have no understanding of what it means to take on an apprenticeship or training and move into a workplace, to be financially independent. They do not have the sorts of choices that all of us in this room take for granted.

We know as a fact that in households where there is welfare dependence for very long periods of time and where it is very unlikely that the children have ever observed a role model in work, those children are more likely to be unemployed themselves. They are more likely to be teenage parents. They are more to have mental health issues and they are much more likely to experience poverty in their own lives. They are more likely to be exploited by the unscrupulous elements in our communities. So it is not always generous or a great idea to simply say, ‘If you’re a parent, we don’t really think you have to try very hard to find part-time work.’

Sometimes, indeed, we have a situation, in the case of an exemption referred to here for those experiencing domestic violence, where the very issue locking those women into the domestic violence situation and the abuse of their children is the fact that they have no economic or financial independence. They have no idea how they will live apart from the relationship which is causing them abuse and harming their children. The best way to help a woman out of an exploitative, abusive relationship is to help her become financially independent, help her to rebuild her self-esteem and help her to re-establish her skills or teach her skills in the very first instance so she can stand alone in the workplace and support her children.

So I do not think it is a great shift forward to extend or create a new exemption in this bill to provide that parents who have experienced domestic violence will be given a different sort of treatment when it comes to expecting them to look for work and move back into the workforce. Of course, right now there are exemptions for women who are experiencing domestic violence. Self-evidently, some women are so crippled and abused by that violence they cannot look for work, but I think it is important that the situation is very carefully supported and monitored by a social worker, by an appropriate person who is skilled and professional, and that the woman in that relationship, the relationship she needs to leave, is helped to move out and to join in with a place of work in Australia.

I am very concerned that this particular set of exemptions talks about the parent not having to look for work up until their children turn 19. That is a very, very long time for a parent to be out of the workforce—from when their children are born until the age of 19. When I was Minister for Workforce Participation in the former government, we introduced the new legislation that enabled single parents to remain on parenting benefits until their children reached ‘school age’ rather than 16. At that time, single parents were given an enormous amount of support to re-skill, to be taught literacy or numeracy or to have their qualifications upgraded so that they could rejoin the workforce when their children reached school age. I cannot tell you how many single parents—both men and women, but mostly women—were grateful for the opportunity and the increased resources we put into supporting them to get back into the workforce. When you have been out of the workforce for 19 years, there are very few employers who look upon you with much enthusiasm, particularly if you are a middle-aged woman whose skills are downgraded to just ‘housework’ or ‘being a mother’. So I do not think it is a kindness to say that you cannot do up to 15 hours of part-time work a week until your children are up to 19 years of age. It is too long. I certainly think 16 years of age is more than appropriate, and that is what the current requirements are. Certainly a 19-year-old teenager should not need the 100 per cent attention of a parent at that stage in their life.

I am also very concerned about the new exemption to be introduced to support parents providing kinship care for a child who is a relative through a care plan prepared or accepted by a state or territory government. We already have exemptions under the legislation for people who have care of a relative and that care has been recognised through a court order. This is relevant for Indigenous women, particularly grandmothers, in the Australian community, who are increasingly responsible for raising their grandchildren. We already have quite solid and strong exemptions in the system. I am concerned that the Rudd government thinks that by tweaking this legislation they can then walk away from this issue. The issue is significant and serious, and simply naming this group in this piece of legislation does nothing to actually address the problem. The problem for Indigenous grandmothers in particular is that if they have their full care of their grandchildren recognised by Centrelink their daughters will lose their parenting payments. Daughters often threaten to take the children back into what is perhaps an abusive relationship or a dysfunctional situation. It might be a relationship with a new de facto partner where the grandmother is concerned for the safety of her granddaughters.

If we do not deal with the issue of giving the grandmother some financial support for caring for those children which does not require the voluntary stepping forward of the daughter to register the realities of that caring arrangement then we are going to continue to see the grandmothers leaving their paid employment and struggling in poverty to raise their grandchildren. They do not receive a cent in Centrelink parenting payments while their daughter, or sometimes their son, receives that benefit, which is often spent on sustaining a drug or alcohol habit or on other behaviours which in no way help to support the children. This is a very serious issue in our community and I am very concerned that the government thinks that by taking a swipe at this problem with this piece of legislation the job is done. No, it does not address the problem at all.

Let me now move on to foster carers. I am very concerned that we could still be imagining that further exemptions should be extended to foster carers to receive, for example, Newstart allowance while they provide emergency or respite foster care for children. As far as I am concerned, foster carers are the unsung heroes of all of our states and territories where we have so many at-risk children who cannot remain with their own families and need foster care. But when the authorities in those different states look for foster carers they find they are a rapidly diminishing number of individuals. In the state of Victoria, for example, the foster carer numbers have collapsed by over 50 per cent. Why are those foster carer numbers collapsing? It is because foster carers are not being adequately remunerated. The legislation related to foster caring is not adequate. When foster carers ask, for example, to remain as carers for a child for much longer than just a few weeks, knowing the interests of the child in their care are best served by a longer placement, they are not listened to. So foster carers see children churn through their care, knowing they will therefore suffer serious emotional disadvantage and distress and perhaps will be permanently affected by the failure of our system to give them long-term, permanent care and love.

This bill refers to extending exemptions for carers while they are providing care and for a period of time afterwards to support their availability for subsequent placement of children in their care. I am saying that this is not the way to handle the crisis in foster care in our country right now. Foster carers need a whole new set of understandings and changed regulations state by state. In fact, I would very strongly urge that we have a national response to the needs of significantly at-risk children and the care options for them. It concerns me that in this bill we simply have an extension of the system and the hope that the problem will perhaps then go away.

We are also told that ‘parents will be able to count their study, voluntary work, part-time work—or a combination of these activities—towards meeting their part-time participation requirements’ in order to continue to receive the various welfare payments. When I was the minister under the Howard government, we looked at voluntary work being allowed for the purpose this describes. We found that too often, if a mother, for example, said, ‘I have been working at the tuck shop,’ or ‘I’ve been helping out at the op shop,’ there was a real reluctance on the part of the not-for-profit organisation to monitor that volunteer’s time of volunteer work or level of commitment to that volunteering work.

I suggest to this government that they really do need to look closely at volunteer work in particular as a substitute for paid work or education or training, because it might sound like a kindness to an individual but it may mean that that individual really does miss out on the chance to rejoin the paid workforce or to be trained so that they can have a much better chance of getting a job in the future. Voluntary work is wonderful. All praise to the volunteers that keep small communities, in particular, in Australia going. But I think there are real dangers in having unsupervised voluntary work regarded as a substitute for part-time paid work or education or training.

I also have to say something in relation to those who are doing home schooling or distance education receiving an exemption from job seeking. Certainly it is difficult, for example, for women living in very remote parts of Australia who are distance educating their children to look for work. But I know for a fact that a very significant number of those individuals actually do work in helping to run properties—some of them very large properties. So I would not automatically suggest that because you are distance educating your children you should have an exemption from participation requirements until your youngest child turns 16. I think we should look at that more on a case-by-case basis. It should not be automatic, particularly when there are others employed in the home as tutors for those children or to undertake other housekeeping and parenting roles.

18:19:58

More and more parents are seeking to homeschool, particularly those who are of a particular faith and who do not want their children to be exposed to the educational philosophies found in our state education systems or in independent schools. I think it is important deal with this case by case. It is not a significant number of parents who offer home schooling but I do not think it should be simply be a blanket case that if you put your hand up and say, ‘I am going to homeschool my children, in the secondary years in particular, so please will you now pay me Newstart allowance or some other special benefit because I choose to homeschool my children for two, three or four hours a day.’ I think it should be a case-by-case matter and we should not lose control of the situation because it is not a kindness to families to have welfare dependency continue and become intergenerational, as is too often the case. If you have four or more children you currently, of course, have a large-family exemption as long as the four children are aged under 16. I think that aged under 16 is a more than appropriate age to cut off the special exemption. Extending that exemption till children are 19 is actually quite ridiculous.

This is a well-meaning set of extensions of exemptions but there are dangers among all of the best-made intentions. In Australian we have too much welfare dependency, which affects the lives not just of this generation but of children and grandchildren. Welfare dependency is not a good place to be if you are talking about your financial independence, your choices in life and your ability to maximise the opportunities that Australia presents. I am particularly concerned for families of non-English-speaking background who are perhaps newly arrived in Australia. Those families should not be assisted with further exemptions from requirements to look for part-time work but, rather, should be given special training and job-seeking support and should be given greater experience of Australian workplace culture, rather than simply being ticked off and allowed to stay away from Centrelink. The other day I was told a very serious statistic that 30 per cent of Newstart allowance recipients are now exempted from reporting to Centrelink with diaries or other evidence of their job seeking—30 per cent! I think that is an extraordinary indictment of the laziness of this government if that 30 per cent is the case. Those 30 per cent need help to find work, there is no doubt about that. Very often that assistance is quite complex and it takes a long time, but no individual should be allowed simply to abandon the business of looking for work because it is convenient to Centrelink staff, because that person is perhaps a difficult person to communicate with or manage. That 30 per cent being allowed to not participate in looking for work, education or training will become the parents of the next generation of welfare dependent, disadvantaged Australians. I do not think that is fair or right, so I cannot support all the principles in this bill. I understand that it was probably from the best of intentions but, unfortunately, from a government that is naive and not experienced in the realities of the working world.

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