Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

This is an interesting debate about social security reform, coming in the context of nearly a decade of changes initiated by the Howard government. What we are effectively debating today is an extension of John Howard's ideas and the reviews that Patrick McClure contributed to. It surprises me more than anything that a number of people on my side of the chamber have a problem with the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Bill 2012, because I do not have a problem with a single word of it.

In debates around something as important as welfare reform, Australians need to know that there is some level of intellectual and moral consistency in the way we approach protecting the most vulnerable in this country. On this side of the House we have worked since the mid-nineties on bringing the words 'work for the dole' back into common parlance—where they could be uttered at a barbecue without the speaker being shown to the door—to a point where there is now an expectation that, as a working-age adult who is not incapacitated or a primary caregiver to a large number of children, one contributes as well as one possibly can. The job of the welfare system is to engage every Australian with an opportunity to contribute as best they can. Let us not forget the words of Noel Pearson, who said that the more you raise the payments for inactivity, the more it becomes a 'welfare pedestal' from which you are reluctant to descend.

Ten years ago these thoughts could not have been uttered in groups of more than two or outside a right-wing think tank, but the world has changed. Now we acknowledge—and Prime Minister Cameron in the UK pointed this out just two days ago—that we may well be moving towards a superior system where there is a single payment for those in need, adjusted simply for the needs of those who are dependent on you or those who may have a disability. We need to move to a social security system that pays a lot more to a severely disabled Australian than just a standard pension. The simple notion that when you obtain a disability-support pension you are paid the same as an old-age pension and, if you are more disabled than others, it is just bad luck—it is a single payment—will have to change. There will be a time when we have to tailor these payments directly to the needs of individuals.

One thing that right-of-centre governments around the world have worked on is the proposition not only that everyone should be able to give but that the state should assist them to give as well as they possibly can. As long as you are paid $529 on a Newstart allowance and $648 on a disability support pension or parenting pension, there is very little drive to go out and do anything other than make a series of excuses for why you cannot work. We are in an economy with high capital-to-labour ratios. There is too much capital in this country to not be utilising our labour as well as we can. We have a participation rate lower than many nations in the Northern Hemisphere. Our job, on this side of the chamber, is to raise that proportion—to hold the hand of every Australian and say, 'There is no reason why you cannot be in the workforce.'

I have been privileged to employ two disabled people in my office. I have learnt that a simple piece of software can open up an entire world to people who could never have dreamed of working in the office of a politician. I have two mums working in my office and they never come in until their kids are looked after. If there is a problem, they leave to look after their kids. This is a cultural shift we need to be thinking about. There are plenty of opportunities for the people we are debating about today, who may well be saying back in my electorate, 'I'm $112 worse off a week after these changes.' I say: not if you get a job. We are paying through publicly funded assets to take your kids to school, to keep them there and give them a great start in life. Why cannot a parent whose children are in publicly funded facilities find time to work in those intervening hours? But, as long as we persist with a $529 payment and grandfather everyone since 2006, it simply will not change until they are forced off the payment by the age of their youngest child. All we are doing today is unravelling the grandfathering that Prime Minister Howard put in place to ensure that the transition from welfare to work was smoother. It is an old, important and valuable political tool to grandfather those who are potentially affected by change and to implement the change immediately. All we are doing in this legislation is removing the grandfathering—removing that little political flourish that John Howard employed in 2005 to ensure that we did not have a mass protest on 1 July 2006 when Welfare to Work was introduced, because we grandfathered parents. I think that in 2012 we are mature enough to say that the rules that apply to parents today should also apply to the parents who in 2006 had children older than the age of six in the case of single parents or eight in the case of those who were partnered parenting payment recipients. There is nothing inconsistent about that.

Frankly, I am a little disappointed that my side of the chamber is not firmly behind the government in doing all of this to the letter. You cannot deny that this is an important move that we would have made if we were in government. You cannot deny that the government has made changes to the thresholds to make it easier to earn some more money as a parent and still be able to get payments, by relaxing some of the requirements around work earnings so that the taper at $62 and $250 a fortnight moves from 60c and 50c down to 40c—a uniform, simple taper. Everybody understands that you can earn $62 a fortnight and, once you tick over that amount, it is tapered by 40c in the dollar. That is not hard for anyone to understand.

This is the basic proposition: if you are a working-age adult in this country—and I do not care if you live in an Aboriginal community or in the centre of Sydney—if you are not incapacitated and you have children who attend state funded education, it is a reasonable proposition to ask you to fulfil a work obligation, an activity requirement or a work-study-training test. Let's not pick on the 16-year-old and 17-year-old mums; let's have every Australian doing that, and then it is up to the employment sector to find the flexibility to enable those people to engage in the economy.

I hear excuses—and I am disappointed that they come from my side of the chamber today—about not being able to catch a bus or having a hole in your shoe or not having the right shirt to go to a job interview. They are the problems that I want to have as a government, because I can fix those, but the problem I cannot fix is having the welfare pedestal of $529 a fortnight as a blind entitlement and having the people who fund the welfare system so separated from those who receive it that it simply becomes an entitlement—a line in a Centrelink brochure: 'That's the money I'm entitled to, and don't take it off me.' That is not a sustainable welfare system. That is not what Beveridge conceived over a century ago.

What we need is a tailored, individualised, case-managed welfare system that can identify a person's need. As I said, there are people who need more money than they currently get. I have 1,500 single parents in my electorate who probably will not be happy with what I am saying, but I am saying to them that these rules apply to everyone from this day onwards. All we have done in this legislation is extend Welfare to Work 2005 and the Gillard government's 2011 changes that sought to accelerate the taper. They simply said that, if you have children aged 13 or 14, you can keep the payments until they are 15; if they are aged 12, you can have the payments for another two years. These were thoroughly reasonable tapers and all we are doing now is exercising them in a more rapid way.

We can analyse whether this is fiscal rectitude, whether it is fiscal irresponsibility or whether it is trying to fulfil a grubby political promise about a surplus next year, but in reality it is what this side of the parliament would have done, so how can we possibly have a debate about what the Right of politics right around the world has been working on over the last two decades? People on my side of the chamber should be patting themselves on the back and saying, 'We've reached a point where a government can hold its head high, left of centre, and suggests these changes.' Doesn't that suggest a real paradigm shift? That is something that the Right can be proud of and that John Howard played a major role in.

If you talk to the 30 per cent of people who are no longer on parenting payments, either they have moved across to another form of payment that has a higher activity requirement or they are in the workforce. Suddenly there are households in this country where at least one adult is engaged in the work system—at least one adult who gets out of bed, has a shower, has some breakfast, makes sure the kids are fed and says, 'You know what: I've got to take you to school because I have to go to work.' I am not going to apply any value judgments around the image I have just created, but the evidence speaks for itself. Everything from the Whitehall studies in the UK through to all of the work in the world indicates, through any meta-analysis, that connection to work and connection to capability—Amartya Sen's description of these very issues—means that health improves, welfare reliance reduces and abuse of children falls. Everything is centred around capability. Only with capability can come opportunity.

I do not mean to sound like Noel Pearson but, the moment we pay flat rates of welfare and we have so many people receiving it that we are unable to individually case-manage, we will find a system that is too large and actually controls us. We must take back control and make our welfare system something that is truly tailored to those who need it most. They are cheap words, but in this legislation they are fairly simple, modest changes. They are not changes that leave people destitute; they are changes that leave people with choices. All a Western economy can aspire to is to provide people with reasonable choices, let the state run the economy so that jobs are available, have money to move people if work is in other parts of the country and, finally, have a system whereby we constantly review people who need it, and for those who are seriously and permanently disabled we stop molesting them and asking them to chase work. That is not appropriate either for someone who is seriously disabled for the long term.

In this debate around the national disability scheme, I hope we can weave in the elements of Welfare to Work, identify people who have a bad back at the age of 50 and have a meaningful conversation with them about what they can do for the next 15 years. At the moment that is not happening sufficiently. Too often we rely on the medical certificates of selected numbers of providers who write certificates for the disability support pension; other doctors do not do them at all. We need a more standardised arrangement so that there is some form of national consistency.

I think that all of the elements are here, including modifications to termination payments to be fairer and more clear about how we identify end-of-work payments, as far as Centrelink goes. The effort is here now to allow people to earn more money before they have this minimum waiting period for Centrelink access to be available. It is more generous. It allows more people to work and be comfortable that, by working, they do not undermine their payments. Lastly, and most importantly, we need to be able to look in the eyes of primary care givers in this country, male and female, and say to them, 'You know what? This concept that you do one or the other has come to an end.' We have reached a time when, in a nation so reliant on using every part of its very small labour force, we must reach out and have every one of them engaged in the workforce. This bill goes a small but important way towards achieving that.

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