David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this important motion moved by the member for Robertson. I commend her for moving this motion on this most important of topics. Social welfare is an extremely important and extremely complex area of policy. So let's start with the fundamentals. It is important that we as a society have a strong social welfare safety net—and we do. We have a very strong social welfare safety net. In fact, we have one of the strongest in the world. The vast majority of Australians would agree with the proposition that it is important that we as a society help those who genuinely cannot help themselves.

Just as we have a moral obligation to those who need support, we also have a moral obligation to those who pay for that support. You cannot have a strong social welfare safety net without very large expenditures of money. To put it into perspective, social welfare is by far the biggest item in the federal budget. It is sometimes said that we spend about a third of our federal budget on social welfare expenditure. My view is that it is closer to 41 per cent. The reason I think it is a bit higher is that our federal budget papers include, as expenditure, the GST transfer payments, which is effectively the money of the states, but that money passes through the federal books as expenditure and in my view it somewhat distorts the overall spending picture in the budget. If you take out the GST revenue, social welfare is 41c in every dollar that the federal government spends. It is a very large amount—five times what is spent on education, six times what is spent on defence, 40 times what is spent on immigration, 150 times what is spent on the ABC and more than 800 times what we spend on tourism and promoting trade. So it is a very large item of expenditure and it is absolutely critical that in public policy we look at social welfare expenditure and we determine whether or not it is working as effectively as it can, both for the people who are receiving it and also for the legions of taxpayers who pay for it.

That is precisely what the Minister for Social Services is focused on through the Try, Test and Learn Fund. The minister, aided by the work done by PWC, has discovered that we do have, unfortunately, some structural problems in the social welfare system because people who become involved in that system perhaps early in life often stay on social welfare for a very long time. Frankly, that is not in the interests of those people because I think it is fair to say that decades of welfare dependence is not something to which anyone would aspire. If the system can more effectively intervene early on and help those people who are at risk of becoming welfare dependent to find other opportunities, then it should do so. That is exactly what the system is all about.

The PWC report estimated that the 11,000 young carers in the system at the moment are expected to access social welfare income support for 43 years over their lifetime and the 4,000 or so young parents who are in the system are expected to access social welfare support for 45 years. The 6,600 young students who were surveyed as part of this process are expected to access income support for 37 years. If you look at the entire cost to the budget of all of the social welfare payments to all Australians over their lifetime, it comes out at $4.8 trillion, which is a staggering figure that obviously dwarfs every other number in the budget. What the Try, Test and Learn Fund says is let us target some sensible interventions especially in situations where people are at an early stage of their lives and perhaps have been involved in the welfare system for a limited amount of time, and do what we can to help those people get off welfare and break that cycle of dependence. That is an entirely sensible thing to be doing, and I commend the minister for this activity and I commend the motion.

See this speech in context