Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to join my colleagues today to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 and the amendments put forward by the member for Jagajaga. The government believes the only way to improve the budget is to go after the vulnerable, and we are here again talking about another piece of legislation that is highlighting their attack on students, their attack on pensioners and, in general, their attack on people receiving any payment from Centrelink. They refuse to lower the deeming rates for our pensioners, they refuse to adequately fund our schools and they will not do a thing about the glacial rollout of the NBN. Yet, here we are again talking about changes to social services and, again, an attack on the most vulnerable in our communities.

We saw their desire to drain middle and working class Australians manifested in their manufactured debt recovery debacle. We have seen that and we have talked about it in here time and time again, and we still have a government refusing to stop and change that system to make it less onerous on people in our community, and more fair.

I understand and appreciate that this government is constantly having to split up their regressive policy ideas so that it might be difficult for people to keep up if they do not particularly pay close attention to politics. So let me tell you this: this speech is going to be the same speech I have been giving in this place since 2014, since the diabolical budget we woke up to in 2014, where this government's priorities were laid clearly on the table. They want to shower largess on the big end of town while chasing people down rabbit holes and putting their hands in their pockets to scrounge and take from the most vulnerable in our community.

Since 2014 Labor has stood up for the people of Australia whom this government thinks it can bully and devalue. Since that 2014 budget, even with a new Prime Minister, this government still has not managed to get itself a set of priorities that are acceptable to the broader Australian public, that are acceptable to all of us here who come to represent our electorates. The same priorities are here, the same division is here and this legislation demonstrates that just one more time.

This legislation has in it a freeze on key payments. This is the new strategy of the government—what I call the 'kick them while they're down' strategy. This means that there will be welfare payments that will see freezes. That means that the amount of money given to recipients of Newstart, youth allowance, the parenting payment and the carer payment will remain at their current rates for three years, irrespective of how much the cost of living increases in that time. We have a government that want to come in here in question time, where they know that perhaps they will get on the TV at night, and talk about electricity price hikes, but while the televisions are not focused on us they want to cut the lowest incomes in our community. The rhetoric is about, 'We want to save you from price hikes,' but through the back door they want to put a freeze on the most vulnerable, who will therefore not be able to afford to pay their electricity bills. If you already struggling to make it on one of these payments, things will get a lot worse if this government gets its way. In fact it is expected that this particular change will make 204,000 Australians worse off.

I know that the majority of those opposite like to get on their feet and demonise those in our communities that need support, those who have fallen on hard times or who lack the networks or the training and require a hand up, those—like people in my electorate—who are lurching from one casual or part-time job to another, those people who need support in between positions, those families who are reliant on a pay packet from week to week and have no certainty about what next week's pay packet might look like, those families who are not sure that the casual hours that they got this week will be available next week and those who find themselves perhaps running a small business with an ABN and are reliant on the weekly receipts of the work that is going on in our community. Any slowdown in housing in my community has ramifications throughout the community in terms of people's weekly incomes, and a lot of those families and a lot of those working young people who are reliant on work in those industries might wake up one day and realise that they need to visit Centrelink.

Let me get rid of this notion that people wake up around Australia going: 'You beauty, I'm going to go to Centrelink today. I'm gonna give up work and I'm just gonna retire permanently because there's a safety net in this country that means I can do that.' Those opposite seem to be stuck in a picture of 1970, where dole bludgers were on the front page of every newspaper. Life is not like that for an ordinary Australian. Life is not like that in my community. People who get up in the morning and realise they have to go Centrelink, because there is not going to be a pay packet next week, go there with dread in their hearts. As someone who worked in schools, I have to tell you how difficult it is to get the young people in my electorate to even say they will go to Centrelink. They are proud people. They want work. They want full-time work. There are 1.8 million people in this country who are underemployed or unemployed. Those are the ones who are walking through the doors of Centrelink. Those are the ones who are requesting assistance to get them through the hard times—not necessarily permanently; perhaps just for a month—and this bill that this government wants to get through this parliament is going to make those things more difficult.

I want to burst that bubble. They believe that there are somehow lazy people that they have demonised into people who want to sit back at the beach and have Centrelink look after them. In my electorate it is a very different story to that, and I would suggest that across Australia it is too. We have had mutual obligation in this country for a long time. Those who are fortunate enough never to have to interact with Centrelink may not understand what mutual obligation is, but everybody who has ever been through those doors understands what it means. No-one thinks they are going onto a Centrelink payment permanently in this country, and people who are there are not there because they are lazy.

I will take, for instance, Peter Grant, a man in my electorate who was once fit and gainfully employed. He worked full time in a job that paid up to $2,000 a week. He had a good job. He would regularly ride and he would regularly run. He was a leader in the community, involved in sporting groups and someone who really was enjoying life living in the electorate. His life fell apart when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis three years ago. The life of this man, who takes more medication each day than I can fit in my medicine cabinet and is in permanent pain, fell apart with that diagnosis. His life fell apart with that pain. He is being denied the disability support pension and is being forced to live on Newstart, because somebody in this world thinks he, a man whose pain is preventing full-time work, is being lazy.

This bill will also go to ordinary waiting periods at Centrelink. Currently, recipients of Newstart or sickness allowance must wait seven days before they can receive a payment. One could argue that is fair or unfair; I would suggest it is unfair. This measure will extend this waiting period to recipients of parenting payment and youth allowance for a person who is not undertaking full-time study and is not a new apprentice. This is a Grinch measure. This is kicking them while they are down. On their worst day, when they have to go to Centrelink, they are going to walk through the doors and be told, 'That's all well and good, but you'll have to wait another week.'

This schedule also provides that the current exemption available on the basis of severe financial hardship will apply only if a person has experienced a personal financial crisis. Why are they at Centrelink if they are not in a personal financial crisis? For goodness sake, wake up. This is not something people do for fun. They do it so they can pay the rent. They do it to avoid eviction. They do it so they can meet a mortgage payment. They do it so that they can pay the school fees. They do it so they can go to the doctor. They are not walking into Centrelink until they have a personal financial crisis. Who goes there unless that is the circumstance? And what will happen now?

They will walk into Centrelink and be told, 'It's really sad that you lost your job last week' or 'that the factory closed down'. Perhaps they had worked in the car industry. It is really sad that 4,000 car industry workers in my electorate are facing a jobless future. They will walk into Centrelink and be told, 'Perhaps you'll have to wait a week.' So they will go down the road to one of our community organisations, possibly to seek support, perhaps for a relief package.

The community organisations in my electorate are down to one relief package per family per year under this government. The cuts across the sector have been absolutely drastic. They have got their hands tied behind their backs and are trying to deal with preventative measures to keep people in their homes or in their rental properties. That situation is being exacerbated now. They will have people who are already in personal financial crisis walking through the door and seeking advice on how they might prove that to Centrelink, and seeking assistance for the week in which they have to wait until there will be support from Centrelink. These are families. These are people with children.

I heard a story in the electorate quite recently—it is actually a good-news story—about a family that had gone through some really hard times in previous years. A mother and her children found themselves sleeping in a car. They have turned the corner, and mum has found employment and they are now in a rental situation. It highlights for me how quickly people can slip—it is not a slippery slope; it is a cliff. If you are reliant on casual employment, this is a cliff when the bad news comes. If you are working for a company that employs a small number of people, you have no recourse in terms of unfair dismissal; there are redundancies happening. Young people show up for work one day and then are told, 'Work has slowed down, guys—sorry, we are going to have to put you off.' Do they ring Fair Work to find out what they are entitled to? These young people have to negotiate with their employers to see if they can get their two weeks that might be owed for leave plus the two weeks for redundancy. Do they have to do all of this by themselves? They are not doing that. They are saying, 'Thanks, boss, for the time you employed me' and walking out the door and then facing the hard decision to go to Centrelink, to be told, 'You'll have to wait a week.' The rent is not going to be paid and the bills are not going to be paid. They are going to be back on mum and dad's doorstep. That is the reality here. To put this waiting period in place seems absolutely insane to me. What is the cost of this in our communities? What is going to be the cost to mental health? What is going to be the cost on the ground in communities like mine compared to the savings that this government thinks it might make?

The other big thing in this bill is the indexation freeze on parts A and B of the family tax benefit for two years from 1 July 2017. Currently the payments are indexed annually, on 1 July, by the consumer price index. This means that the payments families receive will not keep pace with the cost of living for two years. Let us not misunderstand this. This is a government that thinks that people should lose possibly $77 a week in their penalty rates and that people who are reliant on the family tax benefit can no longer have that indexed to CPI. In Lalor, this is a big issue because it affects many families of the 1.5 million families across the country who are reliant on family tax benefit parts A and B, or part thereof. Almost 600,000 of these families are on the maximum rate of family tax benefit A, which means their household income is less than $52,000 per year. In certain sections of the electorate of Lalor the average income is $52,000 per year, so you can imagine the number of people in Lalor who are reliant on the family tax benefit—and now they are going to face a freeze. The impact on families and significant. A family on $60,000 with two primary school age children will be around $440 worse off in 2018-19.

I will finish on this point, because I know it is ringing in the ears of the people in my electorate—that is, while a family on $60,000 with two children is going to lose $440 from this government, millionaires are going to get $16,400 on the same day in tax relief, and big business is still lining up for its $50 billion tax cuts. The priorities of the government are absolutely absurd. They cannot manage getting legislation through the parliament, because they are deaf to the notion that they need to address the issue of fairness. The Prime Minister promised when he took the leadership that he would see things through a lens fairness. He has failed to do so. Being on our feet again today discussing this proves that just one more time.

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