Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It should not be any surprise that we are standing here yet again defending the most vulnerable citizens of Australia from yet another attack by this government. It is a relentless attack, and we will continue to stand up for families and individuals who are the victims of it. The Social Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 is cutting $1.4 billion from Australian families. Those opposite are not willing to back down on their tax cut for big business, but they are willing to pull the rug from under a whole bunch of people who are just trying to get on with living with some dignity.

So let us look at the individual parts of this bill that we are opposed to. Firstly, there is the freezing of indexation on payments. This bill freezes for three years the income-free areas for all working-age and student payments. So, for the next three years, the income test for single parents, jobseekers and students will not keep pace with the cost of living. Admittedly, wages growth is the slowest on record. That will help keep CPI down on one level. But the problem is that the ABS says that hourly rates of pay excluding bonuses grew by 0.48 per cent for the quarter in seasonally adjusted terms, leaving the annual rate at 1.87 per cent. The year-on-year increase was still the lowest level on record. So people are getting the lowest wages on record. And, at times, you would think that freezing something, putting it on hold, slowing down an increase might be a sensible approach. But why would you do it to the people who are already under pressure, with the lowest possible incomes?

Let us talk about Newstart recipients. There are 1.8 million people looking for work. When you have businesses like KPMG and the Business Council of Australia calling for an increase in the amount of money jobseekers have to survive on while they are looking for work, you know you have a real issue. Right now I am not sure if most people even know how much people looking for work are allowed to earn before their payment begins to be cut: it is $102 per fortnight—$51 a week—that they are able to earn to supplement Newstart.

I have people young, old and in-between coming into talk to me about their desire to work and about the efforts they go to to try and get work. They are demoralised. For young people, their families are feeling desperate. These are often families where they have not known unemployment, so these are issues where you just wonder: why do we have to make things harder; how much harder do we seriously want to make it for students; and how much harder do we want to make it for parents?

For parenting payments, the threshold after which the payment is reduced is $188 per fortnight. This is already a really low threshold: it is $94 a week. The same freeze applies to carer payments—and this is one that is particularly concerning for many carers in my electorate of Macquarie. People on carer allowance have often given up full-time work in order to care for a parent, partner or child. They can find themselves in a precarious financial situation not completely of their making. It is something they have chosen to do but sometimes with a sense of financial misgiving, because something unexpected has happened—illness or disability of a loved one. If they can manage to do a few hours of work a week and earn a bit of extra income, they tell me it is not just about the financial benefit; it is about the opportunity to have a change of environment and interact with other people outside their immediate family. You cannot underestimate the mental health benefits and social connectivity that those few hours offer; however, this freeze is yet another blow for people trying to maintain their work connections, which can be so important for them, if their circumstances change and they are in a position to re-enter the workforce in a full-time capacity.

The freeze also applies to single parents—yep, there is a group you really want to make life harder for. Not only are many single parents already juggling study with young families so that when they can return to the workforce they have the necessary qualifications but now we want to make it harder for them to earn a bit of extra money to be able to pay for soccer boots, enrolling in netball or that school excursion. Quite frankly, that aspect of the bill is just plain dumb.

But then we have got the stretched-out waiting periods. The decision to extend waiting periods before being eligible for youth allowance and parenting payments is another part of the bill that we oppose. It is just another example of this Prime Minister's inability to comprehend what it is like to struggle to make ends meet. Currently, if you receive Newstart or sickness allowance, you have to wait seven days before receiving payment. Goodness knows how you are supposed to buy food or pay your rent in that time. By the time people have accepted that perhaps they are not going to get a job any time soon—or actually they are really sick and will not be able to get back to work—they have generally exhausted all the savings and goodwill of friends and family that have kept them going.

We were able to beat the plan to extend the Newstart wait to five weeks, but the leopards opposite do not change their spots. Extending the one-week measure to parenting payments and youth allowance recipients is equally hard to understand. Anyone who has been through the application process for youth allowance already knows that it takes forever to finally be granted eligibility. To be considered independent for youth allowance, you have already funded yourself through work for 18 months so, if you have had a gap year, you are starting uni without any government support—you are often relocating cities, you are paying for transport to and from uni and you are buying text books—and now they want people to just hold on another week.

The only possible explanation I can find for this is that it is desperation by the government to find some savings. They are penny-pinching and aiming it at the socially disadvantaged and politically defenceless. I think Ross Gittins said it well when he wrote that it showed 'the government is near the bottom of the barrel in the quality of budget savings it's prepared to make'—not the savings it could make but the savings it is prepared to make. I can see why he concludes that 'this government is near to being morally, politically and economically bankrupt'.

I now turn to the family tax benefit, which will freeze indexation of the rates of family tax benefit parts A and B for two years from 1 July. Right now, the payments are indexed—that is pretty logical; these are benefits that families rely on to cover the costs of raising a family, and the cost of living goes up every year. This means now that the payments families receive just will not keep pace with the cost of living for the next two years.

The first cut happens in just three months time for that financial year. It will not be the last though: the second cut will kick in in July next year, and the effects will be felt at the end of that financial year. Let's think about the impact of these cuts on families: a family on $60,000 a year with two primary school-aged children will be around $440 worse off in the second year of this cut; a single parent on $50,000 with three children under 12 will be $600 worse off in 2018-19; and a single parent with two high school children will be around $540 worse off in the same year. As always with this government, it is not necessarily a huge amount of money for those opposite, but for the families whose children just do not seem to stop growing—and they do not seem to stop eating for that matter—it is a real hit to a tight, if not already stretched, budget.

The families who will have to cope with these cuts are not an abstract concept in my electorate. There are 8,500 families who receive family tax benefit part A. There are 6,500 Macquarie families on family tax benefit part B, all of whom will lose assistance. They are in Bligh Park, Wilberforce and Bowen Mountain; they are in Mount Riverview, Hazelbrook and Katoomba, and everywhere in-between.

Peggy from Lawson wrote to me recently to explain just how important the family tax benefit payment is to her family. Peggy uses the money to pay for her car registration, because it is very hard to save up week to week for such a large expense. She says that to have the payment reduced or taken away would be disastrous for her family.

A freeze has the same impact as a cut. It will reduce her ability to be able to cover a significant annual bill. As Peggy says, the end-of-year return is more use to her than an extra $20 per fortnight, as in the scheme of things that would mean very little to her lifestyle. But the consequences of taking away that end-of-financial-year payment will pervade her entire year, and she worries that it may leave her without a car in the very near future. So that is the human impact—and I have to tell you: you do not want to be a mum in the mountains unable to access a car. If we had a city public transport system, you might think it was a reasonable decision to make, but once you take away a vehicle from a family in the Blue Mountains you are isolating somebody.

That is why we oppose this undermining of the family tax benefit. These families are part of the 1.5 million families who will be worse off under these changes. More than one-third of them are on the maximum rate of family tax benefit A, which means their household income is less than $52,000 a year. I recall the government tried to do this in the 2014 budget, but after fierce opposition from us it was dropped from the budget in the mid-year forecast in 2015. Who knows what else from that horrific budget they are planning to bring back in a month's time? You have to wonder how many of these families will also be hit by the cut to Sunday and public holiday penalty rates, which would be another blow to their budgets. We think that all of the measures I have spoken about should be removed from this bill.

It has fascinated me to see the way this government has sought to fund its child-care package, especially one that leaves one-third of children and their families worse off and that has been at the expense of other families, playing one family off against another—in some cases, playing one child off against another. This is the priority of this government: hit families and the lowest income people.

But it is not just this bill. It is also the cuts to community legal centres. It is the $30 billion cut to education and the failure to fund the full Gonski so that we have needs-based funding that is fair for every single child. It is the ongoing decision to freeze the Medicare rebate to GPs. When will that be lifted? Until it is, there is no security for people that a visit to the GP is within their budget. It is also the failure to fund housing and homelessness services. It is the failure to adequately support the community sector, which is under more and more pressure. These are the sort of decisions, when you use a freeze as a way to patch up a budget—a budget I should point out, where the deficit is three times greater than what they started with, blowing out of the water the self-proclaimed myth that those opposite are good economic managers—where the impacts are long-lasting.

I want to finish with one measure in the bill that we have agreed to support—that is, the automation of income stream information. The aim of this measure is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the social security system. I see this as a way of avoiding the awful robo-debt letters that people have received, demanding money that may or may not have been overpaid several years ago. The more quickly a discrepancy can be picked up, the smaller the error will be and the easier it will be for welfare recipients to correct the situation. They are more likely to still have payslips and receipts, so it will be a far less painful process. Clearly the current system of income data collecting has failed many honest Australians who reported their income correctly—only to have a computer say 'no'. It must be backed by human beings, who have a key role in the process of ensuring that what we have seen in the robo-debt debacle is not repeated.

I would like to speak about one of my constituents, a retired academic Annabelle Solomon from Winmalee, who was diagnosed with melanoma last year. In the midst of intense therapy for her cancer, she received a letter from Centrelink asking her to confirm her income from 2014-15. She was a casual lecturer at the Western Sydney University at the time, some weeks working many hours and other weeks very few. She was also at retirement age and entitled to a part pension. Every fortnight she reported her income and received some payment, depending upon her earnings, but she was told that she had a debt worth thousands of dollars. Annabelle fought this. She came to me; she went to the media. As a result of all of those efforts, Centrelink realised that they had made a mistake. In fact, recently, again while midway through treatment, she was given the news that there is no debt at all. Annabelle says that the whole process was dehumanising. I hope those opposite are proud of what they have done to someone undergoing cancer treatment—a completely unnecessary thing to have occurred. Let's hope that this legislation prevents that. There are people in my electorate like Annabelle who will never forget the treatment that they have received.

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