Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like others on this side of the House, I strongly oppose the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Better Targeting Student Payments) Bill 2017. As the St Vincent de Paul Society observed in a well-reasoned submission to the inquiry of the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee into the bill, these proposals cut existing payments to those who need them most and re-enforce existing disparities in access to education. The main losers here will be the young, the disabled and women. It might be a little bit unfair to suggest that these three groups are among the government's preferred targets, so let's just say that they are among the most familiar ones. It's a recurring theme, isn't it?

The proposed changes aren't just mean and parsimonious but very short-sighted. In one form or another, they have been a dark cloud hanging over the community in education sectors for the last two parliaments. We hear time and time again from the other side about how much they value education. But it appears they only value education to their constituents, not to everyone. These cuts will affect tens of thousands of Australians. Even ex-service men and women seeking to make a fresh start or to better themselves by furthering their education or acquiring new skills will be drawn into the net.

As submissions to the recent Senate inquiry noted, the bill's key proposals have no convincing policy rationale, like many of the changes coming from the other side. While so-called streamlining is given as a justification for one small set of changes, the main elements of the bill will add further complexity to what all agree is already a complex set of legislative and administrative arrangements. The government had the opportunity by way of the recent Senate committee inquiry to expand on its reasons for persisting with the proposed cuts but declined to do so. Having abandoned its totally untenable plan to abolish the education entry payment and the pensioner education supplement, the government apparently now feels that it's entitled to the equivalent of a free pass on this bill.

The government says that the measures will save $96 million in total over five years. That sounds like a lot of money but it's a tiny fraction of the annual cost to the federal budget of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions given to some of Australia's wealthiest people. It really is a shame, and something that this government should hang its head about. The proposed saving would not even be enough to meet the cost of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, much less the billions the government plans to give foreign based and foreign owned multinationals by way of corporate tax cuts. The government will argue that you have to start somewhere and every little bit helps, but why start here with those most disadvantaged? Why pick on those already struggling? Why pick on those who are undeniably the most disadvantaged? Why do that? For instance, poverty rates among unemployed single parents—one of the principal targets here—are 10 times higher than for lone parents in paid work. It's hard enough to overcome these sorts of odds as it is, without government coming along and cutting one of the few benefits that might help you find a way back to employment. The proposed measures will potentially harm around 50,000 recipients annually. About 10,000 of them will be hit by more than one of the proposed cuts. In the case of the pensioner education supplement, 41 per cent receive the disability support pension and over 80 per cent are women. As you can see, they are targeting the most disadvantaged yet again.

This bill poses a serious threat to those wanting to better themselves in their future job prospects. The proposed changes to the pensioner education supplement, in particular, will not only add to existing complexity but also open up new areas of uncertainty in determining what constitutes a study period for the purposes of accessing support. The proposed savings also come at a cost. In the longer term, both the community and the budget bottom line will end up paying the price of keeping people in poverty and not giving them the help they need to get an education and access to a decent job and a better life. Surely the minister must know that. Surely he can't have forgotten his own fine words in September last year when, addressing the National Press Club, he said:

The hope for a young Australian facing challenging family circumstances today will be that the system is going to provide for them with immediate support, but also surely they should expect that the same system will not just set them and forget them.

Surely they expect that as well as welfare money given in the here and now, that support is going to be thoughtfully structured in a way designed to help them cope, not just in the present, but also in a way that maximises their future opportunities for self-reliance.

The approach taken here is to whip away the immediate support and hope that in the long run self-reliance will magically somehow win through. The contents of the bill have already been extensively debated and examined, including by three Senate committees. In one form or another, the two core elements of the bill have been around since the first Abbott-Hockey budget and have been before this House on five previous occasions. They foundered each time, with very good reason. The substance of the present bill was referred to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee in late June and the committee, which divided on party lines, reported on 7 September. The committee didn't conduct public hearings and took no evidence apart from eight submissions prepared by community organisations and one prepared by the minister's department. The latter was pretty perfunctory, running to just four pages. It added nothing to the minister's second reading speech and the explanatory memorandum. I guess that after four years, even the departmental officers must be a bit over it. Carers Australia, the Australian Council of Social Service, People with Disability Australia, Children and Young People with Disability Australia, the Australian Association of Social Workers, the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children and the National Social Security Rights Network each made submissions to the Community Affairs Committee inquiry. Each of those submissions opposed the bill. Not one single community organisation supports this bill.

There are four elements to the bill. It will further limit eligibility for the relocation scholarship for youth allowance and Austudy recipients. It will make it harder to access the full education entry payment, currently only $208 per annum, that assists students in meeting some of the up-front costs of entering improved training and education programs—an absolute pittance. It will cut fortnightly supplementary support for many students engaged in other than full-time study by linking student workload requirements to a less generous and more complex formula for calculating entitlements. It will stop the pensioner education supplement being paid to students during non-teaching periods such as semester breaks. I'd add one other thing: it completely complicates the whole access to support for people who already have poor resources and who are already struggling. It is really shameful.

What ties these proposals together is they will cut needs based supplementary support to people undertaking bona fide education and training programs. The bulk of costs of participating in those programs, including the opportunity costs, are met by the participants themselves. The payments under attack aren't handouts. They are a leg-up, they're support and they're help. For the vast majority of those to be affected, government support covers only a fraction of their actual costs. As anyone who has been in training or who has children in educational support knows, the costs are much higher than these pitiful payments. They are not overly generous; they are very poor. For instance, the education entry payment, which is meant to partly cover the start-up costs of entering training or a course of study, has remained largely unchanged since its introduction in 1992. Back then, in the pre personal computer and pre laptop era, the educational entry payment was $200 per annum. Currently, it stands at a magnificent $208 per annum! That is a change of $8, if my maths is correct, in 25 years. It is pathetic.

The supplementary payments that this bill will erode are not available to all students, only those facing particular barriers to entering formal training and higher education. You can't access those supplementary payments unless you are in a disadvantaged or dependent category and meet the stringent eligibility requirements for attracting a primary government pension or benefit, such as youth allowance, ABSTUDY, Austudy, Newstart, the carer payment or the disability support pension—et cetera. That's as well as being an Australian resident and undertaking approved qualifying studies. The requirements are already onerous.

The government is also missing the point in arguing, in respect of some of its proposed cuts, that those who have their payments reduced can take out a student loan. HECS HELP, FEE-HELP and VET FEE-HELP loans simply don't cover many of the up-front and ongoing costs involved in participating in education, which are met in part by these supplementary payments. Nor are those generic, loan-based forms of support sufficient to meet the particular needs of all of those suffering disability or disadvantage. It also seems to have escaped this government's attention, too, that this is one of the most difficult times in many decades for those seeking to fight their way out of poverty, overcome disadvantage and enter the work force. The proposed measures also form part of a constellation of government cuts to education, cuts to universities, higher student fees and less accommodative payback periods for student loans under HECS and HELP.

The government also seems blissfully unaware that income support and family payments have gone backwards in real and relative terms in recent times. Income support payments have fallen further behind average wages even though average wages are stagnant. If you're a single mum working one shift a week, you've had your family tax benefit rate frozen and there's a good chance you have seen your penalty rates cut too. Cost of living pressures are always most keenly felt by those on lower incomes. You expect that would be the case even if the principal costs faced by those enduring financial hardship weren't rising faster than consumer prices more broadly.

As the most recent ABS figures confirm, it's pensioners and persons who rely most on government support who are under the most pressure from healthcare costs; gap fees; and housing, insurance, gas and electricity costs, which are rising much faster than the CPI average and are also rising much faster than their wages. Unemployment rates are stuck at near-record-low GFC levels. Underemployment rates are at record highs. This is not an easy time to be digging your way out of poverty or confronting hardship and debt, yet this government is not making it any easier. In his 2016 National Press Club speech, to which I referred earlier, the minister rightly bemoaned the complexity of Australia's social welfare arrangements—and he has just made them more complex. If anyone in the country has a right to complain about government red tape and overregulation, it's the poor and the disadvantaged.

Presently, only about 300 of the 23,000 students in receipt of the relocation scholarship fall into this category. A further 150 Australian resident students who are currently studying overseas were also able to access the relocation scholarship. The government asserts that such students can only access the scheme because of a loophole in the current law and that the relocation scholarship should only be available to those having to move to and from remote and regional areas within Australia for study purposes. Whatever the intention of the parliament in enacting the scheme in 2010 and then amending it in 2015, there is a solid argument for not disadvantaging the small number of Australian students with both parents based overseas who also meet all the other mandatory requirements necessary to qualify for a relocation scholarship. Such students are up against the same problem that remote and regional students living in Australia face—through no fault of their own they have to relocate a significant distance to further their studies. I note, too, that there are humanitarian concerns that young people who arrive in Australia as unaccompanied minors might also be disadvantaged by the proposed amendments as they currently stand.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that, despite the claim of better targeting, none of the savings made will be distributed to enhance continuing entitlements but will simply be skimmed off into consolidated revenue. The government does not have the luxury of arguing that funding is being shifted from the deserving to the even more deserving. Nor is this bill about better targeting or streamlining. They are merely euphemisms. This is a government grab for cash—nothing more, nothing less—and it's from the most disadvantaged people in our community. It really is shameful. We have seen a litany of these bills come through the parliament in the last few weeks. One has to wonder about the psychology of a government that continues to attack, time and time again, those in the community who are most disadvantaged yet is continuing to allow concessions to the wealthy, such as capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing, and also major tax cuts to big business.

This is a government that does not seem to want to give the poorest a leg-up. Perversely, it's an attack on the very sorts of people this government says deserve support and encouragement, but it does the opposite—the self-starters and the very people who are trying their hardest not to let adversity get the better of them. This is really quite a comedown from the lofty ideals outlined by the minister. It's lazy, unimaginative and bullying government at its very worst.

See this speech in context