Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Payment Integrity) Bill 2019, would rip over $185 million from the pockets of Australian pensioners, and this pathetic government calls it the payment integrity bill. This bill is not about integrity; it is an attack on Australian pensioners. It is yet another cruel and dishonest grab for cash by the Morrison government from those who can afford it least. There is no low this government will not stoop to in trying to squeeze money out of those who are struggling to keep up with the cost of living, which continues to go up under this government.

The so-called ensuring integrity bill was not about integrity either. It was an attack on Australian workers. The government think they can fool the Australian people by slapping the word 'integrity' on a piece of legislation. They have been trying the same trick for years. When the current Attorney-General oversaw the expansion of the so-called Online Compliance Intervention program, or robodebt, as Minister for Social Services in 2017, he said that was about ensuring integrity too. As recently as last week, the current Minister for Government Services repeated that ridiculous assertion. Any suggestion that the robodebt scheme ever had anything to do with integrity was blown out of the water after key aspects of the scheme were ruled unlawful by the Federal Court last week. And yet, after over two years and thousands of illegal debt notices being sent to vulnerable Australians, subjecting them to emotional trauma, stress and shame, the Liberal government still have the gall to say that this unlawful program is about 'ensuring the integrity of the welfare system'.

From the very beginning, this government's robodebt scheme has been an extortion racket. It has only ever been about extorting money from Australian citizens to prop up this government's shaky budget. You can slap the word 'integrity' on an extortion racket, but it doesn't change the fact that it's an extortion racket. And now the same government, the government of robodebt, is proposing rip money out of the pockets of Australian pensioners in the name of integrity. You couldn't make this up. This Liberal government has no integrity; it never has. The Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues should stop talking about integrity and start acting with some. The Prime Minister could make a good start by standing down the member for Hume from his cabinet position. This is the member who's currently under police investigation for having used a forged document as part of a pathetic attempt to embarrass the Lord Mayor of Sydney. The member for Hume's imbecilic attempt to embarrass the Lord Mayor of Sydney exploded in his grinning face, and the soot from that exploding act of idiocy by the member for Hume—

See this speech in context