Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The irony of this government introducing a bill called the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020! This government thinking that the announcement of a change of name—from Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency—to Services Australia would be worthy of a stand-up routine in a satirical comedy venue if it weren't so desperately important to the people of my electorate and the people around Australia that the federal government actually deliver services when they need it and does it in an upfront, honest and reliable way.

It's not just ironic that this government thinks that perhaps it can hide what has happened with robodebt, that perhaps Australians won't think about the way they have attacked and undermined the Public Service. The government allows the purchase by the Public Service of a $3 million block of land for $30 million, to be leased back by the Commonwealth for $1 million, while the ministers are saying, 'I don't want to hear about it,' or 'Don't tell me.' They apparently think the Australian public will just forget about all that because they have has decided to use a phrase like 'Services Australia'. They won't. The Australian public aren't mugs. Certainly the people in my electorate aren't mugs.

I'll tell you what this government should be doing. It should be standing up and acknowledging the amazing work that has been undertaken by Commonwealth public servants for years and decades but definitely in 2020, during this COVID crisis. The people who work at Centrelink and Medicare, those frontline workers who are dealing with the Australian public day in and day out, have an incredibly difficult job. They are dealing with people often in the biggest crisis of their lives and the worst time of their lives, and it is their job to help those people through and to help those people be able to access the government support that they need. Employees at the Department of Human Services at Centrelink and Medicare deserve not just praise—and praise is what they'll get from me and from this side of the chamber—but a government that values them in terms of their full-time and permanent employment and the wages that they get.

It has been a time almost like no other in 2020 for the workload that staff at Services Australia, as it's now called, have had to deliver. We all remember the images of people lined up around the block to get to their Centrelink offices to get help, with many people for the first time in their lives needing to go to Centrelink to get help when the government was just too slow to realise that they needed to accept and introduce a wage subsidy. That period of time was devastating and stressful for so many people in my electorate, like elsewhere around Australia, who needed that help from their government. But it was also stressful and difficult for the employees at the Centrelink offices who were forced to try to help people who were in such despair. They deserve our greatest thanks for their efforts always but in particular for what has occurred. In my electorate, for example, between March and May of this year, the number of people on Newstart, which is now called JobSeeker, basically doubled to about 10,000. The number of people on youth allowance basically doubled to just over 1,000. And all of those people needed to receive help from staff at Centrelink.

We know that this government has made announcements during COVID to increase the number of people who are working at Centrelink and on the frontline. We know that people have been redeployed from other parts of the Public Service. Of course, that's a good thing, but it's just not enough. It's just not enough when we look at a Commonwealth Public Service across the board, not just at Centrelink and Medicare, that has been undermined, undervalued, weakened, outsourced and politicised by a Morrison government and a Liberal government that, at its core, doesn't believe in the Public Service.

One of the ways we in this place all agree on to stimulate the economy during a recession is creating jobs and investing in jobs. The Commonwealth as an employer has a great opportunity to directly invest in jobs, to directly invest in people, by employing public servants, who also, then, of course, benefit their communities by helping those people who need to access public services and allowances during this time of crisis. Back last year when COVID-19 wasn't even a bad dream in people's minds—we didn't know it was going to happen during the election in May—in my electorate of Dunkley we made an election commitment that should Labor win we would employ 40 more full-time employees at the Department of Human Services in Frankston. That would have injected $3 million into my local economy. That's the sort of thinking that we need from the government—not a government that continues to undermine and cut the Public Service.

We know, because the Auditor-General revealed it, that the Liberals have spent over $2 billion on outside contractors since they first came to power. That doesn't save money; it puts a heavy burden on the Commonwealth budget whilst also undermining the Australian Public Service. This government has cut and cut Australian Public Service jobs. By the way—for the benefit of government members—public servants are people. They have families—husbands, wives and children. They have mortgages and other commitments. When you talk about cutting jobs in Canberra, you're actually cutting the employment of real people and affecting the economy. The government have cut and cut. Then what have they had to do? They've had to outsource. They've had to go to the big four consulting firms to get them to do the work that the Australian Public Service would have been doing if only it still had the capacity.

This is a government that, at its core, doesn't believe in a properly resourced Public Service to serve the people of Australia. The Thodey report into the Australian Public Service was released midway through December last year, following a review that received over 800 submissions. The report was considered and deep and put out recommendations not just about how the Public Service could be supported and improved now but about how its capacity should be built for the future. It was essentially ignored by the Morrison government, by the Prime Minister. The range of really important reforms that were contained in that report will not, it would seem, be implemented. There was a very important recommendation that I am urging the federal government to reconsider, because COVID puts into stark relief the fact that the Public Service should not be focused solely on delivery. That's part of the job of the Public Service, but the Commonwealth Public Service is about more; it's about capacity-building and strategic planning. It's about planning for the future. It's about developing a preparedness to deal with the unexpected, to advise ministers and governments on how to deal with crises if and when they arise.

Take, for example—I don't know, COVID? You can contrast the response to COVID this year with the way in which Treasury was able to advise the government during the global financial crisis. In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Treasury undertook scenario planning. It had the capacity and the capability to undergo scenario planning so that, when the worst case did happen and there was a global financial crisis, it was able to provide swift, timely advice about how to respond to get Australia through that crisis, as the then Labor government did. But we know that there has been no pandemic planning under the Morrison government.

For the community in my electorate of Dunkley, Services Australia is fundamentally important. It's important as an employer through the Frankston Centrelink, and many other constituents of mine work at the Mornington Centrelink. It's important as the agency that assists almost 25,000 locals who receive pensions—the 16,000-odd people in my electorate who are on the age pension, the more than 1,500 people who are on carer's payment, the 5½ thousand people who receive the disability support pension, the many single parents who rely on child support—and, now, the more than 10,000 people who are on unemployment benefits. It's really important that Services Australia works and works well, but this government's haphazard approach to dealing with government agencies does not fill me, on behalf of my community, with confidence that it is going to be able to work.

We had the situation earlier this year where, with no consultation with the community and no consultation with the local council, apparently without even the courtesy of telling the federal member for Flinders—who, coincidentally, is the health minister and therefore responsible for Medicare—it was announced that the Mornington Centrelink and Medicare office was going to close. The government said it was because a lease had expired and they couldn't renegotiate the lease. Well, the community wasn't having that. It affects my community in Dunkley because of the people in Mount Eliza and Frankston South who go to Mornington Centrelink and Medicare but also because, if that office closes, where does everyone have to go? To Frankston Centrelink and Medicare, which is already overwhelmed. So, on behalf of the community, I got involved in the campaign. The Mornington Community Information and Support Centre also got involved in the campaign, as did the local community, to say, 'You can't shut down Medicare and Centrelink in Mornington.'

Lo and behold, when we saw lines of people, out on the street, needing to access Centrelink for the first time ever because of the impact of COVID and the government's dillydallying in introducing a wage subsidy, and when those lines included Mornington Centrelink, apparently the government could renegotiate the lease after all and Mornington Centrelink got a six-month reprieve. We've recently heard, because the campaign to force the government to keep that centre has been re-enlivened, that it's going to have another six-month reprieve; they've managed to get another lease signed. This just smacks of decision-making on the run, rather than proper, considered, systemic thinking about what is needed for communities and what is in the best interests of people.

We have a government, as the member for Maribyrnong so articulately covered in his speech, that is the architect of robodebt. We have ministers who presided over robodebt and still don't seem to understand the depth of the damage that caused people in our community—the anxiety and the frustration imposed on people on unemployment benefits and student allowances in my electorate and on women who needed to access maternity leave payments—and now they're overseeing this transition to Services Australia. Everyone in this country is allowed to be cynical about how this government is going to deliver, because it's shown no sign of delivering so far and it's shown no sign of learning its lessons. If this were a satire, it might be funny, but it's not. This is real. For people in my community who have lost JobKeeper and who are going to have JobSeeker cut to $40 a day, it's more than real—it's their lives.

See this speech in context