Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I'm really grateful for the chance to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill is administrative in design, but it raises some incredibly critical issues, and that's why I want to start by thanking the members for Makin, Dunkley and Maribyrnong for what have been three really impassioned speeches about some issues of core importance to the people that we represent.

Services Australia is probably the most critical part of the Australian government. The decisions that we make in this chamber, about policy and about who's eligible for different types of support, are basically conveyed and delivered to our constituents through Services Australia. If you are thinking about Centrelink, Medicare, child support, migrant support, disaster support or, crucially, JobKeeper and JobSeeker, you're depending to one degree or another on the way that Services Australia works.

We are of course having this debate in the shadow of the biggest health and financial crisis that our country has experienced for many decades. How many decades, we won't know for some time. But I think it has really highlighted the fact that this is an organisation that has been neglected by the Morrison government. It has been underfunded and subjected to completely inappropriate staffing caps, and it has badly hurt many of the people that I represent, because of the inability of the organisation to flex in the way that it needed to do when the COVID-19 impacts hit us.

I'm incredibly lucky. I have Oakleigh and Springvale offices of Services Australia. They do an amazing job. The staff that work there are committed public servants who show up to work every day to try to help other people. We need to be doing everything we can to help support them in the work that they do, which is actually incredibly difficult. We always need to remember with organisations like Services Australia that they're confronting people who are often experiencing the worst crisis they've ever had in their lives. Their jobs are difficult, stressful and important and the Morrison government has made them much harder by the arbitrary impost of staff caps.

I'm going to talk a bit more about robodebt in a minute—which I think is the most flagrant example of the horrible impact of privatisation and under-resourcing of public services in Australia that we've seen in recent years—but before we do that I want to speak a little bit about the cuts to JobSeeker and JobKeeper, which have so dramatically affected the lives of the people that I represent in this chamber.

About three weeks ago the Morrison government cut $300 a fortnight from the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments. I want to say straight up that the cut in those payments is nothing short of a total scandal. I cannot think of one single decision that's happened in the seven years that I've been in parliament that has hurt the people that I represent as much as this one single decision. I have 8,000 people in my community who are JobSeeker recipients today. I have 30,000 who are JobKeeper recipients. What the Morrison government did on one day was take $300 a fortnight out of the pocket of every single one of those people. The people in my community are relying on those payments tomorrow to feed their children, to pay their rent, to get schoolbooks, to pay for groceries, to pay for energy bills, to pay childcare costs—all the essentials.

This was an outrage in every state of Australia but particularly so in the state of Victoria. I am giving this speech right now from my electorate office in Clayton and I can see that the Prime Minister has forgotten about the 6.4 million people who live just to the south of where you are at the moment. Don't forget, we are still in lockdown here in Victoria. What the Morrison government has done is take away $300 a fortnight while my constituents can do nothing about their economic situation. I am fundamentally outraged at this decision. I am sure that Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, has got a smart, little political answer for this. He will probably say this is all Daniel Andrews's fault, because he has put the state into lockdown. I have to say that my voters do not care about politics at a time like this. What they care about is the financial security of their families that the Prime Minister has put in jeopardy through these cuts. What sort of person would cut pandemic payments in the middle of a pandemic? We are right in the thick of this thing in Victoria. So I ask today that the government consider these incredibly harsh cuts. It should not be beyond the wit of a federal government to try to create some different policy for the 25 per cent of the Australian population in Victoria who are still stuck in some form of lockdown or another.

The language that the government uses again and again when it comes to coronavirus is that this is somehow beaten and over. I can tell you, from the point of view of a Victorian, from the point of view of a Melburnian, that it is not beaten and over. Melburnians are working as hard as we can to try to get on top of this. We are actually doing a solid to the rest of the country because we know that if we don't get on top of this in Victoria then we're going to see the spread of coronavirus go through the country again and no-one wants that. But could we please have a bit of empathy, a bit of sympathy and a bit of understanding from the federal government, because 6.4 million people should not be left behind as this country attempts to recover from this crisis.

I spoke to some of my constituents about the impact that the JobSeeker and JobKeeper cuts had had on them, and I want to share some of the reactions that they had. Matthew said to me, 'It's about time someone correlates the inflation in mental health calls for Victoria with the government's decision to roll back pandemic assistance during a pandemic.' Anita talks about the impact that the JobSeeker cut has had on her. She is an older female. She said there's nothing in the federal budget for her—just a big cut to her entitlements. There is not much good a tax cut gives you when you're not actually earning an income.

Daniel says: 'Signing up for JobKeeper was due to events beyond my control. If I could do my job, I would. The reduction of JobSeeker is a kick in the guts. All it does is reduce my option of returning to work.' So again I say there are millions of people who are still in lockdown here. We need the support. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Why has the government taken away this essential support at the very moment Victorians need it most? It needs to be held accountable for that.

We are talking about Services Australia today, and it would be remiss of me not to touch on the absolute scandal of robodebt, which so significantly affected the lives of thousands of people I represent in my electorate. Robodebt is what happens when you take the human out of Human Services. What we saw here was a government that is, frankly, completely incompetent when it comes to any type of technology let loose an algorithm without any human intervention to demand that hundreds of thousands of Australians pay debt to the Commonwealth that they did not in fact owe. In terms of public policy disasters, this one would surely be top 3 in the last decade and it deserves its own royal commission, as the member for Maribyrnong has talked about.

I hope and believe that most of us in this chamber got into politics to make a difference in the lives of Australians. Imagine if you finished your political career and your legacy was a harrowing fearmongering campaign in the lives of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country. But that is on the government and that is particularly on the minister who is in charge of Services Australia.

It's estimated that by now $1.5 billion was unlawfully taken from Australians by their government through this scheme. We know from all the news reports how genuinely traumatising this was for Australians. As soon as this scheme hit a few years ago, we were flooded with phone calls by people who had been sent letters by the robodebt scheme telling them that they owed money to the Commonwealth. Of course, like many members of parliament, I spent a long time arguing for constituents who were then found not to have owed any money at all. But I'd like to talk about some of their stories.

One of my constituents, Robyn, was first advised that she had a debt of $5,900 covering three-year period between 2013 and 2016. She was paying off $40 a fortnight towards that debt, not aware that in fact she never owed the money to the Commonwealth to begin with. She had wanted to appeal the debt, but she was told by Services Australia this would take months and months and she was going to have to pay the debt anyway. Robin contacted us because she lost her part-time job and was trying to seek assistance in working out how she was going to pay this claim, and we were able to assist her with the claim. We went with her through the process of dealing with Services Australia, and it turned out that the whole thing was a robodebt error. She'd been paying off this money in the very best of faith, because many Australians, when they receive a letter from government saying that they owe money, take it that this is being done in good faith. Now, the family has gone through horrible trouble over the years trying to repay this debt. It's had to go through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and a whole bunch of other processes, and the impact on this family has been untold misery for years while they've been trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to get rid of a debt that they never actually owed. [Inaudible]

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