Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] This bill, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Coronavirus and Other Measures) Bill 2020, is about social security payments and the level of social security payments that people should get. When we're in the middle of the biggest recession that many of us have seen in our lives, where we have one million people unemployed and where there are 12 people looking for every one vacant job, it's good that we're debating that. But I start from a simple proposition, which the government doesn't seem to agree with. In a wealthy country like ours, no-one should be living in poverty. In the middle of a recession, which is not the fault of anyone living in this country, we should be looking after each other. We should be making sure that no-one—and especially no child—in this country is forced into poverty by government actions and by government cuts.

About a million children are going to be affected by the government's recent cuts to JobSeeker. We have a million people who are finding themselves out of work in the middle of a recession, because businesses have closed down while we're fighting a virus. What does the government do? It doesn't bring in a bill to lift those people out of poverty, but it does have time to fast-track tax cuts for millionaires. The government has made sure that people who've kept their job throughout this recession and who are earning over a million dollars a year get a tax cut of a couple of thousand dollars, which is going to rise to over $11,000, but people who are unemployed, through no fault of their own, get a kick in the teeth. We know from statements from the government over the last couple of days that, once it considers that the coronavirus is under control, the government is going to cut their payments. It's going to cut the payments of people who are on social security, while millionaires will get a cash handout. Clive Palmer does not need extra money in his pocket, frankly, but the government is quite happy to give millionaires and the super wealthy a tax cut, a cash handout, while those who are doing it the toughest are going to have their payments cut, with less money in their pocket to deal with the essentials.

For many, many years this government has deliberately kept people in poverty. These are people who are looking for work. The government has kept them in poverty and forced them to live below the poverty line. Then, when the recession came along, caused by the coronavirus, what did the government do? All of a sudden it realised that millions of people in this country were going to see just how appallingly the government had been treating people without a job, and so it lifted the level of what was called Newstart and then changed to JobSeeker; it lifted the level of unemployment assistance. For people who had been living on $40 a day for many years, trying to make ends meet, for everyone who had been skipping meals and skipping the essentials of life because living on $40 a day is no way to survive, for people who had been unable to afford the haircut, the extra set of clothes or the training course to increase their chances of getting a job, that lift of JobSeeker to $1,100 was a blessing. Because, for the first time, many people in this country, including many children, were able to live a life above the poverty line. But now the government cannot wait—cannot wait!—to cut that back to $40 a day. $40 a day is not living; it is barely surviving. In a wealthy countries like ours, instead of finding billions of dollars to give tax cuts to the millionaires and the already well-off, we should be prioritising the million unemployed. We should be standing up for the million unemployed, not for the millionaires. And we should be standing up not only by directly investing in projects that would create jobs but also by ensuring that the level of social security payment is above the poverty line. If the government can find billions of dollars to give tax cuts to millionaires, there is no excuse for having the level of unemployment assistance in this country being anywhere below the $1,100 that it has been.

The government must return JobSeeker to where it was, and that is especially the case in my state of Victoria, where, having now endured the restrictions that we've all lived through, because we know that getting on top of the virus is critical, the jobs just aren't there. The jobs just aren't there—we're opening up, but it's going to be a while before things get back to normal. In my area of Melbourne, for example, a lot of people are employed in the entertainment and hospitality sector. Let's take the entertainment area and the arts and creative industries. They rely on getting a lot of people in the one room. It's the business model. It's the business model of the comedy festival, it's the business model of the various arts festivals, it's the business model of every live performer, and it's the business model that so many pubs and live music venues rely on. It is not clear when we are going to be able to get back to having those industries on their feet, because we've still got a virus to get on top of. In this situation, we should not be cutting JobSeeker. We certainly shouldn't be cutting JobKeeper, either, because the jobs just aren't there. But, in dealing with this bill, when it comes to dealing with people who are unemployed, we should not be cutting JobSeeker. It is going to hurt people in Victoria.

The government has been very happy, as I've said, to write big cheques for billionaires and for large corporations, and, in the budget that was just passed, the government found $99 billion a year in subsidies to big corporations or the well-off. That's $99 billion a year. For example, when Gina Rinehart's companies take their trucks to the bowser on a mining site, they pay the tax that everyone else in this country pays when they go to the petrol station to fill up. But then, come tax time, Gina Rinehart's companies get a huge big cheque back from the taxpayer for all of the tax they paid. So, in other words, everyone else has to pay 40-odd cents of tax a litre on petrol when they go to the bowser, but Gina Rinehart's mining companies get it tax-free and get a multibillion-dollar tax refund between all of them, every year, courtesy of the public. I think that Gina Rinehart could pay the same for her petrol as everyone else in this country. In return, we could use some of that money to make sure people don't live in poverty.

That's what this bill should be about. This bill should be about the priority of making sure Australia, especially as we come out of a recession, becomes a more equal society, not one where we take billions of dollars and give them to the mining billionaires, but one where we say that people who are doing it tough are going to get looked after. If the government was serious about creating jobs for people, then they would be using the money not to give tax breaks to big corporations and cash handouts to corporations, many of which have stayed very profitable during the coronavirus recession, but they would be using that money to directly invest to create jobs. It's $99 billion a year in handouts to big corporations and the like. Let's put that money into building public housing, so that we not only solve the homelessness crisis but create jobs, including apprenticeships. Let's put that money into free education, so that everyone who's dealing with the crisis at the moment doesn't have their fees doubled, as this government has proposed, and the cost of a degree is zero. We could do that instead of giving billions of dollars to big corporations, and that would help create jobs. We could expand our aged-care sector by putting at least one registered nurse in every setting and on every shift, but also expand the number of staff that are available there so that we provide good-quality care and stop running it at a profit, which, again, helps just the billionaires. That would create more jobs. So let's expand education. Let's expand care. Let's build infrastructure like public housing or high speed rail—then you create jobs.

Instead, this government is stuck in a trickle-down mentality of giving $99 billion a year in subsidies to big corporations in the hope that some of it will trickle down and find its way into jobs. We have had 30 or 40 years of this trickle-down fantasy and we know it doesn't work. Before this crisis started, we had high unemployment and under-employment. Nearly one in three young people in this country was without a job or without enough hours of work. It was before the coronavirus crisis started. Those people, instead of being supported by the government, are being punished. They are being forced to live on $40 a day. Some young people have been forced to live on even less. Some people haven't been entitled to any assistance at all. And now, as the numbers go higher in the middle of a recession, what does the government do? The government cuts their payment and refuses to put money into direct job-creating, nation-building, planet-saving projects. Instead, it gives $99 billion a year to big corporations and the like.

We are facing a crossroads. We could come out of this crisis with something to show for it. We could build legacies for future generations—we could deliver high-speed rail, half a million public housing homes and free education for this country and bring unemployment down to two per cent, genuine full employment, which is what it was between World War II and the 1970s—or we could go down the government's road, which is cutting social security payments, giving handouts to big corporations and subsidising coal and gas, and just hope that some of it ultimately trickles down. Not only would Australia come out of that more unequal, but it would take us longer to recover from the recession.

I say this to the government: if you're serious about this mantra of yours that the best form of welfare is a job and everyone who wants a job, if they are good at it, can get one, then offer a job guarantee. Offer a guaranteed job to everyone in this country, if they want it, working on a nation-building, planet- saving project. If you do that, that might be a future where people could learn skills, earn a decent wage and deliver something of lasting benefit to their country. That might be something people would get excited about. That was the approach that the US government took when they were getting their way out of the Great Depression. They didn't think, 'We just need to give billions more to big corporations and hope that, by repeating the mistakes of the past, things will be fixed up in the future.' No, they invested in planet-saving, nation-building projects. If we did that, we'd be in a position to offer a job guarantee to young people. You could have a free education, an income above the poverty line or a guaranteed job working on one of these projects. That's what we could be offering.

Instead, our het-up Treasurer, who likes to shout at Victorians and condemn them after all that we been through, says his unemployment target is six per cent, which means two million people either without a job or without enough work. When we get to six per cent, he is going to start cutting even further. That's the government's approach. The government's approach to getting out of this recession is to deliberately choose high unemployment and low wages. People who don't have a job, like those this bill is focused on, are going to be living below the poverty line.

I said that this bill was about the level of social security payments. There are measures in this bill that go a way towards redressing some of the inequality in our society. Those measures in this bill, which have been dealt with and outlined before, are measures that the Greens will support because they make slightly better a very bad situation for very many people. But, like everything with this government, they come in and they say, 'We understand that people are hurting, we understand that people want a more equal society and we understand that the Australian people want someone to stand up to the big corporations and the very wealthy and make them pay their fair share so that we can invest, create jobs and have a more equal society.' The government know that, so they pay lip service to it. But, when you delve into the detail, you realise they are still pushing people into poverty. Every chance that they can get, they are pushing people into poverty. They pretend to be about jobs, jobs, jobs, and then they come down with a budget that locks in six per cent unemployment and much higher rates of underemployment.

The level of unemployment coming out of a recession is a is a deliberate choice that the government is making to keep millions and millions of people unemployed and underemployed. We could have full employment again in this country. We could get back to two per cent unemployment, which it was between World War II and the 1970s, if we had the courage to ditch this trickle-down economics fantasy that the government is wedded to and start investing in those job-creating, nation-building, planet-saving projects. Not only would we tackle the unemployment and the jobs crisis but we would tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis in this country as well. That is why we are pushing a Green New Deal—a government led plan of investment and action that will tackle those multiple crises, not this trickle-down fantasy of the government that sees $99 billion a year going to big corporations, tax cuts to millionaires and kicks in the teeth to everyone else.

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