Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I want to say at the outset that Labor will be supporting this bill. The Farm Household Support Amendment (Debt Waiver) Bill 2021 outlines the criteria for the waiver, preserves the four years of payment in every 10-year period, allows time for farm household allowance recipients to comply with their existing obligations and provides a definitive end to the BIR and the waiver process. I want to be clear that we are supporting this but we're concerned that the government changed this system back on 1 July 2020 and it's taken them this long to get in here and to do something about the waiving of debts that were calculated under the previous system. Of course, we've seen from this government how it deals with people that owe debts to this government. We've seen it through robodebt. I'm actually going to move an amendment to this. I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes the Coalition Government's failure to adequately address the challenges facing farmers and its mishandling of the debts of recipients of government support payments".

We want to make sure that the government does the right thing by all of those that owe debts to the government. They need to be transparent about those debts and they need to be transparent about whether they're robodebts or farm household debts. They need to be absolutely clear and they need to treat people the same regardless of the type of payment that they're on when they're dealing with debts owed to the Commonwealth.

What we saw with robodebt was a complete disgrace by this government. Those opposite knew those debts were illegal, and they did nothing about it until it was taken to court. The government should have responded to it. For literally years we have been talking about the terrible impact it has had on people. This government has also known that its complicated assessment for the farm household allowance has been a problem for years. It has already waived some debts from 2014-15, but this bill goes back and waives all the debts from 2015 up until the new system came in, on 1 July 2020. We will be supporting that, but we have some concerns, generally, about the way this government is supporting farmers.

It's not just through the payments and the systems that they're letting farmers down; it's also through the workforce. We know there's a labour shortage, and we've heard in recent days about this ag visa that the government say they will create.

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