Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Clark. I know that this has been a point of interest for him—he's shown a real commitment for many years—as it has been for our government. He spoke about returning fairness and humanity to the social security system. Certainly, that is also our intention and desire. In his last comments, he spoke about raising the rate. I would remind him that since coming to government we've increased age and disability pensions by about $5,000 a year, we've increased JobSeeker—working-age payments—by about $4,000 a year, and we've increased Commonwealth rent assistance by up to $1,800 a year. Those initial changes, which we made to social security in the first two budgets, were an investment of around $11½ billion in a fairer system. So there have been very substantial investments already.

I want to also remind the House that it was the Albanese government that established the robodebt royal commission. We exposed a very dark chapter in Australian public administration, and we're the ones fixing it. We've agreed or agreed in principle to all 56 recommendations of the royal commission; three-quarters have already been fully completed or substantially progressed. Recommendation 18.2, relating to the statute of limitations, was agreed in principle and it's one of the recommendations that we're working on. For the measure to be effective, it needs to be carefully designed and consulted on—a process that we are carrying out thoroughly.

The previous statute of limitations was actually not as effective as it could have been and didn't provide a meaningful limit on the raising and recovering of historic debts. I remind the member that increasing the small debt waiver to $250, as he supports in this bill, means that we will waive about 1.2 million undetermined debts this financial year alone. This one measure will remove more debts from the backlog than reinstating the old statute of limitations would. Measures such as these bring with them very significant budget impacts, and, as part of our consideration approach, the government have to work through each proposal to ensure that it's of the best possible benefit for the whole community.

I assure the member for Clark that this work is ongoing, but we are not able to support his amendments at this time.

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