Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this very important Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. It deals with quite poignant issues in a way for me. One always goes to one’s own personal experience with these things. This bill deals mainly with single parents and with the conditions in which they get support from the community.

I can vividly remember my own mother raising me in a single-parent family and there are two things I particularly remember about that experience. The first one is that she went to work. She was a teacher and, right from word go my earliest memories were of her going to work, supporting the family—my sister and me—and it was a good example to set. It is an example that all parents should try to set for their children—to work and to be involved and participate in the community.

The second memory I have is of me being very sick. I had childhood asthma and I had to be rushed to the hospital often. This was terribly worrying for my mother at the time. In a way I think she still sees me as that sick little boy. I can remember in particular the strain it put on her as a single parent, trying to juggle work and care for my sister, who was also sick off and on as a young child, so my heart certainly goes out to all single parents who really do struggle. It is very tough to raise children. It is a particularly tough thing to raise them on your own.

I meet a lot of single parents in my electorate. They are very good people. They try to work and to participate in the community. I have found them on nearly every occasion to be really dedicated not just to the care of their children but also to participating in our community through paid work, voluntary work and study, and you often find these people picking themselves up from relationships that have broken down. They have got kids and they really do want to prosper and make a better life for themselves and their children.

The previous rules were not so much tough as inflexible. I saw a number of my constituents having to deal with being told that they should apply for a job in, say, Noarlunga when they lived in Elizabeth, and that being just completely impractical in terms of picking up the kids from school or finding transport, or for a whole range of other reasons. There was a lot of inflexibility in terms of where you could apply for work. There was also the problem that single parents do tend to work in areas like retail or hospitality and the hours go up and down. You might have 25 hours one week and 10 the next. The previous rules also made it very difficult, I think, for people in casual or part-time employment, because when the hours went down, technically they were required to look for work. So you had a bizarre situation often where people were trying to work, wanted to work, but, because of the nature of their work, they were held up by the rules.

This bill really does seek to put a bit more flexibility in the rules for principal carers. It extends the existing 12-month automatic exemption for families with four or more children, for those who are home schooling or have distance education and for eligible families with older children, up to the age of 19, completing their secondary school education. It liberalises the eligibility for the 16-week domestic violence exemption to include parents who remain in a violent relationship as well as those who have left the relationship in the last six months, and that is important and I will come back to that. It recognises the right of respite and emergency foster carers through a new exemption that remains in place for the period of time a child is in the person’s care and for an extended period of up to 12 weeks between foster care placements. That is very important because our child protection system largely revolves around foster carers and, in particular, those who take children in an emergency. This bill also recognises the kinship carers through a new exemption for those who have care of a child under a state or territory case plan. Again, that helps to underpin the child protection system because we know that kinship carers often take a great deal of pressure off the system.

So this bill does provide some important exemptions to these fairly tough rules or obligations on these people. It also makes changes to the part-time participation requirements. They allow principal carer parents to meet their requirements through part-time study of at least 15 hours a week or 30 hours a fortnight of contact or non-contact hours. It allows combinations of approved activities, part-time study and part-time paid work as long as the parent is undertaking 15 hours per week of activity. It changes the rules on voluntary work to allow voluntary work alone or in combination with other activities to meet the requirement where parents live in poor labour markets where they have limited training opportunities or where there is a significant vocational aspect of voluntary work. That is an important point because in areas in my electorate which suffer from very high unemployment—and suffered from very high unemployment right through the boom, I might say—people often do not have clear avenues into work, so voluntary work often is the bridge by which people get from no work to paid work.

This bill also allows principal carers to participate on a part-time basis in the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme that is based around small business and it introduces more flexible arrangements over long school holidays, which particularly gives some relief from the participation requirements during the Christmas-New Year fortnight. That is important because Christmas is a time to spend with friends, family and children. It is a particularly important social occasion but it is also an occasion when there are some stresses on families. We should recognise that people, in trying to celebrate, often put a lot of pressure on themselves. The last thing we want to do is add to that pressure or the obligations over that period. People deserve some latitude during special occasions.

I talked a little bit before the domestic violence exemptions, which I think are tremendously important. I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the work of the Northern Domestic Violence Service, which does a great deal of work in my electorate. They are based in Elizabeth South but they work as far afield as Gawler and the rural communities. It is a great service and they have been going for 25 years. I think they would have preferred to have shut down by now but, sadly, there is still demand after all those years. I pay tribute to their dedication over that time. Recently we held a fundraiser with the Deputy Prime Minister for this service, some schools in the electorate and Northern Carers. That was held at Hope Central, a church in Elizabeth South which is a very active and decent group of people. Joe and Jodie Habermehl, who are pastors at the church, and Kathy Tripodi organised a breakfast at very short notice. They have a long history of fundraising in this area, having raised about $40,000 or $50,000 for various charities, including the Northern Domestic Violence Service, and I would like to pay tribute to them.

In conclusion, this bill does provide some flexibility but it keeps the obligation for people to be active and to work and to participate in our community. I think that is a reasonable and decent obligation. I commend the bill to the House.

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure for me to have the opportunity this morning to speak to the Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. With the indulgence of the House, I will say very briefly at the outset that you cannot talk about a bill like this without thinking about the people it is going to affect—a lot of people in the community who live and work under enormous and varying stresses. With that in mind, I wanted to take the liberty of mentioning that I had the privilege this morning of attending the ACT launch of the Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal. I mention it simply because you cannot go to a function like that without hearing the stories of a lot of people in our community, many of whom are affected by this very bill. I want to take the latitude of encouraging all members of this place to get behind their local Red Shield Appeal, because they are fantastic sources of support for these very people.

The amendments in this legislation are extremely important. They are in response to the Participation Review Taskforce, which was established by the Hon. Brendan O’Connor MP, then Minister for Employment Participation, and chaired by Patricia Faulkner AO from KPMG, in May 2008. The report was delivered in August of the same year and it made 20 recommendations. The idea of the legislation is to introduce flexibility into employment participation requirements, to help parents balance their parenting responsibilities with those requirements. They will still be required to meet their participation agreements in order to receive income support, unless they are one of the small number that are exempt under this bill. Parents will still have to undertake 30 hours per fortnight of suitable activity and will still need to report to Centrelink, as they do now. However, the activities that are now approved have broadened to include such things as part-time study and voluntary work—and I will go into some of the details in a moment.

The liberalisation of the 16-week domestic violence exemption, which was just mentioned by the previous speaker, the member for Wakefield, is a very important part of these amendments as well and will provide better assistance to children who have been exposed to domestic violence, regardless of whether or not the principal carer has left the relationship. This is to ensure that the principal carer is able to devote adequate time to children who have been exposed to domestic violence. These principal carers will also have regular contact with Centrelink social workers, and the exemption can be extended at the discretion of a Centrelink social worker. However, the principal carer will still be able to access employment services and participate in activities if they so wish.

The government very much recognises that it is very important for parents on income support to remain socially and economically engaged in the community at the same time. They should engage in productive activities outside the home. However, the scope of participation activities really needed to be broader than the ones that were already in place, particularly for parents who are disadvantaged through low education or low skill levels and those who had been disengaged from the workforce, who were more likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market. The changes to participation activities will definitely make the system fairer.

I will go into some detail about the changes that this bill will effect but I would like to make some general comments first. It does not matter what part of the economy or the community you happen to live in or participate in to know that today, more than ever, there are enormous pressures on families to try and strike a balance between their employment obligations—or, in this case, obligations to Centrelink—and time with their families and children. Some people think that, if you are in full employment and living a good life economically, you have those choices; you can in fact decide how much time you will or will not spend with your family, community and children. It is a bit unfortunate that they do not understand, recognise or accept that those who are a bit further down that socioeconomic scale are just as entitled to that level of choice and should also be encouraged and helped to spend time with their families and children. It is a very important point that is really brought home to me when I consider the changes that we are making through this piece of legislation.

Amongst other things, the bill is going to extend the existing 12-month automatic exemptions for families with four or more children, families who have children in home schooling or families who have children doing distance education, and to eligible families with older children completing their secondary school education. The exemption does not stop principal carers from accessing employment services. The government would still encourage them to do so if they are able. I would call this a very common-sense approach to the amendments.

It will also broaden the eligibility for the 16-week domestic violence exemption to include parents who remain in a violent relationship or who have left such a relationship in the last six months. It will also recognise the role of respite and emergency foster carers through a new exemption that remains in place for the time the child is in the person’s care and for up to 12 weeks between foster care and placement. It will recognise the role of kinship carers through a new exemption for those who have the care of a child under a state or territory case plan. These are very important steps that will protect children who may have been vulnerable to traumatic domestic situations and who require extra care.

The bill will allow principal carers to meet their participation requirements through part-time study of at least 15 hours per week of contact or non-contact hours. It will also allow combinations of approved activities, such as part-time study or volunteer work, as long as the parent undertakes 15 hours per week of those activities—again, thank goodness, very much a common-sense, equal playing field approach. It will allow voluntary work as one of the components to satisfy participation requirements in a poor labour market. Over the years I have had many a comment from people in my community about the inequity of this legislation before the passage of this amendment bill.

The bill will allow principal carers to participate in the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, NEIS, on a part-time basis. It will allow principal carers to take a break from participation requirements over the Christmas and New Year fortnight. I am really pleased to be able to say that. Forgive me, but I think this is one of the most important aspects of the bill, because it actually reflects what the government is trying to do in accepting the recommendations of that review and, as I said a moment ago in my introductory remarks, in actually allowing the people affected by this legislation to lead a life like most of us, or at least giving them the choice to do so. I am particularly pleased to see this common-sense, fair approach.

The bill will also allow parents with regular term employment that ceases over the long school holiday break to be exempt, provided their employment recommences after the break—in other words, there is no penalty to them if that is the type of employment they have. This shows a full understanding of their circumstances and is an acknowledgement that the sort of support this legislation can offer is still available to them. These are really important amendments—as I have said, very common-sense and very fair. It allows people who benefit from this type of legislation to actually benefit from it in a fair way along with the rest of our community. It enables them to start making choices the way the rest of us can in that important matter of balancing commitments—between Centrelink, employment, their family, their extended family, their children and their community involvement. It is indeed a pleasure to commend this bill to the House. I am very pleased to see it come through and I welcome it very much on behalf of the people affected within my electorate.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Employment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010 represents a vital part of the government’s ‘more flexible participation requirements for parents’ 2009-10 budget measure. This measure delivers on the government’s commitment to support the economic and social inclusion of parents by ensuring that all parents on income support have the opportunity to develop their skills, to participate in the workforce and to be treated with the respect inherent in their roles as parents.

Before detailing the purpose of the bill, I will take the opportunity to dispute some of the claims that have been made in this debate by the opposition. We should not forget that it was the Hawke Labor government that introduced mutual obligation and penalties as a condition of getting the dole in Australia. From July 2009 to March 2010, this government has imposed 21,189 penalties resulting in a stop to income support. The overriding objective of our policy is to get people into work. The new Job Services Australia is performing very well compared to the former Job Network. On a like-for-like basis about 13 per cent more unemployed people are getting into jobs, and that is not taking into account the more hostile environment created by the global recession. More than 304,000 job placements have been recorded by Job Services Australia since 1 July last year.

Work for the Dole is very important but it is only one of the ways to build skills and get people back to work. Building skills is the key to tackling skill shortages. It is also the key to reducing unemployment in areas where it is highest and where it is most difficult to budge. That is why the government is investing in skills and training: $300 million to build the skills we need for the future through the Critical Skills Investment Fund and the extension of the highly successful Apprentice Kickstart initiative, which were both mentioned in the budget on Tuesday night; $242 million to deliver a better training system, matching the needs of industry and guaranteeing young people a training place; as well as almost $120 million to build literacy and numeracy skills for people in the workforce and looking to get back into the workforce. This investment is about preparing people for work and making sure that they are job ready.

Training is now a much more meaningful part of the compulsory participation system for unemployed people. We have already increased the number of unemployed people required to undertake training. From April 2005 to April 2010, the number of unemployed people in training has gone up from 46,000 to 76,000. We have made the employment service system more flexible. A key change has been to allow the professional employment services to decide how best to get people into jobs. They know the labour market, deal directly with unemployed people and are able to tailor support to suit individuals’ needs. They decide if it is Work for the Dole training or another program that will be best to meet the compulsory participation requirements. This principle of flexibility and tailoring employment services to the needs of individual job seekers with the aim of getting them into a job is reflected in this bill.

The government recognises that many parents with participation requirements already meet their obligations through paid work and that these families benefit from the parents’ participation in the workforce. However, many Australian families face additional challenges and the government understands that these activities need to support parents’ individual circumstances, replacing a one-size-fits-all approach. For this reason, in May 2008 the government established the Participation Review Taskforce to consider the barriers to participation encountered by parents in the workforce. The task force undertook extensive consultation with the Australian community and reported its findings and recommendations to government in August 2008. The government has responded to the recommendations of the task force through a range of initiatives designed to support the economic inclusion of parents in the labour force while considering their individual circumstances. The government’s response is contained in this bill as well as in changes to the Guide to Social Security Law and amended subordinate legislation.

The government’s changes to participation requirements will help parents to better balance their family and caring responsibilities with their participation obligations by improving their ability to undertake education, training and relevant volunteering opportunities. This will provide greater opportunities for parents to obtain relevant skills, qualifications and work experience and to participate socially and economically in their community. Parents will also be able to report their participation efforts more flexibly by utilising Centrelink’s online and telephone reporting services.

This bill and the wider measure respond to the concerns of parents that the current system is too rigid and the current participation rules are often counterproductive to their efforts to develop skills, gain relevant experience and find work. The greater flexibility introduced by this measure, together with individually tailored assistance provided through Job Services Australia and the Disability Employment Services network, will ensure that parents are fully supported in their efforts to gain skills and qualifications and participate in the workforce. Parents will still be required to undertake 30 hours of suitable activities each fortnight. However, we recognise that parents can gain skills and employment through many different pathways. Parents with participation requirements will be able to undertake part-time study and combine suitable activities, such as part-time study, part-time paid work and vocationally appropriate voluntary work, to fully meet their participation requirements.

The bill will directly improve access to exemptions from participation requirements. This recognises that at times some parents face unique challenges that make it difficult for them to be available for part-time work or study. The existing domestic violence exemption will be extended to provide greater support for victims of domestic violence, regardless of their relationship status, to ensure that the exemption is available when needed. The bill also extends existing exemptions for parents with large families, those who provide home schooling and those parents whose children undertake distance education. These exemptions will now extend to parents who have older children who are still in school, therefore recognising the important role that these parents play in the education of their children. New participation exemptions will be introduced in recognition of the important caring role that kinship and foster carers play in our community, including emergency and respite foster carers. These exemptions will be available where a care plan is in place and which has been prepared or accepted by the relevant state or territory government.

This bill provides a sound balance between the role of parents on income support as carers, their participation in paid work, their skill development and their involvement in their local communities. The bill responds to the concerns of Australian parents and provides for greater flexibility for parents on income support in recognition of their most important role, that of being a parent. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.