Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Democrats oppose schedule 1 in the following terms:

(1)    Schedule 1, items 9 to 13, pages 6 (line 22) to page 7 (line 12), TO BE OPPOSED.

I spoke to the Democrat amendment to some extent in the second reading debate. I will not go on at length, given the legislative load that the Senate is dealing with. The Democrats are proposing that items 9 to 13 of the legislation be removed. This is the section of the legislation which makes the child disability assistance payment subject to income management, or quarantining, as it is called. According to the explanatory memorandum, the child disability assistance will be treated in the same way as carers allowance for the purpose of income management, relating to child protection, school enrolment, attendance and the Queensland commission—which is about the Cape York welfare reform trials, as I understand it, and which I think does not yet exist under law, but that is another matter. I do not want to get into the blame game about that.

As the new child disability assistance is an annual lump sum payment, 100 per cent of it—that is, $1,000—will be subject to income management under the rules relating to the Northern Territory. I accept that that does make it consistent with how other lump sums to do with family tax benefit et cetera are treated. There is an argument for consistency under social security law—I appreciate that—but, as I said in my second reading contribution, I think we need to see a bit more about how well the income management regime works before we start lumping every payment in there, particularly as it is 100 per cent of it. I think it is no small irony that the government is saying that they are providing this payment and quite rightly pointing out that it provides maximum flexibility for families to decide for themselves how to use this payment in a way that will meet the needs of the child that they are caring for, and yet it is subjected to income management, which is specifically designed to reduce the choice available to a person.

I appreciate that you do not want any carer to grab a thousand bucks and spend it on the pokies or buy a thousand bucks worth of grog or whatever, but that is obviously a potential that is open to anybody in the country. Given that, particularly for people in the Northern Territory who are currently subject to the income management regime, there are no criteria in place—not even a pretence of a criterion—these people are deemed to have been shown to not be as good as they could be at caring for their child. It is a blanket provision—everybody has their income being managed—so I do not think you can make the case that this is a group of people that has been found to not be as good as they should be at being parents, so we will help them with their income. That does not apply in the Territory; this is for everybody—all Aboriginal people in those communities. To me, it is inconsistent with the stated intent of the lump sum payment, which is to give people maximum flexibility to decide for themselves.

As I think was mentioned in the second reading speech from the government, the payment will help carers to purchase the form of assistance that best suits the needs of their family. Well, yes, it will, except for those under income management. Presumably a Centrelink officer, or somebody, will be telling them, ‘Yes, you can’ or ‘No, you can’t’—that is the potential, anyway. It depends a bit on how that pans out, in terms of flexibility, and we do not know about that in a lot of detail yet. The Democrats believe that, particularly for a payment that is meant to provide maximum flexibility for a carer to decide for themselves what they should spend the money on to help the needs of the child, to on the one hand introduce that for maximum flexibility and choice and, at the same time, saying, ‘For this chunk of people’—Aboriginal people in the Territory—‘no, we’re going to constrain your choice through this other mechanism,’ is I think contradictory.

It will be interesting to see over time, and it is probably too early to tell, how some of these areas will be of assistance to children. I do not want to revisit the whole wider debate, but one of the problems—and it is certainly an issue that comes up often with regard to carers—is: ‘We can only get this type of assistance’ or ‘We only get the subsidy for this sort of assistance; the government has decided what’s needed for our child. Maybe that is what’s needed for most children, but we are convinced that our child is different and we want this type of assistance, but we’re not eligible for assistance for that.’ To use the autism spectrum example again, that is a real issue for some. They can only get some types of supports and not others and it does not suit their child, and they are either forced to take the type of assistance that does not actually suit or they have to pay full bucks, with no assistance at all, for another type of support that is not recognised as being valid. That is always something in the whole health field that you have to balance when you are looking at taxpayer funded assistance for subsidies or support—I appreciate that. That is never easy, but that is the whole point of these sorts of thousand-dollar payments: the parent knows best and we are letting them decide. Then, with income quarantining or income management, we are saying, ‘Well, no, actually you don’t know best’—particularly when that is something that applies across the board, to everybody, purely on the basis of where they live, and certainly some believe it is on the basis of their skin colour. I do not think that is a terribly good precedent or practice, certainly at least until we see how it operates. That is the rationale behind the Democrats’ amendment. Because of the time of day, I will not divide on it, but I thought it would be appropriate to raise those points and some of those concerns.