Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I do not know what Senator McKenzie means when she says, 'Don't talk about it.' We need to talk about jobs. We need to talk about the need to encourage manufacturing. We need to talk about the fact that there are 3½ thousand jobs at stake at the Port Kembla steelworks and something like 10,000 additional jobs reliant on it.

We need to have tough antidumping laws in this country. I only want us to be as tough as the Americans and the Europeans are in defending their local industries against illegal, unfair dumping practices. We do not have the right regime in place right now in terms of dealing with antidumping. That is the background to this. We are facing massive job losses in this country. Unless we consider that in the context of this bill then we are missing the point. South Australia has been hit hardest in terms of unemployment figures. It topped the nation, sadly, tragically, at over eight per cent a couple of months ago. It is the highest unemployment rate in 15 years across the nation.

Here we are considering again the government's measures to impose what it calls 'disincentives' for young jobless people to draw on government benefits. Obviously we need to have clear and firm rules in place so that people who are getting benefits are doing all they reasonably can to get employment in the workplace.

Senator McKenzie interjecting—

Senator McKenzie agrees with that. I think we all agree with that. You cannot have people using this as some sort of measure where there is no reciprocal arrangement or mutuality to do your best to get a job. But the fact is that jobs are not out there. Youth unemployment in the northern suburbs of Adelaide was 16.9 per cent in the year to July 2015. In the southern suburbs of Adelaide it was 15.4 per cent. But you need to take into account this important point: we have changed the basis upon which we determine unemployment figures in this country from what it was many years ago. It used to be that, if you worked more than 15 hours a week, you were not deemed to be unemployed. Now the figure is, as I understand it, one hour a week. That is not realistic. We are grossly understating the level of underemployment in this country because of the statistical basis upon which we determine what it is to be an unemployed person. The levels of underemployment and unemployment are very significant in this country. There are many people who cannot afford to buy a house or a car or plan for their family's future because they are really scraping by with the hours that they are working. They are grossly underemployed.

Having a one-month waiting period for the newly unemployed under the age of 25 could make a big difference to whether somebody loses their ability to pay rent, loses their home, couch-surfs, or slides into homelessness. The test ought to be whether that person is making a fair dinkum effort to find work. That should be the test, not this arbitrary threshold of saying, 'If you happen to be young, we're going to throw you off benefits.' I know the government, through Minister Morrison, has a number of programs in place to encourage people to participate in the workforce, which I welcome, but this stick, which is what this measure is, would be a completely retrograde step.

Additional job-seeking activities—in addition to those already in place for Newstart allowance—will be imposed during that period. A new one-week waiting period is also being extended from Newstart allowance to other payments including parenting payment and youth allowance. And the government still wants to keep young people on the lower youth allowance for longer. Under the bill a young person will not receive Newstart allowance unless they are aged 25 or above, up from 22 or above. Newstart cannot on any measure be determined to be generous. I have deep concerns about the practical impact of these changes at a time when unemployment is rising and some are even predicting Australia is heading for a contraction in our economy. I think the figures from last month indicate that per capita there has been a contraction, which of course is a matter of very serious concern.

The budget papers for this bill say the new four-week waiting period 'will set the clear expectation that young people must make every effort to maximise their chances of successfully obtaining work.' There seems to be implicit in that part of the budget papers an assumption that young people are not already doing all they can to get off government payments. This is not a generous benefit—it is way below the poverty line. I want to introduce a concept that I hope you, Mr Deputy President, and others may want to take up outside the forum of debate on this bill. The poverty line, according to the Melbourne University's Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, for the March quarter of 2015 is in the order of $510.16 a week for a single person and $682.45 a week for a couple. My argument is that Newstart is in the order of $250 a week, and at the moment if you earn more than $102 per fortnight you lose 50c in the dollar of that until your benefit is extinguished, so if we accept that the poverty line is a reasonable basis for determining the bare bones upon which a person can subsist then why do we punish people who earn more than $50 a week with a severe 50c basically tax? Surely we should be encouraging people to at least give it a go, to get in the workforce, to try work with small businesses particularly, even a few hours a week, and not penalising them at least until they get up to the poverty level. That is something that we need to consider and have a sensible national conversation on, because there is an anomaly here: if we accept that the poverty line is a robust measure of what is needed in terms of a subsistence existence in this country then why are we penalising people way below the poverty line, where they are effectively being taxed 50c in the dollar for anything they earn over $51 a week? Many young people would like to give it a go—even a part-time job with a small business—but they risk having to do all the paperwork and being done for Centrelink fraud. There are disincentives, and we need to have a sensible look at that.

The government does not appear to have produced any evidence to support its assumption in the budget papers about what this waiting period is about. While the measures in this bill are a pale imitation of the changes first raised in the 2014 budget, the rationale is still there—and that rationale is fundamentally flawed. By all means encourage people to look for work and have strict tests to make sure that they are doing all they can to find work. I think this bill is fundamentally flawed in respect of this, and I think Senator Carol Brown in her contribution raised the issue of domestic violence. It is good to acknowledge the impact of domestic violence but I think the bill has got it around the wrong way. What the bill is proposing to provide as an exemption does not take into account the magnitude of the problem. I want to acknowledge that the federal government has done much good work in relation to this. Their advocacy of and their support for the campaign of Rosie Batty, the Australian of the Year, and others ought to be commended but respectfully I say that this provision in this bill does not address the issue as well as it could. I do not ascribe any improper motive on the part of the government in relation to that, I just say that they have missed the point .

Going back to the provisions of this bill, Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute has said, citing surveys by Mission Australia and others, that young people in fact want to work and want to work more hours, but they face a number of barriers from doing so. I note that social service providers do not support the waiting periods and the change in the age cut-offs for government payments. The Senate has received submissions that nowhere else in the world has a government imposed a waiting period for payments for young people without any other means of support. The Australian Council of Social Service has also commented on this. Cassandra Goldie did some terrific work with Minister Morrison in reaching what I thought was a sensible and fair compromise on means testing and taper rates for pensions, which I agreed with and the Australian Greens supported. It was a positive contribution by a ACOSS, as is often the case, to improve our welfare system and to make it sustainable in the longer term. ACOSS has said that it was regrettable that the income support waiting period measure for young people had only been modified, rather than reversed, and that there 'was no justification for this measure.'

Other community sector and welfare groups have restated their opposition to extended waiting periods for young people to access income support, including the National Welfare Rights Network, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Mission Australia. These are the groups that know; these are the groups that have to pick up the pieces when someone's life falls apart because they cannot find work. I am concerned, like others who have looked at this bill, by the unintended consequences of the waiting period. Do we really expect young people to be in a position to find work—or meet the additional job-seeking requirements imposed by this bill—if they have no means of financial support?

I would think their primary concern is putting food on the table and avoiding being evicted from their accommodation.

I cannot support the bill. There is a better way of tackling this issue and that is to do all we can to create jobs and opportunities for Australians. That involves looking at issues of productivity, ensuring that our antidumping laws are stronger against jobs being lost to unauthorised illegal dumping from other countries, and supporting our manufacturing sector, particularly with the crisis facing South Australia and Victoria in the automotive sector. Of course, it would be remiss of me if I did not say that it would also make a big difference in terms of confidence to Australia and in particular to South Australia if the Commonwealth government, as a matter of urgency, announced that the future submarine project be built in South Australia, as promised, with benefits flowing to all states in the Commonwealth.