Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Families and Social Services (Senator Ruston) to a question without noticed asked by Senator Siewert today relating to tax cuts and the JobSeeker payment.

It really is an insult to the community and to jobseekers to tell them that their payments haven't been cut. The minister, instead of answering my questions, chose to play with words and say the coronavirus payment hasn't been cut. Well, tell a jobseeker that. Tell a jobseeker who's trying to pay the mortgage, who's trying to pay the rent, who's trying to look after the kids and feed the kids, who's trying to put food on the table for the whole family—including parents; we all know that if you're trying to exist on $40 a day, which was the original JobSeeker payment, very often parents go without food—who's trying to make sure they take their medicines and meet their essential bills such as power and water, that their payment has not been cut by $300 a fortnight, because it has. Very soon we are going to start seeing families lose the roof over their heads because they cannot afford to pay rent.

In the chamber tonight, during adjournment, I will be giving people's accounts and what they've said to me—and I've been inundated with what people are feeling—about the cuts to the JobSeeker payment which have been brought to bear because the coronavirus supplement has been cut. The minister said I was being completely and utterly misleading by saying the coronavirus supplement had been cut. Call it what you will, but people do not have enough money in their pockets. They have been dropped below the poverty line by the cuts to the coronavirus supplement—or, to please the minister, I'll say 'the new coronavirus supplement payment, which is $250, which is a cut of $300 from the $550 coronavirus supplement'.

What's the government trying to do? What did the minister try to do in here? She tried to justify tax cuts to millionaires. It is simply unjustifiable to be giving any more money to millionaires when people are literally living below the poverty line, will lose the roof over their head, will be going hungry, can't afford to pay their bills or their mortgage and have to try to renegotiate with the bank to extend their mortgage even further because they're not going to be able to pay it for quite a long time.

We all know that living below the poverty line has an impact on your wellbeing and on your ability to find work. I'll tell you what also has an impact on your wellbeing: the lack of certainty about what's going to happen at the end of December, when the coronavirus supplement will disappear. The government has given nobody any certainty that they will not be subjected to $40 a day again. So, if you're trying to plan or to say to your bank, 'I can't, because I've had another cut to the JobSeeker payment or the coronavirus supplement,' in order to negotiate with your bank to extend your mortgage, you cannot provide that bank with any certainty that you are not going to be put back on $40 a day. It's the same if you're trying to negotiate with your landlord: 'Trust me: I'll be on JobSeeker and the coronavirus supplement.' No, you won't be able to say that, because you have absolutely no certainty.

I've sat with people who are desperate, who don't know how they're going to make ends meet and who aren't going to be able to find a job because there are still 12 jobseekers for every job that is around. Don't tell me the number of people employed has gone up. Yes, I've heard that, but the number of hours worked has only gone up by 0.1 per cent. In other words, people aren't earning the money they need to get by. So don't run the line that employment has gone up tremendously so we don't need to keep the JobSeeker payment at a rate that is actually livable, because they aren't able to find the work that is necessary.

And who are the people that are suffering the most? The young, and older women. They are particularly disadvantaged. That also goes with a lot of the accounts that I'll be giving you tonight in this place, about the impact that cutting this payment is having on people—and it is a cut. In anybody's language, it is a cut; make no mistake. This is unacceptable in a country as wealthy as ours, even in this recession.

Question agreed to.