Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) Anti-Poverty Week runs from 17 to 23 October 2021,

(ii) currently, more than 2.65 million people in Australia live below the poverty line with many at risk of homelessness, and

(iii) during 2020, around 3 million Australians were protected from poverty when the Federal Government increased income support rates; and

(b) calls on the Federal Government to take immediate action to raise income support above the poverty line and invest in social housing.

The rate of people living in poverty in Australia is appalling. It's particularly appalling because we've seen so recently that it can be different. In 2020 we saw payment rates lifted above the poverty line for the first time in years. We heard from people who were trapped in poverty what a difference that made to their lives, what a difference the coronavirus supplement made. Conny Lenneberg, director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, wrote:

One family told us that for the first time they were able to eat three meals a day. Previously there were only three or four days in the week when they all could afford to eat meals. Sitting down to breakfast together each morning was a new experience.

A father of two young children, Tim, told us that for the first time he could afford nappies and formula for his seven-month-old, food and clothes for his three-year-old and still have enough for himself and his wife to eat well. Others have spoken about being able to afford fresh food for the first time, of being able to buy their medicines and pay their rent on time.

These are all things that the rest of us who aren't living in poverty take for granted. This government has made a choice. After seeing the demonstrable difference that raising the rate of income support made to people's lives, the government chose to once again slash the level of income support and force people back into poverty.

I also want to share the story of Melissa, who is one of the people forced to live on a payment below the poverty line: 'About six months after being put on JobSeeker, I made a suicide attempt. When I was asked why I'd done this, my only response at the time was, "Because I can't afford to live." The worst part after losing Mum was going onto JobSeeker, because I was thrown into even more poverty. It felt like everything was falling down beside me, and all of a sudden I didn't have the money to support me. We are not bludgers. There are real barriers to working, and we are just doing the best we can to survive.'

I emailed a lot of people who previously had been supporting our Greens campaigns and supporting the fantastic work that former senator Rachel Siewert did, over the last six years, on poverty and on raising the rate. I emailed them during the week, introducing myself as the Greens' new spokesperson for community affairs and asked them to share their stories with me about what it would mean to them if JobSeeker were doubled, what it would mean to them to be no longer living in poverty, and what their experience of living in poverty while living on JobSeeker currently was.

I had many people get back to me immediately. Some of the things they told me were that they often had to choose whether to buy food or medication or whether to keep the lights or heat on. Someone said, 'I had to stop medications I should be taking because I cannot afford them. My consumption of food has been reduced by so much in the last eight months that I have lost 30 kilograms.' Someone else said: 'I've managed to keep a roof over my head, but at the expense of everything else. This has affected my mental health, and I now spend most of my time in the house unable to go out.' Another person: 'I have a car I can't afford to run, so basically I am in this house 24 hours a day.' Someone else: 'I'm a diabetic, so lack of food causes my sugars to go down often, resulting in coma-like episodes.' 'I can't afford physio,' said another person, 'I can't afford medication all the time. When JobSeeker payments were increased last year, I could afford to pay my bills and not worry so much about having to work in pain in work that I'm no longer suited to.'

Then we have what happens to people who through no fault of their own find themselves not being able to work. This person said, after they had been living on JobSeeker for the last year: 'Since then, my savings, which are mostly made up of super money I withdrew, have gone down at a rapid rate. I've had to take out around $1,000 a month to get by. My employment provider has done nothing, literally. They refused to help with PPE, uniforms, self-education expenses. So with Indue making around 12k a year from me,' because they're on the cashless debit card, 'and the DSS provider getting around $400 once a fortnight from me for having to visit them, they are getting the exact same amount I receive in payments for these companies. The rate of JobSeeker payment is designed to punish people and to force them to work for bad employers who should not be in business.' One other person said, 'Being on JobSeeker feels like a punishment, a punishment for not being able to find work when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. You see people around you enjoying the most basic things, like catching up with friends for a coffee, and you feel like you've been kicked when you're already down. It's a punishment, and it's killing people.'

What's particularly appalling when you hear these heartbreaking stories is that in the midst of the COVID pandemic the major corporations were raking in the funding hand over fist. They were making out like bandits. Costings by the Parliamentary Budget Office estimate that if just 65 corporations who paid executive bonuses or made excessive profits returned the JobKeeper funds that they got it would involve returning over $1 billion. But JobKeeper isn't the only program that corporations made very well out of. The last budget set out $11.4 billion in subsidies to keep burning fossil fuels and $1.4 billion for new coal and gas projects. So this government can afford to pay subsidies for the biggest polluters in a climate crisis but says it cannot afford to rescue people from the whirlpool of poverty that they are trapped in.

Of course, there are so many other forms of support for corporations and the ultra rich. Research commissioned by Anglicare estimated that the cost of tax concessions for the wealthiest 20 per cent in our community amounted to $68 billion every year. That research was several years ago, and I feel confident that the number hasn't gone down. But while the government is making the choice to reward billionaires and big corporations, it is also making another choice to force people into poverty, to force people to live on a payment whose rate is below the poverty line.

I also want to share some accounts of people who have faced Centrelink debts. Earlier today, in answer to my question in question time, the Minister for Families and Social Services told me that, no, they weren't going to be going after corporations who'd made profits out of JobKeeper and then said that the people who had inadvertently received both JobSeeker and JobKeeper had potentially committed fraud and, yes, they were going to go after them, because they'd committed fraud.

I want to share the voices that this government has made the choice to punish. This is what one person had to say to me: 'I was initially told that I didn't qualify for JobKeeper, along with 120 other casual employees. As it turns out, I did. In the meantime, I got JobSeeker. When JobKeeper came through I was back paid and rang Centrelink to let them know. In that conversation I explained the details of having to fight for JobKeeper. They informed me that they could not collect debt at that time by law and that I'd be asked to return overpayments when they were able to collect again. Even voluntary payment wasn't allowed. Many months later I get an incredibly rude phone call—'You didn't declare for JobKeeper for date X to date Y—and I had to go through the entire thing again, stating it clearly all on the record. I had written down dates and amounts approximately six months earlier and said I needed to find all that paperwork because the phone call was out of the blue. The amount they wanted returned was well over what I had recorded, and I went through it with a fine-tooth comb. It was two fortnights only, but they were attempting to get three. This did eventually get sorted and I paid the correct amount. But I'm in Melbourne, where we have spent around 43 per cent of our lives in lockdown since 30 March 2020. I have a casual job in retail. They dock my pay per fortnight that I get to work but don't account for the times I'm legally not allowed to. I'm earning well under the annual amount for pay docking. No system has been introduced to help us or to account for this. They are very quick to take our earnings but ignore completely when they owe us.'

This is how our government treats some of the most vulnerable people in our society, the poorest people, people who are really living on the edge. There are stories after stories of people living in poverty. It's a choice. It's a political choice. We could lift people out of poverty. It is possible. It's a political choice. We could raise the rate, like we did last year when people suddenly discovered that they could live life again, suddenly discovered that they could get by, suddenly discovered that they actually had enough money to eat well, to be able to get themselves to jobs and to be able to feed their kids. This is a political choice.

The Greens are calling for our income support rate to be lifted above the poverty line. It's the least we can do in the rich country that we live in. It is the least we can do. The response from this government—'That's going to discourage people from getting work'—is just such a furphy. The jobs aren't there. It's really just labelling people as dole bludgers when, in fact, we have people who are doing everything they can to keep their heads above water. It is the least we can be doing to be looking after people in our society. We are a wealthy country. We can afford to be doubling our income support rate, to be lifting people out of poverty, to be giving everybody the opportunity to be living meaningful and fulfilling lives.