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

I want to start by thanking Senator Smith for his focus on income support in the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Enhancing Pensioner and Veteran Workforce Participation) Bill 2022. Senator Smith and I have a long history of working collaboratively on complex issues, and I want to particularly acknowledge his measured and very considered approach on some of the challenging issues facing us in the parliament.

This bill fits within a framework of needing to increase people's well-being right across the board. The Australian Greens believe that a socially just, democratic and sustainable society should be underpinned by a guaranteed liveable income, complemented by the provision of universal social services. We believe that everyone should have enough to live on and essential services to enable them to fully participate in society. That is why we want to see the development and adoption of a comprehensive suite of tools to measure poverty across the range of communities in Australia, including a national definition of poverty and ultimately the eradication of poverty in Australia. We can choose to eradicate poverty in Australia. A key step in that process would be the reform of our income support system in its entirety to ensure a guaranteed liveable income for all.

This bill goes nowhere near a guaranteed liveable income, and the government's version of it falls even further short. But it does include a number of measures to better support pensioners, making it easier for pensioners to earn more before their pension is reduced. The changes in this bill would also make it easier for people to keep their pensioner concession card when they earn above the income threshold in a 12-week period. The questions this bill is addressing—of how to balance the income test and ensure that we're providing support for everyone who needs it—are really important questions. In reflecting on the measures in this bill I am of course very conscious that the Greens were actually the only party in the last election with a clear proposal to provide earlier access to the age pension. As we said at the time, lowering the eligibility age will expand access to the pension for hundreds of thousands of older Australians who are currently living in poverty and will provide a well-deserved earlier retirement with guaranteed income support for people who have worked their entire lives on low wages in order to take care of their families.

Since the Rudd government's 2009 increase to the pension age from 65 to 67, Liberal and Labor have been failing low-income older Australians. Across the country, thousands of older Australians who are approaching retirement age have limited capacity to continue working or have been excluded from the labour market entirely. Thousands more are in physically demanding minimum-wage jobs, forced to keep working an additional two years because of successive Labor and Liberal governments failing to give them the support they need. So we need to be doing more than just enabling pensioners who are able to work to increase the hours that they can work. In particular, we need to be supporting people who, at the end of their working life, having worked hard all their life, don't have to be literally breaking their backs in manual labour, as many of them are—whether it's working in hospitals, whether it's doing heavy lifting—just to survive.

Of course, the measure that we took to the last election of reducing the age that people could access the pension was in addition to our proposal to increase the rate of payments to all recipients to $88 a day, so that people on JobSeeker, people on pensions, people on youth allowance and people on the disability support pension would all receive an income payment above the poverty line, so that nobody was languishing in poverty. We also wanted to remove compulsory obligations—those largely pointless tasks and hoops and forms and meetings that people on income support have to subject themselves to to receive income support. As an aside, there is increasing evidence that some people—more people—are actively choosing to not access income support. That's not because they don't need it. They are choosing to try and survive with no income at all because of these so-called mutual obligation processes that are proposed.

I met a woman earlier this year who was homeless on the streets of south Melbourne. She told me that she was actively choosing to not have any income from the government at all because the whole processes of having to go through the mutual obligations was worsening her mental health so much that she decided that being homeless and living on the streets with no income at all was actually going to be better for her mental health than having to jump through the pointless mutual obligation hoops that she was being forced to.

So, as well as reforms that benefit pensioners, we want to ensure that no-one, no matter how old they are, is living in poverty. We know that poverty is a political choice. It's a choice that the government is making, and it's a choice that the previous government made. And this is at the same time that they are choosing to hand out billions of dollars to billionaires and billions of dollars to the ultra wealthy.

Senator Ayres talked about the very important measure that the Treasurer has been spruiking today for increases to income support. This is actually only just keeping pace with inflation. In announcing these measures, the Treasurer said:

We know that it won't solve every problem for everybody but it's important that we try and make sure that those payments keep up. That's what the indexation is about. It will be welcome even as we acknowledge that times will still be tough for a lot of people.

Yes, indeed, Treasurer. Times are indeed very tough, and your government is choosing to keep them that way. The government is choosing not to increase the woefully inadequate rates of income support for jobseekers, for pensioners, for people on the disability pension, for young people, for students. The government is choosing to keep millions of Australians living in abject poverty, where people can't afford to eat three meals a day. People are being diagnosed with malnutrition and scurvy at the same time that this government is proceeding with the stage 3 tax cuts.

Recent analysis shows just how skewed and how wrong proceeding with the stage 3 tax cuts is in this context The Guardian reported that the richest one per cent of Australians will get as much benefit from the stage 3 tax cuts as the poorest 65 per cent combined. The tax cuts, which will cost $243 billion to 2032-33, would see $160 billion flow to men and $83 billion flow to women. Let's be clear. At the same time that we are debating this bill, which is going to give some very modest increases to pensioners to be able to earn more, we have both sides of politics, the Liberal Party and the Labor Party alike, planning to give $244 billion to very wealthy people over the next 10 years. At the same time, the indexation that the government's touting today is worth less than $2 a day to people living on JobSeeker—$2 a day!—whereas everyone earning over $200,000, and that's everybody in this place, will get $24 a day in the stage 3 tax cuts. Two dollars a day is not enough for people facing a housing crisis, for people who are struggling to buy food.

In the lead-up to the Jobs and Skills Summit last week, my office did a call-out for people's stories, for their experiences of being on JobSeeker and what that did to their ability to find work. Their answers were stark and sobering. One 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. And, to be honest, I'm one of the lucky ones: I don't have children or pets that depend on me to provide for them. When the rate was raised, I was able to buy winter clothes without worrying if I'd be cutting into the food budget. This shouldn't be a normality! No one should have to choose between a meal and a jumper. It's a punishment and it is killing people.'

Another story:

I am so blessed to now be in full-time employment, but in the past few years I have been on Jobseeker payments for extended periods—it was demoralising—and frightening. There was no 'safety net'—nothing to be done except watch the little bit of savings I had built up dwindle to nothing, and then every new letter in the letter box filled me with dread—another bill I had to try to negotiate not paying.

I became depressed and fearful.

And angry at the injustice of it all. And at the stigma—created and perpetuated even by Centrelink itself.

Please continue to fight for those trapped in poverty.

I can assure them that's what we Greens will continue to do.

Senator Smith's bill has some measures that will make life easier for age pensioners, but there is so much more that needs to be done. And there's a simple answer here: we can make a different choice. We can choose to increase the rate of income support so that payment rates are above the poverty line. We can choose to care for people rather than profit. We can choose people over corporations. The Greens believe that no-one in Australia should be living in poverty, and we will keep fighting for that change.