Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Pocock for this motion, but I have to say that there is not a day that goes by when I do not take this issue extremely seriously. We recognise that living on income support payments is extremely challenging. As a government, however, we face competing calls on the budget which, sadly, we have to make very difficult choices on. In the budget that we have just done, we have sought to put some money back into people's pockets, including through cheaper child care, expanded paid parental leave, cheaper medicine, more affordable housing and support for low-income households that are earning wages.

To demonstrate how complicated this issue is—and I don't mean to overstate it in terms of complexity, but this is the way the issue has to be managed—4.7 million Australians received a boost to their government payments just through the indexation adjustments made in September this year. Now, I'm not saying that that fixes the problem, but what I am saying to you is that that increase, in and of itself, adds about $10 billion worth of costs to the bottom line of the budget over the forward estimates. So, when we look to support families and we look to support households, particularly the most vulnerable ones in our society, we need to make sure that the changes that we make are sustainable.

The rate will be considered again in the next budget, but there is little point in having a one-off supplement boost here or there, as we've had a history of doing, if we are simply setting up a system that is unsustainable. I also think we need to look at the whole package of needs of a family, and it's important to recognise that it's not $48 a day when we're dealing with families, that we need to include family tax benefit A and B and that these, along with rent assistance, are targeted payments for low-income households. When it comes to looking at government policies in the future in this regard, we need to be looking at the holistic system of support that people get.

I note in this regard that the House of Representatives currently has an inquiry into Workforce Australia and is also doing an inquiry into ParentsNext. ParentsNext has purportedly been a program to support parents with young children to get ready for re-entering the workforce. Historically, it has had a whole bunch of obligations attached to it, which I note have been suspended in recent times. Programs like that, that have been driven by the last government, haven't really known whether they are a parenting support program or whether they are an employment pathway program. I note, in that regard, that the resources that we put into parts of the community for programs like that, and the resources that we put into places like Medicare, are only good if people can use them. And so we need to continue to deliberate about where our funding is best spent, in a social welfare and community sense. That is why we are looking very actively at these issues, for example, through the inquiry on Workforce Australia in the lower house.

We acknowledge that the release of the Poverty in Australia report 2022: a snapshot, for example—