Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum relating to the bill.

Leave granted.

I table an explanatory memorandum and seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

I move that this Bill now be read a second time.

I am pleased to be joined by advocates and members of the crossbench in urging Labor to finally honour the victims of Robodebt and bring about these protections for people who rely on income support.

It has now been over two years since the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme handed down its recommendations, recommending significant legislative change to remedy the harmful wrongs arising from that scheme.

To this date, the Labor Government has failed to enact these recommendations, and the community is still waiting for change to ensure that this dark chapter of Australia's social services history is not repeated.

This Government rightly came into power pointing out the harm that this scheme had done. But while some minor reform has been enacted, the job is far from finished, with key recommendations left to gather dust.

This Bill seeks to change that.

The impact of Robodebt is still being felt. The damage that the scheme enacted upon some of Australia's most vulnerable people was catastrophic, not just financially, and should be neither forgiven nor forgotten.

This Government has committed that Robodebt should never happen again—something the Prime Minister has said himself—but this appears to be merely a statement with no action to back it up. We have waited long enough for action to be taken to ensure that this can never happen again, and it is time for Labor to finally commit to dismantling the structures that enabled Robodebt, and reforming our social security system to ensure that people are treated with respect and dignity.

The stakes are high. This scheme was at least partially responsible for the tragic suicides of several income support recipients. The severity of that cannot be overstated. Why would Labor not want to do everything in their power to bring about the end of the structures and systems that enabled such a tragic outcome?

I want to pay tribute to the advocates, activists, parents, families, lawyers and community members who fought so hard to bring the scheme to an end. Their resilience, strength, courage and moral clarity is a light on the hill that we should all aspire to.

This Bill seeks to address some of the underlying problems identified by the Royal Commission but unacted upon by Labor.

This Bill has been drafted with my colleague the Member for Clark, Andrew Wilkie MP, in consultation with Economic Justice Australia, the peak for community legal centres providing specialist social security legal services. I wish to thank both EJA and the Member for Clark for the work and their steadfast representation of those people affected by Robodebt.

This Bill acts on several key recommendations from the Robodebt Royal Commission that have so far not been acted upon.

It implements Recommendation 18.2 of the Royal Commission that a six-year limit be reinstated on social security debt recovery. This brings social security debts back into line with other debts since the provision was removed in 2016.

Of immediate concern is the more than 100,000 income support recipients who await a decision from Labor on whether the Government will cancel more than $1 billion in unfair historical welfare debts that are currently being assessed for collection by the Department of Social Services.

Those debts, which pre-date 7 December 2020, were levied using the Department's ruthless and dubious methods of 'income apportionment', which bears similarities to Robodebt. A recent Federal Court decision allows the Government to reassess these debts using alternate methods, putting them back on the table.

The average age of the 'income apportionment' debts affected by this decision is 19 years old. The Department currently holds income support debts dating back to 1979. To pursue these debts would effectively contravene the 6 year limit on debt recovery recommended by the Royal Commission, and previously agreed to by Labor. I have urged the Minister for Social Services to immediately waive those debts and put the Robodebt era behind them.

By reinstating the six year limit, we would ensure that people cannot be unfairly targeted for historical debts.

A core component of this Bill relates to establishing a duty of care for the Department of Social Services that prioritises the needs of social security recipients while administering the law. It does so by inserting within social security law improved principles and duties for the Secretary in administering social security law.

This is a simple yet important change, and one that goes to the heart of how our social security system interacts with the people it should be serving.

It places a positive obligation on the Government to avoid language and conduct which causes unnecessary stigma and shame for recipients of government support. In an era where we still see headlines in the media blaming income support recipients for every ill in this country, headlines that are gleefully repeated by some politicians, this is a bare minimum for reversing the generational stigma.

The Government must ensure sensitive, easy and efficient engagement with Services Australia across all modes of contacts, whether in person, calling up Centrelink, or visiting their website.

The sight of a MyGov notification still sends shivers down many people's spines, and the thought of spending hours on the phone to Centrelink is something many people are all too familiar with. Contact and service should be simple, easy, respectful and efficient.

There is also a provision for clear terms and plain language, which will lower the barrier for people dealing with and understanding what is needed from them.

Perhaps most importantly, this Bill adds a duty to act with sensitivity to financial and other stressors, and where possible to avoid actions which exacerbate these stressors. This should be at the very heart of a social security system.

These duties are simple, and I would hope the Government would support them.

Of real concern is the trend of automation throughout the public service, driven by a desire to harness some benefit from a proliferation of accessible artificial intelligence tools. While automation itself should not be taboo, and in many cases makes the day to day business of government more efficient in service of people, we should also be very wary given the findings of the Robodebt Royal Commission.

Just recently, on the same day that the Commonwealth Ombudsman released his report that criticised automated cancellations of social security payments and IT issues in the employment services sector, the Government was talking to the media about the revolutionary potential of AI.

This Bill addresses the automated decision making that led to Robodebt.

It mandates that where decisions are automated, notice must be given to recipients to explain that automation has been used, and provide clear options for appeal. It also mandates review of certain consequential decisions by a real person, and restricts the kinds of decisions which can be made or automated without human oversight.

The Bill also seeks to increase the period during which a person can claim a Crisis Payment to 14 days, and modify special circumstance debt waiver provisions to increase access to waivers in circumstances of family and domestic violence, including coercive control and financial abuse.

This is an incredibly important feature given the nature of coercive control, and the horrid growth in technology-facilitated abuse and stalking.

While this Bill seeks to address the legacy of Robodebt, what is clear is that our broader social services system is not currently one that is designed to meaningfully help the most vulnerable in our society.

I speak with income support recipients all the time who reach out to my office for assistance. I have personally been contacted by constituents on JobSeeker who can't afford to eat, and are sending their kids to school hungry.

There is a saying in systems theory: "The purpose of a system is what it does." As a society, and as Members of Parliament, we are prone to diagnosing systemic issues in the way laws work, and stating that the system isn't working.

If one thing is clear to me after working with income support recipients, and seeing how our Government treats them, it is that the system is working as it was designed to do so.

Legislation has consequences. Systems have consequences. It matters how we choose to set up and run the systems that offer social security. Whether it is the punishingly inadequate rate of payments, or the Kafkaesque mutual obligations system, it is clear that our work to reform social services must not stop here.

But in putting forward this Bill, we extend an opportunity to Labor, and to all people in this Parliament, to take meaningful steps to improve this system and to ensure that Robodebt is never repeated.

I commend this Bill to the chamber.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.