David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise first of all to acknowledge the work of my colleague Senator Allman-Payne and to endorse the words and the contribution that she's made to the chamber. But I also rise to oppose schedule 5 of the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2025, which gives the power to cancel welfare payments for people with outstanding arrest warrants—not people who've been found guilty but simply with outstanding arrest warrants. There's a name for that. It's called punishment without trial, and we've been here before.

The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was damning. Commissioner Holmes found that robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, that made many people feel like criminals. In essence, people were traumatised on the off chance they might owe money. Now, in a different way, this government is repeating those mistakes. It's a different mechanism but the same callous disregard for fairness and the same assumption that welfare recipients are criminals until proven otherwise. These amendments were added after committee scrutiny finished, after the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee reported and after the Joint Committee on Human Rights examined the bill—after scrutiny of bills, you might say.

This government has deliberately avoided parliamentary oversight for these amendments, and is it any wonder? The coalition tried this in 2018, and they couldn't get it through because at the time Labor thought it was unprincipled and wrong. But of course now Labor's in government they've basically become the coalition, haven't they? In 2018 states and territories opposed it, and this government said in the 2022 budget that they would not proceed with it. So what's changed? What on earth is wrong with the Australian Labor Party? Since 2014 there have been so-called security notice provisions that allow the minister to cancel payments for people who've had visas or passports cancelled on security grounds, essentially terrorism related cases involving ASIO. Those provisions were controversial enough at the time, but this bill massively expands that power. Now the minister can cancel payments for anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant for serious offences. We're moving from a narrow national security power to a broad criminal law enforcement power that removes power from often-essential support for themselves and their families. This could cover potentially thousands of people with outstanding warrants.