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

I rise today to speak to the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 1) Bill 2026. The Greens will support the measures in this bill that align current practice with legislation, but let me be direct about what this bill represents. It's a government finally and belatedly legislating to make lawful what has for years been conducted without legal basis. That is not a routine technical fix. That is an admission of systemic unlawfulness. The question this chamber must ask is: how did we get here, and what does it tell us about the broader state of our social security system?

This bill does not exist in isolation. It is the latest entry in a long and troubling record of noncompliance with social security law, a pattern in which the major parties have, time after time, failed to administer the social security system lawfully. The Commonwealth Ombudsman could not have been more pointed in naming their most recent report Following the law is not optional. That title is not a suggestion. It is a rebuke, and it is a rebuke that has been earned.

The scale of known concerns is staggering. There are 144 identified issues of concern already on the record, and yet schedule 3 of this very bill addresses a further issue that does not even appear on that list. In this area of law, it feels as though every month brings a new revelation. The specific practices addressed in this bill are not newly discovered. Services Australia was first aware of them six years ago. Labor has chosen to act only now after the Ombudsman's report made continued inaction untenable. Let me be precise about what a six-year delay in addressing known unlawful practice means. It means that for six years the government administered parts of the social security system without a lawful basis. Practices without a legislative basis are not grey areas. They are unlawful, and the decision not to act on them in a timely way was a choice.

Here is what makes this pattern so corrosive. The standard applied to the government's own conduct is entirely different to the standard applied to the people receiving payments. Under the targeted compliance framework, recipients face punitive and swift consequences for any perceived noncompliance—payment suspensions, financial instability and disruption to housing and food security. Hundreds of thousands of people face payment suspensions every single year, and these are not trivial consequences. For people on JobSeeker or youth allowance, a suspension can mean rent not paid, meals skipped and debts compounded. And who oversees this system? A privatised network of job service providers, many of which are, it should be noted, donors to the Labor Party.

This means that a system with almost no meaningful accountability, transparency or oversight is delivering life-altering consequences to some of the most financially vulnerable Australians while the government presiding over it cannot even assure this chamber that the system is entirely lawful. Last year, Labor was forced to pause payment cancellations after it was found that thousands had been cancelled unlawfully. The government cannot assure us of the lawfulness of the rest of the system, and yet it continues to function unchecked.

Beyond the question of lawfulness sits an even more fundamental problem. The mutual obligation system is built on a false premise. It treats unemployment as a personal failing, a result of insufficient effort, rather than a structural reality. Right now, we have the Reserve Bank raising interest rates because employment and inflation are too high. The ombudsman report addressed this directly and without equivocation. The evidence cited in that report found that the majority of the 652,300 current jobseekers are in fact unlikely to find ongoing employment, no matter how hard they try, given that current employment in Australia is so close to the natural level with respect to the inflation rate. The ombudsman observed that stigmatising unsuccessful jobseekers as people reluctant to accept employment may contribute to limited oversight of providers and a narrow administration of the program, despite the evidence. This is a punishing, costly and largely pointless system. It punishes people for an economic reality they did not create and cannot individually solve.

The Greens will be moving several amendments to this bill. Firstly, we will be moving a second reading amendment. I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate calls on the Government to introduce legislation to:

(a) increase the rate of social security payments above the poverty line, ensuring no one is forced to live in poverty; and

(b) abolish the parental income test for Youth Allowance for those not living at home; and

(c) abolish the partner income test for all social security payments, ensuring that a partner's income will no longer be required to be considered for a social security payment for an individual".

This amendment seeks to call on the government to abolish the parental income test for youth allowance, a test that punishes young people for their parents' income and treats them as dependents long into adulthood. The second reading amendment also calls on the government to abolish the partner income test for all social security payments. Every person in this country deserves to be treated as an individual, with financial autonomy and independence, not as an appendage to their partner's income. And there is ample evidence that continuing to insist on testing people's income support against their partner's income is a not insignificant factor in preventing women from escaping situations of family and domestic violence.

We will also be moving some Committee of the Whole amendments, and they will relate to reinstating the six-year limit on debt recovery, something that is an outstanding recommendation of the robodebt royal commission. We will also be seeking to remove the arbitrary limit on the amount a person can request as an urgent payment. People need those urgent payments for things like bonds when they get evicted because their rental is being sold, or they need those payments to get a new fridge when their fridge breaks down. None of those things cost $200, and forcing people to go back day after day after day asking for $200 is not only inefficient it is punitive to those people who need that urgent money when they are subsisting on an income support payment that is below poverty levels.

Our current rates of income support, it must be noted, are not merely low. They are among the lowest in the entire OECD. There are virtually zero rental properties affordable to anyone on jobseeker or youth allowance, and Labor's own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has told the government for consecutive years that rates must increase substantially and not claim indexation as a rise. The government has not acted on this to the extent that it must.

The global economic uncertainty created by the Trump administration's war of aggression will have real consequences for the Australian economy. An economic disruption of this kind always hits those on income support hardest and first. Raising the rate of payments is not just a matter of compassion; it is a matter of economic resilience. That is why I have written to the minister this week calling on Labor to pause mutual obligations and raise income support payments. Even the coalition took some of these steps during the pandemic. That was a precedent, and there is no excuse at this time of rising economic inequality.

Our social security system should be administered lawfully. That should not be a radical expectation; it is the minimum. And yet issue upon issue continues to be identified year after year, suggesting that lawfulness is treated as aspirational rather than foundational. Our social security system should support people, not punish them. We have a political and media culture that too often stigmatises and shames those who rely on income support, as though poverty is a personal failure rather than a policy outcome. The people receiving these payments are not asking for much; they're asking for a system that operates lawfully, does not keep them in poverty and treats them as individuals with autonomy and dignity. That is not a high bar. It is the bar that any decent society should clear without question. The Greens will continue to fight until that bar is cleared and until every person in this country who needs support receives it lawfully, adequately and with their dignity intact.