Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Once again, we have the Welfare to Work initiatives that were introduced by this government back before us with the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. They are not here to be improved and certainly not because there is a flaw in the way that they were announced in the budget that is therefore being addressed; they are here simply because of the government’s rush to get the original piece of legislation through, because of their shoddy draftsmanship and because they are now seeking to correct those problems. That is the basis of this bill before us today.

I have to make it clear from the outset that Labor will not be opposing the measures contained in the bill, not because we support the initiatives but because to oppose them would mean that those who are affected by this bill would be further marginalised by the government’s incompetence. Let me make it clear and take the opportunity to state the position of this side of the House: Labor believes that if people can work they should work. There is absolutely no debate about that. However, unlike the government, Labor also believes that reducing the support to people who are not working will not equip them for a job. It is simply going to make them poorer. That is what it is designed to do.

Changing the nature of the welfare payments so that some people receive less will not address the issues at the heart of why these people are not working in the first place. A lower payment does not of itself improve the employment prospects of the unemployed—or the disabled, for that matter. A lower payment does not equip people with a range of skills, abilities and experiences that an employer seeks when they are looking to put a person on in their particular workplace. Placing people on a lower welfare payment, even in a time of historical low unemployment, does not make them any more employable. It does not give them any more opportunity to get a job. As I said, it simply makes them poorer. To tackle unemployment, to tackle issues of labour market disadvantage and to improve the employment prospects of the unemployed you need to address issues at the core of why people find it difficult to find employment.

Members opposite, as they have in the past, will obviously paint the Labor Party as defending dole bludgers and defending welfare recipients, and this is because the government’s Welfare to Work measures simply do nothing. Our opposition is because they do nothing to improve employment prospects of people who find themselves unemployed and unable to find work. It is not a matter of simply defending welfare recipients; it is a matter of supporting them in their desire to find real and meaningful work.

Labor understands that, quite frankly, people do find it difficult to find reasonable and gainful employment. I know that is true in my own electorate of Werriwa. Unfortunately my electorate has a high rate of youth unemployment. That does not mean we need to take a stick to the kids who cannot find employment; it challenges us to bring in policies to help equip those young people with the necessary skills that are being sought by employers. That is what real welfare to work reform should be about, and that would be the preferred option. If we were serious about Welfare to Work, we would certainly be designing legislation to assist, to support and to encourage the acquisition of skills and to help people become more competitive as they compete for places in the labour market.

Everybody benefits from being part of the economic mainstream, being part of the labour force. It is certainly infinitely better for someone to be gainfully employed, not simply because they are out of the unemployment statistics and not simply because they are no longer a burden to the welfare system. It is better for them for a range of different reasons: they are personally more satisfied and able to see that they can look after their own families, make a contribution to the economy and also participate in the economic mainstream activity that most of us tend to take for granted.

In my electorate thousands of people are dependent on the disability support pension, Newstart allowance and parenting payment single. I recognise the social importance of economic participation and I am a keen supporter of improving their participation in the workforce. But, as I said, it is not a matter of taking a stick to people; it is a matter of applying the proper infrastructure to facilitate the acquisition of skills that will allow people to either rejoin or, in many instances, join the workforce.

However, the government’s Welfare to Work measures that are being cleaned up by this bill will not necessarily lead to an increase in mainstream economic participation. The government has previously conceded that more than 200,000 people will be worse off financially under the Welfare to Work changes. The government has also admitted that it expects only 109,000 people to gain employment. Assuming that those who secure employment receive wages above their level of benefit, the net result will be that 91,000 people will be worse off because of these changes.

This government, with some twisted version of logic, intends to make almost 100,000 people worse off than they were before without assisting them in any way. This has to be the most offensive thing about these changes. While the amendments before us today are welcome insofar as they clean up anomalies in the government’s original, hastily drafted Welfare to Work legislation, it is nevertheless a fact that around 100,000 people will be worse off due to that legislation. They are going to be worse off financially and worse off generally because they will not receive the support they need to seek and secure employment. They will receive less money, no training and no support services and yet they will be expected to find work.

This government has, in effect, thrown these people on the economic scrap heap to survive as best they can. That is not a real form of motivation, particularly when it is often beyond the immediate capacity of people in that situation to do anything to change their position—particularly people on the disability support pension, and let us not forget about those receiving parenting payments.

As I mentioned earlier, when it comes to moving people from welfare to work, it is not about simply replacing their welfare payment with a job, because it just does not happen as easily as that. This is a difficult time for people; it is a time when people need to be supported and encouraged into work where possible. These measures should be about replacing a handout with a hand up, and that is simply not occurring. There is no support whatsoever contained in the government’s measures.

It is absolutely correct to target welfare dependency and to seek ways to move people off welfare and into work. Labor has advocated, and will continue to advocate, for real welfare reform that achieves that objective. Labor will continue to argue that policies that seek to facilitate the transfer from welfare payments to wages can be achieved only through real welfare reform and should be pursued only if the reforms tackle the reasons why people cannot find work and deliver practical solutions to accommodate this transition. But this is not what the government is about. This government is not about these practical solutions, and that was my objection to the original legislation. The government is about handouts, but not, unfortunately, to those who need them the most.

On budget night we saw just how addicted this tax-and-spend government is to delivering handouts as it goes on its big spend. It spent up big on tax cuts, it spent up big on superannuation and it claimed to be making changes to child care. One thing that was conspicuous by its absence was spending on education. The Treasurer did not even mention a word about that in his budget speech. In fact, Tuesday night’s budget actually reduced the overall percentage of federal funds spent on vocational education and training.

The people who will be impacted most by the measures contained in the bill before us are those who need education and training opportunities the most. Australia is experiencing a skills crisis—there is no doubt. In fact, the government is so sure of this that it has increased skilled migration intake and has come up with the new training visa for those coming from overseas to work in Australia. So, on the one hand, the government has acknowledged that there is a skills crisis where businesses are screaming out for skilled employees while, on the other hand, it is doing nothing to increase the pool of those skilled employees available to businesses throughout this country. The government is looking around and saying that there are some people out there on welfare who should probably be in the workforce, but it does not act to support them or to help them acquire the skills that employers are presently looking for.

Real welfare reform needs to give people a chance to get the skills that an employer is looking for. Despite this reasonably logical view as to how best to assist people’s transition from welfare to work, the government seems to be obsessed with the view that people on welfare should be punished because they are not working. For some reason the government has decided that a much better approach to get people to seek employment is to reduce their payments and at the same time reduce their bargaining power through the government’s extreme industrial relations laws. The people we are talking about who are subject to this legislation are the most vulnerable in our society. There is no question that these people do not have a bargaining position, yet we are using a threat to reduce their welfare payment as their motivation for finding employment. And, as they go to find employment, under the new Work Choices law they really find out the level of their bargaining position.

I take a small liberty in connecting the industrial relations laws with the Welfare to Work provisions, but I would contend that these laws must be looked at simultaneously to see how they impact on people on welfare. They need to be considered together because we are going to see in the not-too-distant future people who have been shifted from one welfare payment to a lower one out there looking for a job—desperate to find work because they are struggling on a lower welfare payment. At the same time an employer out there knows that they are desperate for a job. An employer out there knows that they have no bargaining position. An employer out there knows that these are the ultimate pricetakers in our society. So, from the very start, you have an even greater imbalance in the bargaining power of the parties. The employer by far and away has the great advantage, when we look at people at this end of the scale—particularly a person who has a disability, a single mother trying to re-enter the workforce or a person on Newstart.

Added to the fact that a number of people seeking employment are likely to be, as I said, disabled or lacking skills and experience, you will find that the government has created a situation where a whole group of people with a limited range of employment options find themselves having to negotiate employment agreements with an employer who is in a massively superior bargaining position. That is not reform. That is certainly not what you would expect in a prosperous country such as Australia. Creating an environment in which employers know that the prospective employee in front of them is faced with the situation of accepting the job, no matter what the terms and conditions are, or losing their benefits hardly creates a reasonable environment to encourage participation. Everyone would know that it is preposterous to seriously believe that this will result in improvements for existing welfare recipients moving to work. Breaking down barriers to participation should be about addressing the starting point to welfare reform.

Earlier today I heard the Treasurer in an interview mention the importance of investment in the promotion of productivity growth and, as a consequence, economic growth. Although that was said in the context of investment in capital, the investment in the skills and education of those in the labour market is also important in the promotion of productivity growth and economic growth. That is why it is a little disappointing that, to encourage people to move from welfare to work, the government has passed up the opportunity to use a carrot and stick approach and has decided to just use the stick.

Most reasonable people would consider that it is appropriate for the unemployed to be assisted with training to improve their skills and employment prospects. Most people would also consider it appropriate to address the root causes of long-term unemployment as a sustainable way of facilitating a transition from welfare into work and increasing participation levels in work. Sadly, it seems that the government is not filled with such an ambition. The impacts of short-sighted and hastily introduced Welfare to Work provisions that have resulted in this bill before us today are not confined to the domain of the disabled and the low skilled. The provisions also impact on single parents—and in the main, as you would appreciate, Mr Deputy Speaker, that really refers to single mothers.

Contrast with the position of this government, which, under family tax benefit B, goes out of its way to encourage mothers to stay at home, the situation in the bill before us which seeks to encourage people off welfare. Mothers returning to work do need to have special support. Great fanfare greeted the child-care measures the government announced in the budget. Those measures may actually assist single mothers re-entering the workforce if more child-care places were created. (Time expired)

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