Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

My neighbour the member for Rankin is probably the only person on the other side of the chamber who does take an active interest in OECD comparisons. Quite commonly they are quite unflattering for the opposition in their time in government, so I appreciate that he took the time to even acknowledge them today. Unfortunately for the argument that omitted so many OECD comparisons that were convenient to the member for Rankin, in the very situation he described in great detail throughout most of his contribution, pertaining to single parents who have children turning six and turning eight and being required to attempt to return to the workforce where possible, the simple fact is that throughout most of Europe they are compelled to do so. In fact, there is barely another economy in the OECD that has a system as generous as Australia’s. For that reason I think Australia is completely vindicated in this last 10 years of working to address the very skills shortage we have heard articulated so commonly on the other side by moving towards an active workplace participation model.

It is worthy to just cast our minds back through the range of improvements that have been made over 10 years, which were utterly required as Australia attempted to become a nation that could keep up with its international competitors in what is a very competitive race to preserve quality of lifestyle and to preserve a GDP that makes us competitive internationally, that ensures that our exports are strong and that our population are adequately trained and have an opportunity to enjoy their own endowments and participate in this strong economy that only yesterday was acknowledged by the OECD to be the second most competitive and the second best performing of the economies with a population over 20 million.

Before going into a response to the many speeches we have heard from the other side, it is important to acknowledge that the changes being proposed in the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006 today are in fact very good ones. They pertain to partnered parents who are receiving payments. They extend the right to access a pharmaceutical allowance and, for those who have a partial work capacity, the right to access Newstart and youth allowance and, most importantly, where relevant, the right to access the pension concession card. That is an important change. For single carer parents who do lose a child, this also allows them to access for 14 weeks Newstart or the youth allowance. These are commonsense amendments, and I know there is probably universal support for those changes on both sides of the chamber.

I want to go back to 1998, because the debate that is heard today may seem novel to new members like me. In fact these debates have been held by our predecessors since 1998, when the first proposal was made to end the Commonwealth Employment Service and move to a new and revitalised model. I do not need to read out the quotes that were spoken in parliament at that time, when the end was forecast by the opposition. The belief was that with the end of the CES would come burgeoning unemployment and a collapse in the Australian economy. The same thing was predicted again in 2002 when, following the McClure report, Participation support for a more equitable society, we responded and developed Australians Working Together.

We heard that same echo as things continued to improve on virtually every economic marker, with the active participation model in July 2003, which was that very revolutionary model to individually link up those who were receiving support and looking for work with a job provider. I will just make the remark on the side that, as long as unemployment was over 10 per cent of Australia’s population, how could you ever hope to have a personalised approach to engaging people and helping them back to the workforce?

Obviously, we know that there is no better way of ensuring someone’s wellbeing than providing them with a job. It is a very simple premise. We know that simply providing income support without any sense of reciprocity does not work. This goes right back to someone who I am quite sure is quoted often by the other side of the chamber: Beveridge, the English father of welfare economics, who noted even then that passive welfare support without any sense of responsibility or obligation is eventually eroded by its own middle class, who cease to have faith in a pension system if there is no reciprocity but simply passive income provision. That is a fairly simple model. That observation was made over a century ago, but it is still just as accurate today.

Of course, what has changed in the last five or 10 years is not so much the proportion of people in part-time employment. Australia has been increasing its part-time proportion of employment. It still falls behind one or two European nations, but in the end what we have is a more flexible workforce, an easier workforce to access. I want to give a personal anecdote, because there are certainly plenty of them articulated here. My view, as a person who grew up with a mother who worked part time but did not want to—and there were plenty of mothers out there who could not work part time but wanted to—is that, if there has been one change in the last 10 years, it is that people are no longer forced back to the workforce because they cannot afford horrendous interest rates. There are no longer people sitting outside the economic engine of this country because there are no options to engage in further training and there are no options in the form of jobs in the classified sections of the back end of our cities’ newspapers. The number of jobs being reported each month is extraordinarily high, and I do not need to repeat that unemployment sits at record low levels.

We need to remember that that is a significant change to just 10 years ago, when so many people may well have been working, with just as many part time, but when so many of them found themselves not maximising the very endowments that they had. They did not have the opportunities to study, train or be at home because the very people who wanted to be at home with their children could not afford to and the very people who found themselves working part time could not afford to leave. But what we have now is a completely different situation, with a workforce which is far easier to engage. You only have to walk through a shopping centre and talk to small business proprietors who cannot find people to employ. We have a completely different situation. As has been expressed here before, far better it is to have a shortage of skills than a surplus of labour and people completely disengaged from our own economy.

In 2002 the focus was on increased self-reliance, and that means giving people searching for a job an opportunity for a one-to-one relationship with a Job Network provider. For parenting payment recipients, those obligations really are very minor. I know that the case was made—and it is an almost preposterous proposition—that every single parent who is on a payment, or at least a large proportion of them, are abused. I do not for a moment wish to dismiss anyone who has ever been in that situation, but to make a ridiculous claim, as the educated member for Rankin did previously, that we need to take our hands off single parents because they are in some way subject to enormous levels of personal and family abuse is just ridiculous. It then suggests that we have to have Centrelink making decisions every day on whether to engage people back into the workforce and whether violence within the home becomes some reason for opting out of the economy.

That is a preposterous claim, as is that it is a heartless proposition to have a form of mutual obligation. If there is one thing we have learnt from the last 10 years, it is the electorate’s willingness to take on the principles of Work for the Dole. Just 10 years ago one would not have dared stand up in a coffee shop and propose Work for the Dole, and now the notion of reciprocity is so accepted in the community. It has been fought tooth and nail from this side of the chamber—and even I, having not been here, acknowledge that that has been the case.

For every change that is made to the workforce and to workforce policy, I acknowledge there will be a battle with the other side of the chamber. And, while I am sure that in your own hearts you believe you are right and that you are often confronted with individuals who come to you with cases of hardship, I put to you that Centrelink does an extraordinary job of dealing with those very exceptions and, where it can within the rules, being as responsive as it can to a community that often has many and varying needs.

One thing you do not hear too much from members of the opposition is that pensions are too low. They themselves have an appalling record of not linking pensions to MTAWE, and there was enormous hardship until that was done by this government. But the proposal that people are then working for $2.60 an hour, as we heard from the member for Rankin, who has a PhD in economics, simply misses the point that this is a subtraction of a currently very strong welfare payment from average wages. That is where he gets the figure of $2.60 per hour. Prefaced upon that figure, of course, is his belief that every single person is entitled to a pension and that, if you go back to work, there has to be $200 a week to make it worth while for you. Once again, that is a preposterous way to treat the welfare system.

I am proud of the very strong welfare platform that this country can boast. If it is only an extra $200 a week one might earn to go back to work, that is a decision that every individual is free to make. But to say the marginal tax rates are unfair—and, sure, they are higher than they are in a number of other economies—only reflects that other countries have a lower pension system and that other countries may choose to taper out at a different rate. That is where a marginal tax rate is calculated from. A high marginal tax rate for those returning to the workforce is simply a product of a very high welfare payment and a tapering that does not extend all the way up to people earning $50,000 per annum. Were we to do that, I am sure we would be criticised by the other side for having middle-class welfare.

The Treasurer made the decision to increase family tax benefits to those earning $40,000 a year. That was an important decision—not criticised by the other side—which addressed those marginal tax rates, making it easier for people to return to the workforce. It is also important to note that the changes to participation requirements are not as onerous as has been proposed by speakers from the other side. There is already a range of automatic exemptions available for some parents and applied case by case. I think we too easily tend to criticise Centrelink in their efforts to apply those case-by-case exemptions, but I know personally from having observed the work of the Centrelink offices in Cleveland and Capalaba that they are doing that and doing it every day.

For very long term job seekers a system called Wage Assist is valuable. There are full-time work for the dole activities for the very long term unemployed, particularly those who have made a genuine attempt to look for work—and that is what is asked for. It is never noted by the other side that there is not an obligation to go back and work for a certain hourly rate; an option as part of the obligation is to participate in voluntary engagement. There is always the option to do voluntary work as well, and it should be noted that that does not affect payments. In addition, people with disabilities will have access not just to vocational rehabilitation through Job Network, which we well know, but to the disability open employment services as well.

The supporting employer strategy promotes involvement by employers in these partnerships, which is important. Principal carer parents do not have to accept work if there is no appropriate child care or supervision available in the hours during which the parent is working. These sorts of details are often glossed over, papered over, by the opposition when they attempt to portray an effort to do what is only responsible for a government—to return our participation rates to somewhere near OECD and developed economy averages. They attempt to paper over these very important exemptions, including those for single parents of large families, and portray them as being unnecessarily heartless.

When we make these comparisons, it is worth noting that the number of jobless families in this country is the third highest in the OECD. We also have the lowest employment rate of people receiving disability support benefits of the major OECD economies, which means that once a person is on a disability payment in this country they stay on it for an average of 10 years, and the number of people who earn additional money on top of their disability payment is around 10 per cent. For seniors who are receiving a seniors payment, that figure is around 38 per cent. We know by comparison that these figures are extraordinarily low. I think it is a responsible government that engages that proportion and asks, ‘Why is there not an incentive for this proportion of our population to return to work?’

We just need to look at the basic numerator that we are talking about here: there are 2.6 million Australians receiving these payments out of 13.7 million people of working age. That is 20 per cent. In very few countries in the OECD is it more than 10 per cent. It does not take a great deal of maths to ask, ‘Why are there 20 per cent of disability payment recipients in Australia and around 10 per cent or fewer in other OECD economies?’ I am not for a moment saying that one person is or is not disabled, but there needs to be a very good case made by the other side of this chamber for why 3.7 million Australians are receiving disability payments when we are not seeing that reflected overseas. I think a responsible government would look closely at those figures.

Of course, we know that, when you are without a job and are receiving income support in isolation, that is correlated with—not a direct cause of but correlated with—lower wellbeing, and with that comes all of the socioeconomic ailments that we are aware of, including engagement with schools and outcomes for children. These are the reasons why we are working very hard to see families re-engage with the economy. That is the underlying drive—that is why these three small but worthy amendments are being proposed today and why I support in here and in Bowman the changes being made both today and through an ongoing process to give every Australian, regardless of their background, an opportunity to engage with the economy. It is all starting with local Centrelink offices and it is a campaign that I support strongly.

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