Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. This bill makes largely technical amendments to the Social Security Act 1991 and the Social Security (Administration) Act 1991 which are necessary as a result of the Employment and Workplace Relations Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Act 2005. These amendments include terminology changes and changes to facilitate more consistent treatment of similar groups of income support recipients. The need for these amendments arises from the Howard government’s incompetent and extreme welfare changes which, in my view, were rammed through the parliament last year. If the government had not rushed this legislation through last year as they did and had they thought more carefully about these reforms and the content of these bills, this particular bill would not be necessary. But here we go again, cleaning up the mess that comes out of an arrogant approach by the government in their rush to abuse their control in the Senate.

Labor opposes the government’s welfare changes but will not oppose this bill, as that would entrench inconsistencies in the application of the new regime. This evening I would like to focus on the reasons why Labor opposes the government’s welfare changes. This is an issue that I am extremely passionate about and have spoken about many times. Labor believes that people who can work should work and that those who are unable to work should be cared for. There is no doubt that everyone benefits more when more people participate in the social and economic mainstream that most of us can enjoy. Labor supports welfare reform that goes far beyond moving people from one welfare queue to the dole queue. Instead of moving people from welfare to work, all the Howard government is doing is dumping people from one welfare payment to a lower welfare payment. Instead of reducing the number of people who depend on welfare, the government is just dumping people from one Centrelink database to another. This is why Labor believes that the Howard government’s changes to welfare are extreme, incompetent and grossly unfair. The changes are extreme because they cut the household budget for families who can least afford it, for no good reason. The changes are incompetent because they do not help people find jobs. They make work less financially worth while because the government now takes back more of every dollar these people earn than ever before.

This evening I would like to focus on the impact the Howard government’s reforms will have on people with a disability. What the Welfare to Work reforms mean for people with a disability is that people who apply for income support after 1 July 2006 who are assessed by a new comprehensive work capacity assessment as being able to work 15 to 29 hours per week will have to seek 15 hours or more of part-time work a week and will be placed on the Newstart allowance or youth allowance. These reforms will not help people with a disability or single parents to get a job. The government itself has admitted that over 200,000 Australians will be financially worse off under these changes, but only 109,000 in their estimation will actually gain work—and that remains to be seen.

The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, or NATSEM, published a report in November 2005 entitled Options for reducing the adverse impact of the proposed Welfare-to-Work reforms upon people with disabilities and sole parents. From the title alone, it is obvious that these reforms are expected to have an adverse impact. I would like to quote from the NATSEM report, which outlines the impact on people with a disability. The report says:

The Newstart Allowance provides a much lower payment rate than PPS and DSP, has a much harsher income test, and is associated with much less generous income tax concessions. As a result many sole parents with school age children and many people with disabilities will receive much lower incomes than under the current rules. Our previous reports suggested that sole parents will be up to around $100 a week worse off and people with disabilities up to around $120 a week worse off under the proposed changes relative to the current system. In addition, most of those affected will face much higher effective marginal tax rates under the proposed new system than under the current system.

The NATSEM report then goes on to state that these reforms will not help people with disabilities to find work. It says:

At this stage it appears likely that a substantial number of affected people with disabilities will be placed on Newstart Allowance but not actually be placed in jobs, due to a lack of suitable work opportunities.

I would argue, as do many organisations representing people with a disability, that people with disabilities will not be placed in jobs for another reason—that is, the Howard government has done nothing to promote or create job opportunities for those people with a disability. The Howard government’s hypocrisy in relation to employing people with a disability is astounding. Its behaviour towards people with a disability is completely unethical. It takes people off the disability support pension and throws them onto the dole. Then it does absolutely nothing, in my view, to help them get work.

The Howard government talks about people with bad backs and malingerers. It has done that for years, in the lead-up to this reform. How many times did we see front-page articles in the press where government spokespeople were quoted as talking about people with bad backs and malingerers receiving the DSP? I have to say that the Treasurer was one of the leading advocates of that particular line. Then the government goes silent and does nothing to help people with real disabilities and chronic illness to gain employment. I have heard so many government members in this debate continue to talk about bad backs. It is pretty pathetic and a pretty appalling method of debating if you are really that confident about the reasons you are doing certain things in legislation.

If the government’s reforms are so good and they are going to get people with disabilities into the workforce, how do they justify grandfathering those very provisions? It is an interesting argument. Wouldn’t that mean that people with disabilities will miss the opportunities to get work that the government are now boasting is going to be available? The answer is no, because the reforms will not help anyone get work. It really mystifies me that, after maligning all of these people and accusing them of malingering and of unfairly living off the government purse for virtually the whole time they have been in government up until these reforms come in, when they talk about these reforms they say, ‘Yes, but we are not going to touch the 780,000 people that we’ve been abusing for the last seven or eight years; we are going to leave them alone.’ I am glad they have in one sense, but why have they? I can tell you why. It is because the political distastefulness of having those people go through the system that is now going to be imposed on new recipients would be too hard politically for them to swallow. That is why. They are going to aim their new regime at new recipients. We need to find the ones who miss out. We need to understand how their lives are being affected by these new rules that are being applied to people who will be genuinely attempting to get support through the DSP in this country in the future.

Let us look at one young woman in my electorate whom I know very well through my constituency. Her name is Kylie—she does not mind me using her first name. She has down syndrome. She is extremely keen to work. In fact, after a great deal of effort over many years by her and her family—but by Kylie in particular—she has really developed some skills. She currently works eight hours a week in a Public Service department here in Canberra and desperately wants to work more hours, but she cannot get them. The public and private sectors have no real incentives to assist people like Kylie and they have no-one to lead the way. The Public Service itself at a Commonwealth level has reduced its proportion of employees with a disability. The Public Service is not showing the way as it should. This government has reduced the proportion of people with a disability it employs from 5.6 per cent down to 3.8 per cent. We heard in the budget that there are going to be 7,000 new public servants. A lot of those people will be in my electorate, there is no doubt about that; there will be new public servants in other parts of the country as well. I want to know how many of those 7,000 new Public Service jobs that are coming on stream are going to be taken up by people with a disability. It is a very fair question, but I have not heard an answer to it. I challenge the government to tell us what its intent is. If it is going to move all these people off welfare, offer all these wonderful incentives and change the world, tell me how many of those 7,000 new Public Service jobs are going to be taken up by people with a disability. I wait with bated breath to hear the answer from the government.

I do not know how the Prime Minister can tell people with a disability to get a job and yet not help them get a job and not put in place policies that we know would work to ensure that people with disabilities are employed at least in the Commonwealth Public Service. It is no secret to anybody who takes the time to think about this and talk to people that people with disabilities would like to work. They would give anything to have a life other than the one they have. They would love to have another chance. They would enjoy participating in the community like the great majority of us have the wonderful opportunity to do. It is not rocket science. The overwhelming majority of them would like another chance and another life in which they could get out and participate more fully than they are able to do.

We on this side of politics have a completely different approach to people with a disability. We believe that, if people with a disability cannot work, they should be taken care of. If they are able to work and choose to work, we encourage them to do so. We give them every support we possibly can. We train them. We do not just shove them onto the dole. I think the government would be most surprised if it looked at cooperation instead of coercion—if it looked at partnerships and the abilities that these people have. The government should stop complaining about malingerers with bad backs and take on the role of promoting these people into appropriate places within our community. The government would be surprised how successful such an approach would be.

We on this side of politics want real welfare reform that tackles the reasons why people with a disability are not working and delivers practical solutions. Real welfare reform gives people a chance of getting the skills an employer needs. Real welfare reform encourages employers to give people with a disability the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. Real welfare reform understands that being a parent is an important job in itself and that work makes families more secure. Real welfare reform helps parents find the balance between supporting their family and raising their kids. Real welfare reform involves strong support from government in breaking down the barriers to participation—such as skills, work-family balance and employer attitudes—alongside fair and reasonable requirements for job seekers. And real welfare reform makes sure people get a fair reward for effort.

In conclusion, I support this bill simply because I have to—because if I do not, life will get too hard for the people who have to live under this legislation. But in supporting this bill, which fixes the technicalities, I am still strongly against the basic philosophy of the government’s reforms in this area. I ask the Howard government to actively help people with disabilities to find work and to encourage the public and private sectors to employ people with a disability. The government should stop treating disabilities or chronic illnesses as if they were crimes and stop automatically categorising people with disabilities as if they have no right at all to the disability support pension. If things were done this way, we would see a far more positive outcome than, sadly, we are going to see under the government’s reform agenda.

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