Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

All right. This is unusual conduct. As a member of the Speaker’s panel, I understand the dimensions of speaking to a bill. With regard to these vocational services and what is being done, the point is that it is what any government does as part of its economic role in running the country. The point is very clear. While the member made the point that so much money had been wasted, the reality is that there is a context for everything that we do.

In this vocational context, there is a simple line that you can put underneath it. All of the debate that I have heard here, both from the member for Ryan and from others on the government side, has a single point and focus, which is to back up what the government intend to do in this area and to make themselves seem as hard as possible. The line coming back from any person concerned about the impact on those people who do not deserve it, in relation to disability services or vocational rehabilitation, is to say, ‘O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome!’ Because the target here is not just those people who should not be on disability services or should not be up for vocational rehabilitation; it is about everybody who is on social welfare who is not entitled to be.

The member for Ryan quite rightly said, in terms of the government’s approach to this, that $87 billion worth of expenditure on social welfare and other services is a hell of a lot of money. He used the example of very healthy people running around in board shorts, who should be working and all the rest of it, and argued that the Hawke-Keating government did nothing in relation to this. From Rickard Road in Bankstown, when I was working for the Treasurer of the time, I did my bit in making sure that the crackdown in relation to disability services and vocational rehabilitation under a Labor government was as strong as it could be. The reason I did that was that I actually listened to the people in our electorate who said that there were people who were exploiting the system. There was an absolute recognition that, unless you targeted the money that was available for disability services and pension services generally to the people who were entitled to it, you were doing down the people who needed help.

There are always people in the Australian community, from the top to the bottom, who are willing to exploit the system. There are always people willing to go over the top, people willing to extract something from Commonwealth services, people willing to do whatever they can. There is a history of such cases. We have seen barristers and others decide not to do what they were supposed to do and pay the relevant taxes they had to pay. We have seen it with company collapses. There are a whole range of cases where enormous amounts of money have been taken from the Commonwealth—money that the Commonwealth could have used for good purposes. But one thing that is very hard for some people to understand is that that can happen at the bottom of the pile as well.

When the former member for Batman, Brian Howe, was Minister for Social Security, he conducted a major study under Professor Bettina Cass into the social security system in Australia. A part of that study related to disability services and vocational education and the problem of people who might be able to work not doing so. I directly took these points up with Mr Howe in Canberra. His initial response was quite simple—that, in this area, all I was telling him was purely anecdotal and could not be given any weight.

The reality is that action was taken by the Treasurer, the former member for Blaxland, Paul Keating, to clean up the disability services area and crack down on people taking the dole who should not have it. The example the member for Ryan used was boardriders on the North Coast without jobs. It demonstrates that if you actually listen to the word on the street, to what people are saying, people who use their eyes and ears, you can affect government policy to have a good outcome for all the people who need targeted assistance. When we first brought in the special teams on the North Coast, we had between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of people who were on benefits totally knocked off benefits. They were getting benefits and they should not have been. The money saved went to people who should have received it.

Some people said: ‘That’s because it’s the North Coast. They’ve got the beaches and all of that stuff.’ When those teams were directed to the Central Coast, 30 to 35 per cent of people on benefits were knocked off benefits. In areas where you would expect there to be a problem, it was wiped out. In Bankstown and other major metropolitan areas of Sydney, there were substantial numbers of people who had been rorting their benefits who lost them—and they should have. If they were working a day job or a night job and taking a Commonwealth benefit as well, they were defrauding the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and doing down the people who really needed the benefit.

If you look at the particulars of this bill, who are they really directed at? The people on disability services and the numbers in Australia are legion. There are a whole range of expectations around this, but the fundamental mistake to make is to assume that most of the people on disability are there simply because they want to be there, because they want to get out of work or because it is an easy way to avoid it and they are bludging off everyone else, and that you could crack down on them in enormous numbers. There is always that potential. Our government took direct action. Treasurer Keating took action because of the position he was in, and he also understood what I said and what his constituents said. He recognised that you can only help those people most in need who are dependent upon social welfare payments—the age pension or other pensions, benefits and entitlements allowable—if you crack down hard on rorters. That is the duty of any Commonwealth government. But part of the problem is actually cracking through what is in people’s heads to start with in order to understand the dimensions of the problem and then deal with it properly.

There is another element here as well. This is where I go to the point about the hard hearts and cruel men of Rome. The person I am about to speak about is dead. That person, Mervyn Dassouki, was a branch member of mine. Merv was a Muslim who had come from overseas and who married a lady from Yugoslavia. He arrived on a Friday and started working on the Monday at Kirby’s in Revesby, just over in the electorate of Banks. Merv was there for 28 years as an active employee in the tooling and machining area. Merv was a guy who worked really hard. Merv had a problem with his heart and he was hospitalised as a result. He went onto benefits for some time and was about to go back to work. He was working in his backyard, he was up a tree doing some pruning, and he fell out of the tree. He ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

It was impossible for him to go back to work. He had to have assistance with his breathing. He had multiple complications as a result of it. He was angry with himself and angry with the world. He was someone who had given so much, and wanted to continue to do so, who ended up in a position where he not only had to receive but also could not properly control his life anymore. He suffered enormous pain, until 10 years after the accident he finally succumbed to his multiple difficulties. That is at the core of my response in terms of the ‘You hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome.’

There is no desire on the part of the government as a whole, because they are using it in propagandistic terms, to really look at this and ask: are there people who are really in need? There are a lot of people in that circumstance. The vast proportion of people who are on disability pensions did not choose to be there in the first place. They are people who were working—who were part of our effective workforce, paying their taxes and contributing—and who then had an accident. Merv did not draw down a pension because he did not need to.

And it happened to one Colin Jacobsen from the electorate next to mine. He is a bloke born in Panania and otherwise known as Col Joye from Col Joye and the Joy Boys. He fell out of a tree at his house in Hunters Hill. Col was well off, although that changed in the period after his fall, until he brought himself back. It took a tremendous amount of work to get himself back into performing, because of the dimensions of what he suffered. That is another case of someone who has given a lifetime of work and effort. He was lucky enough to be able to come back.

A third example—this lady is dead as well—is Eileen McCarthy. She had enormous courage. She was actively working. It shows how simple it is and what needs to be kept in mind when we are dealing with a bill that looks like it is simply a way for the government to kick people receiving disability services—and kick them hard. But there is an implication here. It is the same as the line between sanity and madness: you never know when it can happen to you. Whether you are a deputy speaker, a member speaking in this House or someone who is working here, no-one can tell when they might end up on the receiving end and be in need of disability services.

That happened to Eileen McCarthy. She walked out the back door of her house in Greenacre. It had two steps to the ground. She missed the step and went off the side. She landed on her heels and a jolt went straight up her spine. It was four or five hours before her husband and children came home. She had remained there in that state; initially she was unconscious. She was in terrible circumstances when I went to see her in the Coast Hospital. She was initially quadriplegic but came back to being paraplegic because she had one arm and one leg that worked. She was left with one arm that was virtually useless and she had continuing problems with one leg. She was in hospital trying to rehabilitate for over five months. Through dint of her own courage she got back to a position where she could drive a car again and she was looking to go back to work. This was someone who did not want to be on disability services—the kind of case that is real. The complications from the injuries she suffered ended up killing her as well. These two people, Merv Dassouki and Eileen McCarthy, were amongst the hardest workers I have known. For them the short step between normality and disability was just a whisper.

I have a brother, Sean, who was quadriplegic but came back to being paraplegic. After 15 weeks he was deaf, dumb and blind and, as far as we knew, he had no mental function. They wanted to turn off his support mechanisms about two hours after he had gone into the hospital. Sean came back from that. He is still paraplegic; he cannot walk properly. He was born in 1960. At 17 his life was dramatically transformed. Sean cannot go into the normal workforce. He has done voluntary work but he is in such a condition that he is unable to do that. Sean went from hospital to the Koorabel rehabilitation centre. I was working at school. After work I spent most of the rest of the night with him for the 12 months that he was in there learning how to walk and how to function again. I saw the disabled people in Koorabel trying to come back—like the people who have the education services that are being targeted by this bill. I saw the trauma for them and for their families. There is an enormous cost for the community but there is also an enormous cost for those people—people who had otherwise led normal lives until they slipped, with a simple step, into a parallel universe that is dark and difficult and nasty. Unless you really understand it, you cannot run disability services in Australia and you certainly cannot run education programs. But worse than Koorabel was the double storey building up the hill from Koorabel that housed people who were in large part brain dead as a result of motor car or motorcycle accidents—people who had survived the accident and were being kept alive but would spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state or something similar.

There are disabled people who work their way back because of the better interventions that we now have. But the government would have us believe that the vast majority of disabled people are con merchants and con artists who want to do everyone down and that the campaign it will seek to run against them this year is fully merited. This bill is the spearhead of that campaign and it is the spearhead of the denigration of anyone with a disability.

I think of Merv Dassouki, Eileen McCarthy and my brother’s situation. I know real people who did real work, took one step the wrong way and ended up with their lives entirely destroyed. If you adopt the approach of being hard hearts—cruel men of Rome—and encompass these people in that campaign as well, you should be condemned from now to eternity. It is right and proper to weed out the people who want to bludge on the social security system and defraud the Commonwealth—and we did that when we were in government. I will not cop a piece of the argument by the member for Ryan and others that we were not hard in relation to this, because I was a deliberate and central part of doing so. (Time expired)

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