Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment Participation) Share this | Hansard source

‘Why do we get rid of financial case management?’ he asks. There are two simple reasons. Firstly, it is administratively complex. Secondly, and more importantly, job seekers who receive financial case management currently have no participation requirements. The new financial hardship provisions of the bill will oblige job seekers to continue to look for work or engage in activities that will improve their prospects of finding employment. A job seeker who receives an eight-week non-payment penalty for persistent and wilful noncompliance will have the opportunity to demonstrate a renewed commitment to finding employment by participating in an intensive compliance activity. A job seeker who agrees to participate in an intensive compliance activity will continue to receive income support while they work off their penalty through full-time Work for the Dole or a similar activity for 25 hours per week.

This bill is designed to instil in the job seeker a greater level of personal responsibility. Therefore, the job seeker may suspend the penalty at any time by resuming their activity requirements or attending their reconnection appointments. The opposition, I would contend, have misunderstood the essence of this bill, and that has been revealed in this debate. They love inflammatory, demonising language like ‘dole bludger’; they revert to meaningless pop culture references like ‘tough love’; however, to claim that the current compliance regime has helped people escape the poverty trap is contrary to the evidence. Over half the job seekers have been on income support for more than one year, almost half the people on income support in 2001 were still receiving income support in 2007 and three in four young women with little education who were on unemployment benefits in 2001 were still on income support in 2007. Indeed, in less than a decade the proportion of unemployed people who have been on income support for more than five years has increased from one in 10 to almost one in four. This proportion has remained a constant since the introduction of Welfare to Work in 2006. In real terms, this is an increase from 75,000 job seekers in 1999 to 106,000 job seekers at June 2008.

Why do we on this side of the House keep using these figures? Because they tell us that people have not been getting the right assistance at the right time in order to be able to put income support behind them. The previous government thought that the way to get those long-term unemployed off income support was to hit them with an eight-week $2,000 stick. They ignored the characteristics of job seekers who remain unemployed. Mental illness, drug and alcohol problems and unstable accommodation are among the vulnerabilities to which substantial numbers of job seekers are subject. Even with the supposed protections in the current system, the lack of discretion available inevitably means harsh outcomes. More than one in 10 job seekers who had received an irreversible eight-week non-payment penalty had reported a mental illness. This figure is likely to understate the scale of the problem because of the difficult issue of job seekers not wanting to disclose personal issues. The current compliance system takes vulnerable people and makes them more so. The departmental survey of eight-week non-payment penalty recipients found that over half of these job seekers had failed to pay rent or board on time and around 15 per cent of this group were evicted as a result. It is difficult to see how anyone could think this tackles poverty, let alone helps people find work.

The compliance system proposed by this bill allows us to distinguish between someone who does not want to meet their obligations and someone who cannot meet their obligations. Unlike the present automatic three strikes rule, a job seeker will trigger a comprehensive compliance assessment when they miss three appointments or six days of activity in a rolling six-month period. Centrelink will use the comprehensive compliance assessment to consider a job seeker’s circumstance to determine whether there is a reason for noncompliance, such as episodic mental illness, before applying any penalty. Furthermore, providers will be able to exercise their professional judgement about whether to report behaviour as a no-show, no-pay penalty or reconnection failure. A provider can use alternative means of maintaining participation if they reasonably believe that there is a better way to ensure a particular job seeker is moving towards employment.

The new employment services will provide job seekers with the right mix of training, work experience and other support they need to find and keep work. The new employment services will support innovation and will ensure job seekers meet the needs of employers. The new compliance arrangements and other measures proposed by this bill will form an important part of the new system. This government, along with most Australians, believes that a person on income support should make every effort to find work. Governments should and will support job seekers who do the right thing. Job seekers who do not do the right thing should not expect to receive income support. This is the fundamental principle underpinning mutual obligation. This is the fundamental principle underpinning the compliance system proposed in the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Employment Services Reform) Bill 2008. This bill is a key component of the government’s employment participation agenda and I urge all members to support it.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

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