Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In making my contribution to this debate on the Social Security and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Weekly Payments) Bill 2010 I am pleased to hear that the opposition will not oppose this measure. Although, in listening to the previous speaker, the member for Menzies, I am not 100 per cent convinced that, when it comes to the crunch, they will not oppose this measure just for the sake of opposition. We on this side of the House have become very familiar with the fact that the opposition, under Tony Abbott, will oppose absolutely every piece of legislation that comes before the House. It does not surprise me that speakers on the other side have tried to highlight negative aspects of homelessness and programs designed to address homelessness.

It is interesting that this legislation has been developed after a series of trials. I should state at the outset of my contribution that this bill makes weekly payments available to certain vulnerable customers of Centrelink or people who are homeless. The bill also makes a small number of technical corrections which are unrelated to the main part of the bill.

As I was saying, this legislation has been developed from previously conducted trials that showed that weekly payments were beneficial to a number of people who receive welfare and are struggling, for various reasons, to maintain a budget over the fortnightly period. One of those trials was in the town camps in Alice Springs. The trials were carried out from September 2001 to March 2003 as part of a broader trial of culturally sensitive banking and financial services in the town camp communities. These trials showed that there was some benefit in the weekly payments. At that time they were funded through FaCSIA, and the aim of them was to break the ‘feast and famine’ cycle. Siobhan McDonnell, a former visiting fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, studied the results of this trial, and she found that there was indeed some benefit to be obtained from providing weekly payments. There was also another trial that took place within the broader community. As with the town camp trial that I have already referred to, it was found that there were some benefits associated with weekly payments.

The trials sought to determine the costs and benefits of weekly payment arrangements both for the people who were taking part in the trial and for other stakeholders. They included Centrelink, social workers, support services that catered for the needs of disadvantaged welfare recipients, and Centrelink staff who had to deal with many of the people that were constantly requesting advances or urgent payments because they were unable to manage receiving their payments fortnightly. The results of these trials support the extension of the scheme.

Michael Raper from the National Welfare Rights Network, based on feedback provided to him by community groups, said that the weekly payment trial worked well for very vulnerable clients and that they had been able to turn their lives around, with improved health and personal outcomes, more stable accommodation and reduced costs for and demands on the health and legal services. So, when you look at it from the background of the trials that were conducted by the Howard government and that I suspect members on the other side of this House supported, you would have to wonder why we have had some of the contributions to the debate we have had today.

Weekly payments on their own will not be sufficient to turn around the lives of people who are suffering severe disadvantage. There will need to be programs that run in conjunction with the weekly payments scheme—programs that help people get their finances in order and help them with daily living skills and with problems that they may have in their lives at that particular time.

One of the major problems faced by people who are struggling with the fortnightly payments is homelessness, and we have heard homelessness mentioned this morning on a couple of occasions. The member for Blair stated—and it is common knowledge—that on any one night there are 105,000 people in Australia who are homeless. That is why the Rudd government is investing $1.2 billion in trying to turn around and address the issue of homelessness. In Shortland electorate there are homeless people, but quite often those homeless people are hidden because they move on a daily basis from home to home to home. You do not have many visual pictures of people sleeping on the streets, but you have many people who are unable to find accommodation. Under the Howard government money that was invested in social housing was ripped away from the states. One of the actions of the Rudd government that I am very proud of is that of massively increasing money to the states to build social housing.

In Shortland electorate there are 2,000 people on the eastern side of Lake Macquarie and in Wyong shire waiting for social housing. The person who has been on the waiting list the longest has been on it for 18 years—that is, 18 years waiting for social housing. I think that that is unconscionable; I do not think it is good enough. I do not think it is good enough that, on a daily basis, we have people in Shortland electorate sleeping in their cars; I do not think it is good enough that, on a daily basis, we have families moving from house to house to house; I do not think it is good enough that we have families who are forced to live in tents; and I do not think it is good enough that, for a very long period of time, the issue of homelessness was ignored and the previous government failed to act to address the need. It is little wonder when you hear the Leader of the Opposition make statements such as the one in Perth in mid-February when he said that you cannot stop homelessness, basically attributing it to the fault of the individual and implying that people choose to be homeless. That shows what a sheltered life the Leader of the Opposition has led. It shows that he has never really been faced with true adversity in his life. It is very easy to make those statements when you come from a very privileged background, when you have been offered the best of education—attended private schools and gone to university—and your life has flowed along smoothly. I have news for the Leader of the Opposition: anyone can become homeless, and we do need to have in place the proper support for people who are homeless.

I was also most disappointed when I read a report in the newspaper about a Liberal party forum, a get-together, here in Canberra, where everyone sat down and tossed around a few ideas. The Leader of the Opposition had some very strong thoughts on welfare and welfare payments. Basically, he felt that welfare payments to disadvantaged people were not something to be guaranteed universally—that every person who received a welfare payment should have to work for that welfare payment and that it was a privilege, not a right, to receive a welfare payment.

Taking that a step further, you come to the conclusion that there will be a massive increase in the number of people that are homeless and that Australia will move away from what I have always been proud of as an Australian: the ideal that every Australian will be supported in their time of need and that as a nation we can afford to look after those people that are more disadvantaged than others. We do this, as I said, through social housing and through the strategies that have been put in place in relation to housing. We do it through ensuring that there are payments in place for people when they are disadvantaged.

The weekly payment scheme will be a scheme that will really benefit those people most disadvantaged in the community. It will enable the family tax benefit to be paid on a weekly basis and it will allow for the baby and social security periodic payments to be paid on a weekly basis. There is great interest in the community in relation to this particular piece of legislation. I received a phone call from the social work department at the Mater hospital in the Hunter asking about this information. They had identified that this would be a really good program to assist those people they were dealing with who have trouble handling their finances.

I strongly support this piece of legislation that we have before us today. I condemn the Leader of the Opposition for the statements he has made about homelessness. I would like him to read the white paper, The road home: a national approach to reducing homelessness. I would like him to open up his mind and to be a little bit more compassionate. I would like the members on the other side of this House to give real thought to the issues that surround the most disadvantaged people in our community. It is more than paying lip-service to disadvantage. It is more than standing up and attributing increases in homelessness to increases in prices, trying to play the blame game, trying to trivialise the issue, because that is what they are doing.

In the whole time they were in power the Howard government did nothing, absolutely nothing, to address homelessness. They did nothing whatsoever to improve the lives of those people that are most disadvantaged. Instead, they made it harder for people who were homeless to access their social security payments. They made it harder for people who were most disadvantaged to get their lives together, to get their lives back on track and to be able to access the services that were available in the community. It was under the Howard government that so many people were breached and a number of those people that were breached suffered severe financial hardship. Those people were often homeless and if they were not homeless the actions of the Howard government of the time led to them become homeless.

This is a very, very constructive piece of legislation. It will help the most disadvantaged people in our community. This, coupled with the right sort of support programs, will help people turn their lives around.

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