Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this very important Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. It deals with quite poignant issues in a way for me. One always goes to one’s own personal experience with these things. This bill deals mainly with single parents and with the conditions in which they get support from the community.

I can vividly remember my own mother raising me in a single-parent family and there are two things I particularly remember about that experience. The first one is that she went to work. She was a teacher and, right from word go my earliest memories were of her going to work, supporting the family—my sister and me—and it was a good example to set. It is an example that all parents should try to set for their children—to work and to be involved and participate in the community.

The second memory I have is of me being very sick. I had childhood asthma and I had to be rushed to the hospital often. This was terribly worrying for my mother at the time. In a way I think she still sees me as that sick little boy. I can remember in particular the strain it put on her as a single parent, trying to juggle work and care for my sister, who was also sick off and on as a young child, so my heart certainly goes out to all single parents who really do struggle. It is very tough to raise children. It is a particularly tough thing to raise them on your own.

I meet a lot of single parents in my electorate. They are very good people. They try to work and to participate in the community. I have found them on nearly every occasion to be really dedicated not just to the care of their children but also to participating in our community through paid work, voluntary work and study, and you often find these people picking themselves up from relationships that have broken down. They have got kids and they really do want to prosper and make a better life for themselves and their children.

The previous rules were not so much tough as inflexible. I saw a number of my constituents having to deal with being told that they should apply for a job in, say, Noarlunga when they lived in Elizabeth, and that being just completely impractical in terms of picking up the kids from school or finding transport, or for a whole range of other reasons. There was a lot of inflexibility in terms of where you could apply for work. There was also the problem that single parents do tend to work in areas like retail or hospitality and the hours go up and down. You might have 25 hours one week and 10 the next. The previous rules also made it very difficult, I think, for people in casual or part-time employment, because when the hours went down, technically they were required to look for work. So you had a bizarre situation often where people were trying to work, wanted to work, but, because of the nature of their work, they were held up by the rules.

This bill really does seek to put a bit more flexibility in the rules for principal carers. It extends the existing 12-month automatic exemption for families with four or more children, for those who are home schooling or have distance education and for eligible families with older children, up to the age of 19, completing their secondary school education. It liberalises the eligibility for the 16-week domestic violence exemption to include parents who remain in a violent relationship as well as those who have left the relationship in the last six months, and that is important and I will come back to that. It recognises the right of respite and emergency foster carers through a new exemption that remains in place for the period of time a child is in the person’s care and for an extended period of up to 12 weeks between foster care placements. That is very important because our child protection system largely revolves around foster carers and, in particular, those who take children in an emergency. This bill also recognises the kinship carers through a new exemption for those who have care of a child under a state or territory case plan. Again, that helps to underpin the child protection system because we know that kinship carers often take a great deal of pressure off the system.

So this bill does provide some important exemptions to these fairly tough rules or obligations on these people. It also makes changes to the part-time participation requirements. They allow principal carer parents to meet their requirements through part-time study of at least 15 hours a week or 30 hours a fortnight of contact or non-contact hours. It allows combinations of approved activities, part-time study and part-time paid work as long as the parent is undertaking 15 hours per week of activity. It changes the rules on voluntary work to allow voluntary work alone or in combination with other activities to meet the requirement where parents live in poor labour markets where they have limited training opportunities or where there is a significant vocational aspect of voluntary work. That is an important point because in areas in my electorate which suffer from very high unemployment—and suffered from very high unemployment right through the boom, I might say—people often do not have clear avenues into work, so voluntary work often is the bridge by which people get from no work to paid work.

This bill also allows principal carers to participate on a part-time basis in the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme that is based around small business and it introduces more flexible arrangements over long school holidays, which particularly gives some relief from the participation requirements during the Christmas-New Year fortnight. That is important because Christmas is a time to spend with friends, family and children. It is a particularly important social occasion but it is also an occasion when there are some stresses on families. We should recognise that people, in trying to celebrate, often put a lot of pressure on themselves. The last thing we want to do is add to that pressure or the obligations over that period. People deserve some latitude during special occasions.

I talked a little bit before the domestic violence exemptions, which I think are tremendously important. I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the work of the Northern Domestic Violence Service, which does a great deal of work in my electorate. They are based in Elizabeth South but they work as far afield as Gawler and the rural communities. It is a great service and they have been going for 25 years. I think they would have preferred to have shut down by now but, sadly, there is still demand after all those years. I pay tribute to their dedication over that time. Recently we held a fundraiser with the Deputy Prime Minister for this service, some schools in the electorate and Northern Carers. That was held at Hope Central, a church in Elizabeth South which is a very active and decent group of people. Joe and Jodie Habermehl, who are pastors at the church, and Kathy Tripodi organised a breakfast at very short notice. They have a long history of fundraising in this area, having raised about $40,000 or $50,000 for various charities, including the Northern Domestic Violence Service, and I would like to pay tribute to them.

In conclusion, this bill does provide some flexibility but it keeps the obligation for people to be active and to work and to participate in our community. I think that is a reasonable and decent obligation. I commend the bill to the House.

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