Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Job Seeker Compliance) Bill 2011. The greatest piece of welfare any government or any person can give to another is in fact a job. It is a plain truth, because we know that with a job comes a whole raft of other things like self-respect, better education for your children and more likely better health outcomes. A job is the most important thing to improve the standard of living of any Australian or, indeed, anyone in the world.

I am privileged to be the Deputy Chair of the House Standing Committee on Education and Employment. We were responsible for the review that was done on this legislation and the recommendations that came back to the House. We thought it was reasonably cut and dried in that we had flagged on this side of the House that we were in general in support of the government's legislation. But in the end the review process was quite beneficial to the legislation in general and certainly in drawing up the guidelines of the legislation. I believe there may even be a small amendment moved at the completion of this debate to one of the terms. But in particular it gave an opportunity for the industry to air some of their concerns and ongoing issues with the way the job seeker arrangements are dealt with, and it gave us an opportunity to express the view that the language should be very clear and that people should understand what is going on here. One of the recommendations was that things should be in plain English because often the people dealing with it at this end of the field are not well educated and they need to easily understand what is going on.

Another interesting thing for the committee was the quite wide support through the industry, if not the welfare lobby organisations, for this move to tighten up these obligations. We recommended there be a comprehensive training package and the department be required to collect data on the reasons why people are no-shows for interviews and appointments so that we can better understand what it is that drives them and perhaps find better ways to get them to participate. In the end, you cannot give people a job if they are not prepared to participate or are not interested in participating in the process.

One of the other recommendations was after a full year of operation, the data be analysed and the department have another look at how the regime is operating. There was also a recommendation concerning vulnerable job seekers. Initially I was a little concerned about this insofar as it sounded like a watering down of the process, but when we consider what a vulnerable job seeker is this recommendation has merit. They may not have a home or may have a mental disability, so I think the recommendation is well founded. We must be very careful not to alienate those who are unable to help themselves in this process. It is very much pointed at getting those who are able to help themselves and better themselves involved in the process and making sure they make the most of their opportunities.

There are some confusing messages here. While we support the government's legislation, there have been quite a few times when this government has sent mixed messages to the electorate and to the people at large. I remind the House that the Rudd government watered down the terms of mutual obligation in 2008, and how the government must sometimes wish that they had left well enough alone with some legislation. If we turn our minds to the current interceptions of people trying to come to Australia in boats, perhaps the government may reflect that some of the settings that were on the clock when they took over the job 3½ years ago were in fact good models. They may well look back on mutual obligation in the same way.

In a very closely related field, I am reminded that the government also relaxed the regime surrounding the Work for the Dole program at about the same time, in 2008. Previously, if someone had been on the dole for six months they may have been required to attend a Work for the Dole program. That was changed to 12 months. That may not seem all that much of a change, on the face of it, but I have talked to a number of people who have coordinated Work for the Dole groups, and the program has been gutted as a result of that change. Because there was that six-month break, they ran out of customers. The work crews were abandoned and those who were running the work crews moved off to find new employment. It is just not that easy to line some of these things up again in a hurry. The Labor Party has long been uncomfortable with Work for the Dole provisions, but it has been a very popular program—and not only popular; it has been instrumental in engaging those people who were choosing to be unengaged in the process. While that does not strictly relate to this part of the legislation, it is certainly a related issue because we are talking once again about trying to get people engaged in a process.

We can put this in the context of a bucket of measures where the government have shown inconsistency. I will not go into any detail on any of them, but I simply list them. I mentioned the asylum seekers. The government were going to adopt the save the Murray report, but of course then they did not adopt it. They were to have a CPRS, but then they were not to have a CPRS. They were never to have a carbon tax, and now they are to have a carbon tax. They were going to have a green car, but of course now we are not going to have a green car. We were going to have cash for clunkers and now we are not. In my electorate we were to have an MRI machine and now we are not. The government were going to introduce a dental scheme, and now we find in yesterday's budget that it has been deferred. We were definitely going to have a mining tax and now we definitely may be going to have a mining tax, if the government can ever work out the detail. And we were always to have surplus budgets, but of course we have not seen one of those yet, either.

I just bring these inconsistencies to this part of the debate. This is why people in the electorate, the Australian public, are becoming confused with the message. I am very happy that the government has seen the light on the issue of re-engaging those who may not wish in the first instance to seek a job, to get them back on board. That is why I am happy to support the legislation, but the government should take great care before it mucks around with things that are working okay.

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