Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move amendments (1) and (2) together:

(1) Clause 2, page 2 (table item 2), omit the table item.

(2) Schedule 1, page 3 (lines 1 to 22), omit the Schedule.

This amendment will remove schedule 1 from the bill. Schedule 1 is a schedule that the Greens vigorously oppose. If enacted, schedule 1 will see 100,000 sole-parent families lose up to $60 a week when their youngest child turns eight. Instead of $324 under parenting payment single, these parents will be put on the lower paying Newstart allowance of $265 per week—$38 a day for a parent and their child to live on. This is not the kind of country that I want to live in. Any payment reduction will only push these people deeper into poverty. It will not help them secure a paid job.

The evidence is crystal clear, and story after story is told by single parents and their representatives and by welfare groups, that putting people further into poverty in fact becomes a barrier to work. They spend more time just trying to survive. There is less income available to get ready for a job interview, whether for buying new clothes or getting assistance preparing for the job itself. There is less income for the kind of training or activities that would be needed to enhance their work prospects. And, of course, the proposed cuts in schedule 1 will disproportionately impact on women, who make up the majority of single parent payment recipients.

As Minister Shorten has noted in his summing up speech, there is a growing chorus of people from across the political spectrum making the point that Newstart is simply too low. The Greens have succeeded in establishing an inquiry, and that is long overdue. That will, of course, as has been indicated, shine a light on the extraordinarily difficult situation that people on Newstart find themselves in, but we know already that it is too low. We cannot simply say that the inquiry may, at the end, come up with some recommendations. We know that it is too low now, and this is the rate that we will be pushing these single parents onto.

I commend the Australian Council of Social Service and the wide range of groups that have campaigned against these measures, and I am pleased that the Human Rights Committee has held a hearing into whether schedule 1 breaches Australia's human rights obligations, given the serious concerns expressed by ACOSS and a wide range of groups. However, I am disappointed that the committee needed to hold such a hearing at all.

Single parents, through this bill, are being asked to bear an unfair burden in the push to return to a surplus according to an arbitrary time line. We know that there are many other places that the government could look to find savings to meet a surplus. We live in a country where, if one of these single parents goes to the petrol station to fill up their car to get to a job interview, they are paying 38c a litre in tax. If a wealthy mining company goes to get some fuel, they pay zero because they get a rebate. We are giving somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion a year in the form of subsidies or handouts to extraordinarily wealthy companies who are doing very well by themselves. For the sake of a few hundred million dollars, we could shave it off them and ask them to take a haircut. Instead, we are asking some of the most vulnerable people in the community to bear a burden that they cannot expect, pushing them down to $38 a day to care for themselves and their child when often they are finding themselves as single parents because they have experienced difficult circumstances in their lives already.

I am pleased that, following the introduction of this bill, there have been a number of people in this place who have raised concerns about it. That shows that they are in touch with the realities that single parents face, and they understand that, as a question of priorities, there are other places that we could find this money from.

I hope that, when these amendments are voted on, all of those who have spoken out in the media and elsewhere will come and sit with us to remove this schedule from the bill.

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