Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the biggest policy challenges we face in this parliament is the 800,000 Australians who are today out of work. It has been to my enormous distress and frustration that, even since I was elected to parliament two years ago, this problem has grown significantly worse. We have seen the unemployment rate in this country climb significantly since I was elected to parliament. For certain pockets of this country and for certain people who are living in Australia and have a looser connection to the labour market, such as young Australians, the problem has gotten dramatically worse.

Unemployment is a profoundly important issue. For a Labor member of parliament this is absolutely core to our mission. We know that the best way out of poverty is a job, and the fastest way into poverty is job loss. So I want to start by saying how critical it is that we talk in this parliament about this pivotal issue of unemployment.

It has been with some disappointment that I have seen a real lack of discussion in this chamber about this important topic. The debate today on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Further Strengthening Job Seeker Compliance) Bill 2015 touches on the support we give to people who are out of work. But what I am waiting to see come before this House is a bill about job creation and how it is that we are going to start to get these 800,000 Australians, many of them young people—one in five unemployment Australians today are young people—into work.

The bill today relates to the system we have set in place to help connect people who lose their jobs back into work. This is a critically important social justice issue. One of the things the evidence on job loss is very clear on is that the best indicator of how long someone will be unemployed is how long they have been unemployed for. What this means is that the quicker we can get people who lose their jobs back into work, it is the very best thing we can do for those people, because every extra day on which they are unemployed makes it that bit more challenging. So, the system that we construct to help people who lose their jobs to instantly connect back into work—to get back on their feet and give them the support and skills they need to find a new job—is incredibly important.

Making the system work well is a very worthy goal, and it is something that Labor comes to the table to discuss, with the importance being on evidence in this and not on ideology. We do not want to assess the strength of this system based on what are really unsubstantiated beliefs about what it may be like to be unemployed and what sort of things we can do to help people. Rather, we should look at the studies that have been done and at things we have tried in the system before. We need to look at what really does make a difference to people who are looking for work.

What principles will we use to consider legislation that touches on this really important area of helping people who have fallen out of work? I think the first one is that we should show real concern for these Australians who are struggling to find work. All of us, as members of parliament, talk to people who are struggling to find work. Every time in the last two years that I have done a mobile office or set up at a train station to talk to people I represent about what is worrying them, I will have a person who is struggling to find work. The sense of incredible distress they feel and the enormous impact this has on mental health and self-esteem cannot be overstated. This is intensely important. It does not just affect the person, but their whole family generally is affected by their falling out of work. So I think we need to be frank and be concerned about these people and provide them with support.

The member who preceded me in this discussion talked extensively about the need for mutual obligation. Of course Labor supports the need for mutual obligation. We support it because that is the fair approach. It is fair that people who are getting benefits from government also give back to their community. But we support it because that is what is in the best interests of job seekers. One of the driving principles of all of this area of policy is that we need to help people and support them and also push them a little bit to re-engage, because people who do fall out of work sometimes can start to slip through the cracks, and we cannot allow that to happen. So, when we talk about mutual obligation we need to be clear that this is not a punishment. It is not trying to penalise people who often, through no fault of their own, find themselves without work. But it is an important principle, because it helps that person.

These are some of the principles through which we have looked at the proposals that have been put forward by the government in this bill. Using that approach we support three aspects to the six changes that are being proposed, and there are three that we do not believe are in the best interests of the system and we therefore will not be supporting them.

I will first talk through the aspects of the bill that we are supportive of. Firstly, the bill seeks to allow a job seeker's participation payment to be suspended when a job seeker fails to participate in an activity, without a reasonable excuse, from the instalment period in which the failure is determined, and not the following fortnight—I will decode that into English in a moment. The second aspect is that the bill allows a job seeker's participation payment to be suspended immediately when the job seeker fails to undertake adequate job search efforts, without a reasonable excuse. The final of the three provisions that we will support is that the bill will rename all failures resulting in short-term financial penalties as 'no-show no-pay' failures.

What does all that mean? The central meaning of all of this is that the government is proposing to bring the penalty associated with failing to comply with the job seeker system close to the action itself, which is the failure to comply. It means that, if you are judged not to have turned up to your appointments and this is a consistent failure, the decision of the government to not continue your payments will be brought right back to the point in time that this behaviour occurred. It sounds like a small thing, but it is actually critically important. What we are trying to do is perfectly line up the failure to comply with, essentially, the punishment or the incentive to re-comply. The reason that Labor will support these provisions, again, has nothing to do with anything punitive; but we know that, when we bring those two things together, the job seeker is absolutely clear about the reason that their payments have been ceased, and we can show that this reduces the time that people are without payment. This is very consistent with Labor's approach to this policy space while we were in government. Labor of course have always encouraged job seekers to engage with employment providers, but the evidence, which we worked on while in government, does show that this short period between the reason for suspension and the reduction in income is important and productive, and previous efforts to line them up have reduced the delay in payment for the job seeker.

All of these things are terribly important because we are trying to tighten up this system to, again, ensure that people who are without work are not allowed to fall through the cracks. We cannot in good conscience allow people who fall out of work to disengage completely from the system. We need to encourage people to keep trying to get back on their feet and get back in the game, and the three amendments that I have referred to are really trying to achieve that. For those reasons, Labor will support them and we are happy to continue to improve the system.

But I mentioned earlier that one thing that Labor will not do is confuse the job seeker system, which primarily exists to support people back into work, with some form of punishment. There are 800,000 Australians out of work today and surely no-one in this House believes that all of those people are completely at fault for what has happened to them. These are broader macroeconomic issues that they, in a sense, are the victims of, and it is completely inappropriate to create a system of punishment to bully those people into jobs that, frankly, do not always exist for them.

For those reasons, there are three measures in this bill that we will not be supporting because we believe they are punitive, are unfair and will, frankly, have terrible social justice outcomes, which will push more job seekers into poverty faster. The first measure is that this bill seeks to allow job seekers' participation payments to be immediately suspended if job seekers fail to enter into a jobs plan. Essentially, job seekers are presented by their service provider with a plan for how they are going to get back into work. The bill is essentially seeking to provide that, if the job seeker does not immediately sign this plan, their penalty will be that their payments are stopped, so they will be left without any income. Labor believes this is unfair because it just takes it too far, essentially. It seems incredibly unfair to ask a person who has fallen out of work to instantly, on the spot, sign up to a plan that they have not had the time to take away, consider and discuss with their family. We know that often these plans recommend things that the job seeker is not even meant to be doing. The shadow minister gave a good example of an older person who had fallen out of work who was asked to go into a Work for the Dole program. Under this bill, the person would not have the time to take the document away, consider it, get advice and speak to people.

The other aspect of this that we do not like is that there is simply no evidence that this type of activity is going to encourage more people into work. What it is likely to do instead is take vulnerable people, force them into signing a document that they have not had the time and the space to consider, and threaten them with a failure to comply and not having any income at all. That is patently unfair.

The second aspect of the bill that Labor will not be supporting is the provision that seeks to introduce a new penalty for job seekers who are deemed to act in an inappropriate manner. One of the critical issues—and this actually spans across the three measures that Labor will not support—is the lack of clarity around what exactly this means. I heard the member from the other side who preceded me in the debate talk about what he believed was an inappropriate manner, but it is not defined in the legislation. What the bill suggests is that the secretary of the department will have full power to define 'inappropriate manner'. This will not be a matter subject to parliamentary oversight, and this is a really problematic feature. We also know that the behaviour of the person deemed to be inappropriate will have to come through multiple different sources—perhaps from the person running the Work for the Dole program, to the job services provider, back into the arms of government. We just do not believe that the powers around something that so lacks clarity should be handed over to the secretary.

I remind the House: of course a lot of things that we do in this House allow a lot of latitude on the part of decision makers and public servants, and sometimes that is appropriate, but let's remember that the end point of this is someone's income being taken away from them. Someone without any other income will be literally with no income. These are people who have rent to pay, food to purchase and families to support. So I think we need to set the bar a little higher than just allowing one senior public servant to define inappropriate behaviour and set up a system where we see multiple points at which messages and communications could get mixed up. I think we need to work a little harder than that and be a little clearer about what is and is not acceptable. Perhaps Labor will be willing to have that discussion if there is a bit more clarity.

The final aspect of the bill that Labor will not be supporting is the provision that would not allow job seekers who fail to accept work to be able to have their penalty waived by re-engaging and undertaking additional activities, even if it would cause financial hardship. In a sense, I have left the worst till last here, because I think this is such a good example of what we see so much of on the other side of the House, and that is this appalling treatment of job seekers without any acceptance that there are a lot of vulnerable people who are job seekers in this country, and we should not set up a system which essentially punishes them for being victims of broader economic issues over which they have little or no control.

Essentially, the way the system works at the moment is that there is a discretion about whether someone's payments will be taken away from them, subject to the person agreeing to undertake additional activities. So, if they miss a series of job appointments or they do not show up to their Work for the Dole program, there is the capacity for government to say, 'We're going to allow you to continue to receive your payments if you agree to do the following things.' This bill seeks to take that discretion away. What we are talking about here is that there will be many more job seekers who will be left without income. The specific provision says that it does not even matter if this is going to cause financial hardship to the person. We are talking here about vulnerable job seekers who are definitely going to be put in situations where they may become homeless, because job seekers are the most vulnerable people, and the discretion to decide whether to take that payment away or not is being dealt with.

We are always enthusiastic to engage in discussions about this important system, but unfortunately three of the most significant aspects of this provision are simply unfair, and Labor will not be able to support them.

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