Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Member for Cowan—per year. That is what we spend on welfare. That includes the disability pension, the age pension, Newstart, youth allowance and so on and so forth. I think it is fair to say, and I am sure everyone would agree, that Australians are very generally fair-minded. They generally work hard for their income. They pay their tax—all of us with a degree of hesitation—in the full knowledge that part of the hard-earned money we pay tax on will go to provide a safety net for those Australians who, from time to time—or in some cases, in perpetuity—find that they need our help; they need a safety net. We provide welfare provisions to those people.

Every fair-minded Australian has no issue with providing a safety net. Where I think they leave the train on this matter is when they see a safety net for some become a trampoline. They do not like that. They do not like their hard-earned taxes being abused or used or taken for granted. They like to know that their hard-earned taxes are being put to work fairly and in proportion to need. That brings me to the point of this bill.

I congratulate the Minister for Social Services, Mr Porter, and those who have gone before him in this portfolio role for their work. It is a tough gig to be Minister for Social Services, with a welfare bill of over $150 billion every year. Another point that I forgot to mention is that, when you walk down your local main street in your community, of the 10 taxpaying individuals that you come across, the taxes of the first eight that you meet are going to meet the welfare bill of this nation. That is eight out of every 10 payers of personal income tax. That is a fact that should not be missed on anyone. So I do understand the pressures in this portfolio area and I thank the minister for his ongoing tenacity in trying to find ways to maintain the safety net, to maintain the fairness but, at the same time within his budget, to find those areas where we can claw back some of the funds that hardworking taxpayers are paying.

In this case, this one is an absolute monte. To cut to the chase, in this country you can owe money to the government because you have been overpaid—possibly for reasonable reasons or maybe not so reasonable reasons. You have been the beneficiary of the hard-earned money of taxpaying Australians, sometimes in the full knowledge that you did not really deserve it, but you have taken it anyway because you know you have not updated your information with Centrelink or you have not been quite transparent in the declaration of your income. I also accept that there are some people who find themselves to be making genuine mistakes, so let me put that on the record. But hardworking taxpayers across Australia do not expect for one minute people to be recipients of their hard work in the full knowledge that they are receiving money they should not be receiving. Then, to make matters worse, they find out that the government agency that is the mediator of the provision of that money to these people fails to go after that money and, up against the legislation it works with, after six years basically forgets that it ever existed.

The numbers presented to this chamber a few moments ago by my fellow amigo, from the seat of Lyons, are very startling figures. Why is it that we have a situation where someone can do the wrong thing—or not do the wrong thing, but, irrespective, find themselves owing the country, the government, money that no longer has to be collected? It just falls off the end of a cliff somewhere and people wake up one day and say, 'How lucky are we? The government has lost its passion to follow the pursuit of that debt,' and we just say: 'It's all okay, brother and sister. Don't worry about it. We are not fussed.' On behalf the hardworking taxpayers of Australia, that is not what they expect their taxes to do.

This bill provides two measures which strengthen the capacity of the agency and the government to recover social welfare and family payment debts—and I stress the word 'debts'. It amends legislation to allow for the use of departure prohibition orders to prevent targeted social welfare debtors from leaving the country. There are some conditions around that, which I will come to if I have time. These are the same rules, I hasten to add, that already exist for debts in child support. Every man and woman in this place would stand behind the fact that, if someone owes child support, they should pay it. The legislation around child support does allow the capacity to actually chase debt and prevent people from leaving the country if in fact they still owe child support money.

The second amendment to the piece of legislation we are talking about is to remove the current six-year limitation on the recovery of social welfare debt, which, otherwise, would be non-recoverable. It aligns the treatment of social welfare debt with the recovery arrangements in place for other Commonwealth agencies. I am not sure who the goose was who suggested it some time ago. Whether it was on this side of House or the other, I do not really care. It was not a very smart move to suggest that, after six years, people could just fall off the end of the cliff and we would not care anymore. To use the previous speaker's language, you could 'go dark'. Hardworking taxpayers have willingly stepped up to the plate to provide a safety net to the vulnerable, only to have it smacked back in their face.

I think this is a tremendous rearrangement of this legislation. It is a very positive amendment that hardworking taxpayers in Australia would have expected we would have done years ago. A debt to the Commonwealth can occur, as I said a moment ago, under differing circumstances, sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional, but, irrespective of the motive, the money is owed. I hasten to add that sometimes I unintentionally accrue too much of an electricity bill in my household. Sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is unintentional, but, at the end of the day, the bill comes. The last time I checked, they still wanted their money and, if I did not pay the bill, I suspect I would end up with a big sticker or, worse still, I would go to turn my lights on one night and they would not work. It is a principle of life that, if you owe money, you pay it back.

The average value of social welfare debt is $2,357. You might say, 'Gee, member for Braddon, that is not a lot of money.' The average length of debt is within the six-year limitation period—it is just over three years. The oldest outstanding debt, according to the records, is over 30 years old, and the greatest amount of debt is in excess of $300,000. At the end of June—this is a really important figure—there were over one million debts with a value of $3.04 billion. That is $3,000 million of hardworking Australian taxpayers' money. I am not, for one moment, going to stand here and justify why we should not go after that money, particularly when these hardworking taxpayers are doing everything they can to support their families.

These prohibition orders are an obvious place to start. Why should those who are providing the hard-earned taxpayers' money to provide for welfare have to save up for years and years to go on a family holiday when someone can leave the country tomorrow to sit on a beach and read a book in Honolulu owing $10,000, for example, to Centrelink and the Australian government? This is common sense. This is absolute common sense. Yes, it is carrot and stick—I accept that—but, at the end of the day, why should someone be able to leave this country when they have sufficient enough funds to go on a holiday but still owe money to the government?

Very quickly, in the one minute I have left, I want to assure people that, where there are hardship issues, the government has not failed them. The government has taken those into consideration within this bill. If there are extreme cases and hardship cases—if someone does not have money and, for example, they are being lent money by other members of the family to go to someone's funeral, and so on and so forth—these prohibition orders can be lifted for that period of time. The Commonwealth also reserves the right to hold onto a bond of some description to make sure that people are not leaving the country and not returning.

I cannot think of a fairer piece of legislation. It takes into account genuine cases of hardship. We are not going to stop someone from attending a family event such as a funeral, even if they do owe money, but we want to ensure that we are very good stewards of the hardworking, taxpaying men and women of Australia who every week see their taxes provide a safety net. Let's make sure that they maintain their faith in that system. This amendment allows for that. (Time expired)

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