Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the amendment that has been proposed, because it highlights the true nature of this government. On a day when the government and the Prime Minister refused to support a suspension of standing orders so we could debate legislation which would protect the income of hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers, we are now debating a bill which sees this government also cut many of the support payments for those same workers. And that is the thing about this government: they are very quick to put forward tax cuts for themselves and tax cuts for the top end of town, and very quick to, with a lot of fanfare, talk about the $50 billion tax cut to big business, in particular—money that will go overseas to multinationals and money that will go back to the big banks. At the same time, they are also very quick to continue to attack some of our lowest-paid workers and families trying to survive on the smallest of incomes.

So, when I rise to give this speech on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017, it is not just about the fact that these workers—particularly in retail, pharmacy and hospitality—will have their penalty rates on Sundays cut, which will cost some of these workers $2,000 a year, though for some could be even more. These are the same workers who, if they have children, will get hit by this government if this bill gets passed with cuts to their family tax benefit.

And, just in case the government thinks I am making this up, I will just share the story of a local woman in my electorate, a single mum. She will be hit if this bill is passed because her youngest is now 18. She still runs her daughter around to school. Her daughter does not yet have her licence. Her daughter is involved in a NETschool program and has re-engaged in education, so this is a family that has had its challenges. Mum tries to work two casual part-time jobs, and then has some support from Centrelink in terms of family tax benefits, as well as some Centrelink payments, just to try and scrape by. She is dependent upon how busy the store is and whether people are sick, so she might get 30 hours one week and then 10 hours the next week, so her income does fluctuate. She is trying to do everything she can. She is a single mum trying to work two jobs, hoping that they would make a full-time job, and then, with family tax benefit, is just scraping by. Christmas is hard. Returning to school is hard. Helping her daughter with driving lessons is hard and expensive. Yet everything that this government has done today is to not help this single mum and her children survive. Everything that this government has done today is to attack her, on the small income that she has.

So let us just remind ourselves of that. These are people who are earning less than, in some cases, $30,000 a year. They did not benefit from the government's tax cuts to high-income earners; those, in parts of my electorate, went to a very small proportion of people. Instead, the government choose to attack people like this family.

And it is not just this family that I choose to highlight; it is families like Beck Kelly's. Beck Kelly is an advocate in our community who, day in, day out, supports families of children with autism. She volunteers a lot of her own time. She is studying and she is working part-time. Her husband is also working part-time and taking care of their two young children who have autism. The cuts to family tax benefit means that Beck might have to give up study to work full-time or they will have to try to find someone to care for the children so that her husband could return to work full-time. They are the kinds of pressures that this government is putting on families—families who are trying to survive on the smallest of incomes.

I also think of the Martins in speaking to this bill. The Martins are on what is the average income in the Bendigo electorate—just under $50,000. They have three children. One of them is in high school and two of them are in primary school. They are surviving. They are what the government would term 'a hardworking family'. Yet this government wants to change the family tax benefit for this kind of family, which would see them worse off.

In rising to speak about this bill, I also think of little Paige, who I first met when she was in year 1 and homeless. She was at the Saltworks dinner with her mum. Her mum was pregnant and they were desperate to try to find accommodation. Mum was looking for work. At the age that she was, she was struggling to find work—pregnant, homeless and looking for support. She is what you might coin 'vulnerable', but she would not coin herself as 'vulnerable'; she would say that she is just trying to get by. Yet she is a mum that this government would seek to target. This government clearly have a problem with working families. They clearly have a problem with families, whether they be low- or middle-income families. You can see that by the cuts that they have proposed in this package—for example, the cuts to paid parental leave, denying new mums time with their families.

Perhaps the government need a bit of a lesson on how collective bargaining works, because they seem to really struggle to understand collective bargaining. We have a minimum award. It is an absolute minimum, which is why people get so upset when there is a random cut to the minimum, as we have seen with penalty rates. Employees, most of the time with their elected union representatives, will bargain for above the award rate and will secure a change in conditions and an improvement in conditions above the award minimum. A number of the industries that we have focused on today—like pharmacy and retail—have been able to secure, through collective bargaining, top-ups in paid maternity leave. It is similar in our Public Service. Through years of enterprise bargaining they have been able to secure extra paid parental leave. But now the government seek to punish those workers and those employers who did the right thing about prioritising conditions for new mums and new families in terms of paid maternity and paternity leave.

In this bill they are also targeting young jobseekers, people who may have finished their university degree and are starting to look for work. They want to make them starve, essentially, for five weeks until they are able to claim Newstart. It is just ridiculous to say to university students, who may have finished their degree, who still have to pay their rent—who may have had to leave home and are living in an electorate like Bendigo, where we have a university—and who no longer qualify for the university study allowance, because they are no longer studying, 'Because you are on Newstart, you have to wait five weeks.' It is just forcing people into dire poverty. It is okay if you have rich parents to fall back on. But the vast majority of young people in Australia do not have rich parents to fall back on. The government's answer for young people seems to be, 'If you want a home, have rich parents,' or 'If you finish university, move back home and live off your parents before you start your job.' That is not how the majority of young Australians live. It is also completely disempowering to force young people back home so that family members can support them for five weeks until they qualify. This government has the most negative and cynical approach to this.

And all of these cuts are savings. Previous speakers from my side of the House have highlighted that these changes that are before us are actually a $2.7 billion saving. The government are cutting $2.7 billion out of the pockets of low- to middle-income Australian families, single parents, young people and pensioners. They are cutting money out of their pockets. This is a savings bill—and, in a cynical way, they have tried to link it to changes to child care.

Labor has, for a long time, supported greater investment in early childhood education. It was Labor that introduced the national quality framework to ensure that we had a framework for education and care for our youngest Australians. It was Labor that introduced and ensured that there were ratios—so you had the right number of educators to young children from babies through to five. It was Labor that first acknowledged that we have gone from child care and a workforce participation sector to early childhood education. I am really concerned at the government's changes to the activity test. I am concerned that some of the most vulnerable children in parts of my electorate will miss out on hours of early childhood education. They need every single hour they can get.

I think of a young man named Lestat whom I met at Golden Square Goodstart. He is there five days a week. Goodstart are very good in that they do not chase the fees. His family are in tens of thousands of dollars in debt for fees they have not paid. The educators know how critical it is for Lestat to come to their education facility every single day. This childcare facility taught Lestat and his brothers everything from toilet training in their early years to their letters and their colours—because they simply do not come from a stable home with parents capable of doing that. The activity test will exclude vulnerable children—the children who most need to be engaged in early childhood education.

I also have a fear—and the government has not addressed this in any way—that, if vulnerable children whose parents may not be fully engaged in work or study are excluded from child care because they have had their hours cut, that will put pressure on centres to close rooms for certain days. I fear that, in areas of low income and high unemployment, where we are desperately trying to break the cycle of poverty through the next generation, numbers will drop because families get fewer hours allocated to them. That will mean fewer children going to child care and early childhood education each and every day, which could place pressure on some childcare centres to close rooms on certain days. That would then put pressure on families who want their children in care because of work to turn around and say to their employers, 'I can't come to work on Mondays because the centre doesn't open on Mondays.' A childcare model that is designed for the inner cities does not work in regional areas. The government has not put enough focus in its childcare package on regional cities and electorates and areas where the most vulnerable are accessing early childhood education. It has not put enough focus on mobile childcare and education facilities, which are most in need in the bush.

To outline a few of the other cuts contained in the bill to demonstrate how much the government are seeking to save, they are stopping the payment of the pension support supplement after six weeks when our pensioners are overseas. Do they know how this washes with people in their electorates? Perhaps they are just not listening to pensioners in there electorates. We live in a multicultural society and a multicultural world today. Even in my electorate, which has one of the smallest proportions of people born overseas living in it, there are still lots of grandmas who travel overseas to spend three months of the year with their grandchildren and then come home—because guess what? They cannot afford to fly back and forth every five weeks. This measure targets a lot of pensioners living all over Australia, including those in regional areas. This is another budget savings measure. The pensioner education supplement is being abolished—because why would pensioners want to keep studying? This is another cruel measure, excluding pensioners from education by taking this money out of their pockets.

The government are also seeking to close the energy supplement for new welfare recipients. They are trying to suggest that energy has all of a sudden got cheaper, when all of their rhetoric says otherwise. The energy market at a national level is failing. It has emerged that, during the really hot few weeks that we had in February, the national Energy Regulator was going to shut off electricity to my home town of Bendigo so that coal focused New South Wales could keep their lights on. There is a problem with the energy market and there is a problem with the Australian Energy Regulator, but the government blame renewables. Worse still, they are cutting the supplements that help people pay those bills.

This is a cruel bill; it is a cynical bill; it is a savings bill. It is linked to changes to child care and early childhood education, but those changes demonstrate how the government have not moved with the times. They do not acknowledge the importance of early childhood education for every child, regardless of their parents' income. I urge the government to drop this bill or to support Labor's amendment.

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