Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017. It is noticeable how few government members of parliament have come into the chamber to debate this bill. Indeed, none of them came in today and only a handful came yesterday. This bill should be opposed, as my colleagues have quite rightly pointed out. Government members have not come into the chamber to debate the bill because they know that it is indefensible. They know that when they go back out to their communities and tell the people they represent that this legislation went through the parliament with their support, the people they represent will be very unhappy with them—and rightly so. As many of my colleagues have pointed out, this bill hurts and hits some of Australia's most vulnerable people very, very hard. Nothing better contrasts the stark difference in values between the Turnbull government and the Labor opposition than this legislation does. This legislation makes very clear whom the Turnbull government represents, whom it sides with and whom it seeks to protect and it does all of that at the expense of our country's poorest and most vulnerable people. It also highlights how out of touch this Turnbull government is, and particularly how out of touch this Prime Minister is.

This legislation seeks to cut payments to families, whether they are working or not working, by around $3.7 billion in total, while simultaneously the Turnbull government refuses to change the very generous negative gearing rules and capital gains tax laws. As the statistics will show, those rules already benefit mainly people who are very well off. Even more insulting, the Turnbull government now wants to cut $3.7 billion from those who need it most, while simultaneously saying to the Australian people that they will proceed with tax cuts of $50 billion which, as my colleagues have highlighted, will go to big companies, many of whom are based overseas. It will also go to the four big banks, which for several years now have been making near-record profits.

Given the level of tax avoidance that big business has been associated with in recent years, as exposed by the Tax Justice Network and others, I fail to be convinced how reducing corporate tax from 30 to 25 per cent for those entities will make any difference, given that they already use tax avoidance measures to minimise their tax. Indeed, some of them pay very, very little tax. So what difference cutting it to 25 per cent will make to the Australian economy is beyond me. It is no wonder that the gap between rich and poor is widening. If trickle-down economics really worked, the gap would be closing, not widening.

When I look at this legislation I am at a complete loss to understand how members in this place who represent rural electorates can support it. Some of the lowest socioeconomic status families live in country electorates that members opposite represent. These are people that are already doing it tough, and their own members will come into the chamber and say that. Yet these are the people that the Turnbull government wants to balance its budget on. It wants to do it on their back, making them live life even tougher than what they already are, while simultaneously giving generous tax breaks to the very rich. Only today The Sydney Morning Herald, in a story by Eryk Bagshaw, reports that company profits have surged to record highs. At the same time wages suffered their sharpest decline in eight years. Those statistics are not being pushed by the Labor Party but are reported in the daily paper. So when the cuts to family payments proposed in this bill are combined with stagnant wages, it is clear that this legislation will hit families even harder than many of them believe they have been hit by the previous cuts that this government has pushed through the parliament following their 2014 budget.

Australians will not be fooled. They can see exactly what is happening and they can see that their MPs on the government benches are failing them. Not surprisingly, we see that in the electorates of many of the government MPs their voters are deserting them and looking to other parties. The most recent polling is clear evidence of that.

If the cuts in this legislation were in isolation, then the government might be able to find it easier to argue the case. But the reality is that these cuts come when families across the country are facing additional financial pressures. They are being proposed at a time when real wages growth has been minimal for the past two or three years. Working hours for many families have been cut. Indeed, many families are now not even working a full 38-hour week. When cost-of-living expenses—including utilities, government taxes and medical costs—continue to rise, again that directly hits families' abilities to make ends meet. On top of that, the government says that these cuts are fair and appropriate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The legislation makes several changes to areas of family assistance. I do not have time to go through the legislation in detail, but I want to talk about some of the matters that are contained within this legislation. The first matter I refer to is the proposal to change paid parental leave. In particular, I refer to the proposal to limit paid parental leave to 20 weeks, and where an employer provides some paid parental leave the government will only provide the difference if the employer-provided paid parental leave is less than 20 weeks. This, as been highlighted by so many speakers from this side of the House, this will negatively affect 70,000 new mums across Australia.

Where a person receives paid parental leave from an employer, it is very likely that the leave will form part of a salary package agreement. It is part of a negotiation. It is probably something that the employee has traded off in order to get. And yet the government now says, 'We will effectively take that away from you.' It would seem to me that unless the employer is prepared to renegotiate that agreement with the new mum, then the new mum will be worse off. It also seems to me, and it is very likely going to be the case, that no employer will continue to pay paid parental leave just to save the government money. The first thing they will do is try to work out an arrangement or renegotiate with their employee to ensure that that component of the salary package is going to be paid in full by the government in the future. I would be most surprised if that does not happen. So the government's own attempt to change the rules, in my view, will backfire on them in the long term.

The second matter is the transfer of young people from Newstart or sickness allowance to youth allowance, which will mean a cut of $48 per week in support payments. Mr Deputy Speaker Georganas, I am sure in your electorate you have dealt with issues similar to what I have in mine. In recent weeks I have dealt with many young people who are struggling to find work. They have completed their studies, so they do not want to be doing more study and be on youth allowance. They have completed their studies, but they simply cannot find work in the very profession that they might have studied for. In many cases they are young people who have actually come to Adelaide from a country area. They have relocated to the city because that is where they were hoping that they might be able to find a job in the area that they studied. For them to have their income cut by $48 a week means a lot; it means the difference between them being able to perhaps survive and keep going or not. And for the government to think that it does not matter that it is only $48 a week, then can I suggest to government members, and to the minister in particular, that they have a good hard look at what this will mean. Ultimately, this will lead to other welfare problems which inevitably have to be funded by governments—whether they are federal or state.

But to then also say to them, 'Look, you have to wait five weeks before you will get any payment', just adds to the cruelty of this government. Again, not every young person has the backup or the money to be able to carry them through that five-week period. Indeed, many young people actually do find a job, but due to things beyond their control they lose the job—perhaps because where they were working closed down or they retrenched some of the people they employed and so on. So that then means they have to wait another five weeks without work. I have dealt with young people who are struggling because of that. We know that we have a lot of young people who are homeless. This will simply add to it and make their lives tougher. I believe it is one of the measures that no-one in the community who wants the government to act fairly could possibly support.

It seems to me that when it comes to young people, in the mind of this government they can be easily sacrificed. If we look at what the government proposes to do with university fees—again, hitting young people; pushing up degrees perhaps to the tune of $100,000 a degree—and if we look at what has just happened with the Fair Work Commission and the penalty rates, which many young people rely on and which this government clearly supports, then we can see that this government has no empathy whatsoever for young people.

I want to now go briefly to the energy supplement, because this is going to affect any pensioner who comes onstream in the future. It means a cut of $14.10 a fortnight for a single pensioner and $21.20 a fortnight for couple pensioners. The thing that is wrong with this, firstly, is that it creates two classes of pensioners. Secondly, it will mean that in the future, when we are trying to ascertain what the pension rate should be, it will be a jumbled mess of payments that have to be carefully sorted through. Every time we differentiate in our laws between people it has to be rectified at some stage in the future, and it is left to future governments to do that. Whether a person comes onto the pension now or was previously on it, they face the same cost. If the energy supplement was intended to assist pensioners with meeting their energy bills, then can I tell government members, who come into this place every day and actually crow about this and make criticisms of the Labor Party, that energy prices have gone up around Australia. They have not gone down. The so-called relief that pensioners were supposed to get from taking away the carbon tax did not last very long at all. In fact, as they took away the carbon tax, it gave the operators and the resellers of electricity the opportunity to jack up their prices and they did, and the statistics will bear that out. So, again, these very pensioners that are being denied the energy supplement are themselves also facing the very increases in energy costs that others are being compensated for but they are not. Quite frankly, it is discrimination.

The last matter I want to briefly touch on is the pensioners who have come to this country from overseas and who have resided in Australia for less than 35 years. I have spoken about this on another occasion. The truth of the matter is that many of these pensioners have worked and toiled as hard as they possibly can in the time that they have been here. Their goal was to, when they retire, perhaps go and spend some time with family members that they left nearly 35 years ago. For many of them, it is the only holiday that they might ever get in their life, and yet we are now saying to them: if you are away for more than six weeks and you have lived in this country for less than 35 years, it will affect your pension. It is wrong and, quite frankly, it is a shameful treatment of people who have come and put their heart and soul into this country.

Australians will see through this legislation and they will see through it even more when they see the odious attempt of this government to try to link it to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which my colleagues have touched on. To try and suggest to the Australian people that this is necessary in order to pay for the National Disability Insurance Scheme is nothing but dishonest spin. Australians will see through it. This legislation is an example of how low the Turnbull government is prepared to sink. (Time expired)

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