Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Governing is of course about choices, about the choices we make. This debate shows how profound the choices are that face Australia at the moment and how desperately out of touch this government is. On the Labor side of this House, we have made some clear choices. We stand with Australians. We stand with young Australians looking for work, with Australian families, with new mums and expectant mums, with everyone in receipt of family payments to make ends meet. We stand with the kids who will benefit from quality early years education and with their families, with the mums and dads looking to make sure they can fully participate in the workforce. We stand for the Australian compact that the Labor Party has carved out over so many years, but this government is turning its back on this.

This government in this bill is standing for a much smaller Australia and a divided Australia at that. This bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017 is the government really writ small. It shows the poverty of the vision of this Prime Minister, a pale imitation of the vision of his predecessor, as we see with so much of this bill seeking to bring back to life elements of that 2014 budget and its contempt for so many Australians who are struggling to get by. So I am very pleased to join my Labor colleagues to rise in opposition the bill that is before the House and in support of the amendments moved by the shadow minister, the member for Jagger Jagger.

This debate that we are having today does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place at a time when inequality in Australia is at a post Great Depression high and the trend is getting worse, sadly. This trend is of course being exacerbated by decisions this government is taking, including the measures that are proposed and contained in the legislation before us now. Again, it comes down to choices. We can choose to take strong action as Labor has done to reverse this trend to inequality or we can continue down this path to exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Australian society, recognising, as we do on this side of the House, that this is not just a question of morality; it is also a question of efficiency, knowing as we know now that more unequal societies have much lesser prospects of sustaining economic growth, the sort of economic growth to sustain all of our living standards.

Today, as we continue to debate in this parliament the wages of 700,000 of Australia's lowest paid workers, this side of the House is standing up for them. On the other side of the House, the Prime Minister talks about Labor instead of standing up for 700,000 Australians who are struggling to get by, who deserve a parliament on their side. We are seeing that in a wider context too. I read in TheSydney Morning Herald today an article by Eryk Bagshaw that points out company profits soar as wages fall. We are again seeing a big gap opening up between those Australians who are doing very well—corporate interests and individuals—and too many Australians who are being left behind, left behind in an economy that is not working for them, an economy that is not being managed effectively by this government in their interests or in all of our interests. We see, when we look at the vision of this government for many Australians—the millions of Australians who depend from time to time on payments—in the words of the minister in his second reading speech when he talks about his vision, weasel words.

The Government wants a welfare system that supports the most vulnerable, encourages those capable of work or study to do so, reduces intergenerational welfare dependency, and is sustainable for the future.

These aspirations are not in evidence in the bill before us or in the attitude of the government generally.

I talked about choices at the outset and the choice Labor has made to stand up for Australia's social compact, to stand up for Australians in need at times of need. The government has chosen at this time of record inequality to cut, to rip away valued supports, to cut family tax benefits, to cut paid parental leave, to cruelly attack young people and to cruelly attack migrant pensioners—many of whom I am very proud to represent in this place—and, as the member for Jagajaga said, to take $2.7 billion out of the pockets of Australian families. But of course that is not all. There is more.

We see the linking of the savage cuts to a promise, which is illusory at best, of so-called reform to what the government persists in calling child care. There are a few things which need to be said about this. The first is of course that early education is just that; it is not only child care. The government should recognise this, and that is important for a couple of reasons. As a matter of principle, we on this side of the House recognise that encouraging the employment participation of parents, of mothers and fathers, is a critical goal in the interests of their sense of choice and their fulfilment from participating in the formal workforce, and in the interests of the wider Australian economy. But there are also extraordinary benefits to be gained from quality early education, benefits that we on this side of the House recognise. Perhaps one of the cruellest aspects of this deeply cruel and divisive piece of legislation is the imposition of a very harsh so-called activity test which will remove the opportunity for quality early education from some of the very kids who would benefit from it the most. The government is again turning its back on evidence for its own ideological fixations—a government that is prepared to introduce, in effect, what would be a life sentence of reduced opportunities for young kids.

There are also these questions of process that my colleagues have touched on in this debate so far. The manner in which the provisions in this bill have been put before the parliament is so much worse than just unsatisfactory. It is no way to make laws. It is no way to advance the serious public policy issues that go to debate around child care and early education, on the one hand, and supporting a sustainable but just and generous safety net of payments and programs, on the other. The attempt to effectively blackmail members of this place by linking these changes must be rejected, and it is clearly rejected by Labor members. It is extraordinary that any government would seek to link what they claim to be significant improvements—at the very least, ending uncertainty when it comes to child care and early education support—to cuts to the NDIS and cuts to family payments.

So I call on members opposite to think about the legislation that is before us and to have regard to the amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga. I call on members opposite to end this support for cruel, unnecessary cuts that will deepen inequality in Australia, cuts that will hurt individuals and families, cuts that will damage our social fabric and, indeed, our economic prospects more generally. I also call on them to end this short-sighted view of child care and early learning—in particular, to enable Indigenous kids, such as those who attend Bubup Wilam, the Aboriginal children and family centre in my electorate of Scullin, and other vulnerable kids in regional Australia the opportunity to access the early learning that is so important as a foundation for their further education and their life prospects more generally.

There is so much in this bill that needs to be talked about in this place and in the community. Time, unfortunately, does not allow me or any other member to go through the full litany of horrors it contains, but there are a few matters that I drew on earlier that need to be expanded on a little bit further.

I would like to start with young people, because in this bill the government is saying that it expects young Australians who are looking for work to live on nothing for five weeks. The logic of the Commission of Audit lives on, even though its formal report has been dismissed. And it is a cruel logic, no matter how long the waiting period is, to expect people to live on fresh air.

But the government's cruelty to young Australians does not end there. There will be a cut of $48 a week for 22- to 24-year-old jobseekers, who are being pulled off Newstart and onto youth allowance, a saving for its own sake that is heedless of the impact on these young people's lives. If we step back and look at the wider context, youth unemployment is at unacceptable levels, particularly in some regional communities and in areas of our major cities, including some suburbs in Melbourne's north, but this is a government that has no plan to invest in these young people's skills and no plan for jobs—no plan for jobs. Indeed, we have had much discussion about the government's casual and contemptuous attitude to the wage rates of many young people, in the retail sector in particular.

I mentioned earlier that I am very proud to represent a culturally and linguistically diverse area, including many pensioners who were born overseas and who came to Australia, worked hard all their lives and have made an incredible contribution to Australian life and who are confused, bemused, hurt and horrified by the proposal that, after only six weeks away from Australia—they may be visiting friends or relatives, perhaps for the last time, to say goodbye—they will have their pension rate reduced. That is after only six weeks. These are people who are often quite old, travelling quite some distance. We on this side of the House say that these pensioners are not second-class citizens. We on the Labor side of this House will stand up for them, as we would for anyone else. We recognise their contribution and we will not stand for this form of cruel discrimination, particularly when it sits, again, in a wider context of further cuts to small but important payments to pensioners. There is also the cut to the energy supplement, a big issue for the pensioners I represent as well as for Newstart recipients.

The previous speaker, the member for Melbourne, touched on paid parental leave. What a sad journey this government has had in its treatment of working families and, in particular, working mothers. The government, which called working mothers 'double dippers', amongst other unfair epithets, is continuing down its path of attacking rights at work and attacking the capacity of mums and dads to spend critical time with their children. In doing so, they are undermining the bargaining that many people have undertaken in good faith, in which they made trade-offs to prioritise time with young children. This proposition before us will put in place perverse incentives for employers as well.

The family payment cuts in this bill deserve serious attention as well. But let me say this: we are talking about proposals that would affect 1½ million families—1½ million families would be worse off should the provisions in this bill be adopted. Perhaps the worst aspect of this rotten legislation goes to its treatment of early years. Linking these provisions to unfair and unrelated cuts is bad in both process and in substance. Let me be very clear about this: in the Labor Party we do not regard investment in child care and early learning as something which should be contingent on these sorts of savings. We reject the logic—if it can be called logic—that is advanced in support of this bill. It is a curious way, to put the matter most generously, to seek to exhume those zombie measures from the 2014 budget and to add some new nasties. It is so deeply cynical.

What sort of government would link funds for child care and for early years with family payment cuts? What sort government would seek to impose such adverse consequences on vulnerable young people—Aboriginal children and other children who have not started life with the advantages that many others do? What sort of government would exclude those people who, the evidence tells us, will benefit most from quality early years from those opportunities? We have before us an audacious attempt to further damage Australia's social compact, to rip up the ties that seek to unite Australians—those ties which recognise our shared interest and our shared concerns in holding one another together. Labor will always stand against these cruel cuts and stand up for the Australians who depend on having a government on their side.

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