Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

Addiction is incredibly complex and, indeed, addressing the issues that surround poverty is equally so. From the outset, I would like to say that I spent considerable hours examining the proposals in each section and I've also engaged extensively with stakeholders, including Volunteering Australia, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, St Vincent's Health Australia, Catholic Social Services Australia and ACOSS, among a few. It's been a great privilege, on behalf of the NXT team, to have responsibility for this portfolio area. I am very grateful for the time stakeholders have given to me. They are busy professionals undertaking critically important work in our community. They've done this so that I can more properly examine this bill and have a deeper understanding of the challenges many Australians face with addiction. I've also followed the Senate inquiry process closely: the submissions made by stakeholders and the compelling testimony given by specialists in the field. Despite working in the NGO sector for some years, the information brought to the fore through the process of examination of this bill has been incredibly insightful.

Every decision NXT makes in this place is influenced by the evidence before us, and for me in this instance it has been critical to listen to and, on many occasions, to go back to the specialists who work with Australians suffering addiction—those who have specialist advocacy roles in the welfare sector—and meet with local government officials where trial sites have been identified. I would like to thank the Logan City Council mayor, Luke Smith, and his team for taking the time to meet with me and to explain the work they are undertaking within their council and within their community for those suffering with addiction.

Beyond the evidence, we must determine what exactly it is that we want to achieve from welfare reform. I believe that as a society we want to do all we can to ensure that every person who is receiving a jobseeker payment is indeed job ready, and we owe this to the taxpayers of Australia. Importantly, we also owe this to the recipients of Newstart and youth allowance. It is unacceptable for government to accept that some recipients are suffering from addiction and not to do all we can to assist those people to access rehabilitation and support to beat that addiction and to strive for a life of happiness and prosperity.

There are parts to this bill that I do support, and I think it's best to unpack the sections of this bill to better examine and explain to the parliament where that support lies and where I have concerns with this bill. I can see logic in the government's decision to simplify the categories for payments. I know that constituents in my electorate find reading through the rather thick Centrelink booklet quite complex. Schedules 1 to 8 collectively are a net cost to government of just over $15 million. However, there will be a significant administration reduction to government, and this will also make the Centrelink system much easier for recipients to navigate.

Specifically, schedule 4, the bereavement payment, will provide the Centrelink recipients with a triple upfront payment to assist with unexpected expenses that occur when you lose a partner. However, there does need to be further supports available in the rare occurrence that a person is expecting a child at the time that their partner passes away. I believe that such an example was raised during the Senate inquiry process. I would urge the government to consider amendments so that we can provide necessary support during such tragic circumstances.

Next is schedule 9, the requirement for Newstart recipients aged 55 to 59 to complete at least 15 hours of job activity or employment, with a balance of up to 15 hours in their mutual obligations in volunteering. Volunteering Australia has raised concerns that this proposal would diminish their volunteering workforce. This proposed measure will move people away from volunteering positions and will possibly have a detrimental impact on the volunteering sector, affecting service provision, workforce capacity and the long-term financial viability of volunteering support services and volunteering organisations, which provide essential services to the community.

A further concern is that this proposal does not recognise age discrimination as a very real issue in the workforce—and such discrimination is experienced in some industries long before age 55. I'm troubled that some Newstart recipients in this age group, particularly those with lower levels of English and lower levels of skills, could be spending years—absolutely years—applying week after week with no interviews and no offer of employment, and that would be crushing. So I would encourage the government to consider amendments to this schedule, possibly in the Senate—preferably in the Senate. Over a set period of time, perhaps after 12 months, they could set it so that a person would no longer need to do 15 hours in each and could possibly just resume 15 hours a fortnight of volunteering. Volunteering is an effective way to engage with society, and often it does lead to employment outcomes. I think that we need to recognise the valuable contribution that volunteering makes: $290 billion to our national economic and social wellbeing—particularly in regional areas, where volunteering rates are much higher than the national average.

The Rapid Connect process outlined in schedule 10 has merit. However, we need to ensure that there is immediate financial assistance available to new applicants who have no means either to make that appointment with the jobactive provider on the phone or indeed even to get to that appointment. I believe that this particular schedule will have a greater impact on and result in greater hardship in regional and remote areas where there is no public transport and where jobactive providers are often some distance from home.

I believe that schedule 11 raises the greatest concerns for those living in regional and remote areas and older residents who may not be computer savvy, have an internet connection and have their documents, such as bank statements, electronically stored or have public transport access so that they can get to the services to get that documentation. To take my electorate of Mayo, for example, in the last 25 years I've seen our bank branches close. We have limited public transport across our region and a lot of distance between our jobactive providers. This makes it much harder for a person in my electorate to reach such expectations. When we make decisions in this place, they have a blanket effect across the nation and we must remember that the experiences of those of us who do not live in capital cities is very different. I would encourage the government to consider this schedule, in particular, through a regional lens.

I support schedules 16 and 18. However, I have deep concerns with schedule 17, which restricts the fundamental common privilege against self-incrimination. This schedule contravenes what are considered important values and long-established principles of common law.

Schedule 12 of this bill is a schedule that has concerned the sector the most and has been the focus of much media attention. This schedule provides for a random drug-testing trial of 5,000 new youth allowance and/or Newstart recipients in three regions of Australia—Mandurah in Western Australia, Western Sydney and in the local government area of Logan in South-East Queensland. According to testimony given on the trial, it is expected that 120 recipients will fail two drug tests and then those recipients will be placed on income management as a first measure—and I acknowledge that the minister believes that number could be between 200 and 300 recipients. We have no details on the cost of such a trial and, explicitly, the government has said that the cost of the trial is not for publication. There are no details in the legislation of what sort of drug testing would be applied and the efficacy of such. There are wildly different levels of accuracy among drug detection tests and wide-ranging costs to conduct such tests. Tests include saliva, hair, urine and blood—all with differing degrees of invasiveness.

So let's unpack that schedule. Firstly, we are talking about spending possibly millions of dollars on drug testing, and we don't know how much of taxpayers' money has been put aside for this, to capture somewhere between 2.4 per cent and six per cent of the trial group. The connotation of this schedule is that we would be demonising communities that we already know are communities with pockets of disadvantage for the purpose of capturing a couple of hundred people at most. This appears to me to be a scatter-gun logic approach that is without evidence and I believe devoid of logic. Why would we spend thousands on such a trial when we know, according to the department's own records and from the minister's own speech, that just over 4,000 people each year self-report that they have an issue with addiction, drug or alcohol and are unable to fulfil their job activity requirements because of this addiction?

At the moment we accept that certificate from an medical professional or an allied health professional, but we do nothing about the addiction—nothing from a social welfare perspective to meaningfully assist that person to address that addiction. The evidence currently before us suggests redirecting the funds allocated for the drug trial to target people who self-identify and that that support should be flexible, evidence based and tailored to the individual. Importantly, that support should be under the guidance of specialists, so that the person can receive assistance and support by way of counselling through to intensive behavioural therapy and, in some instances, in-patient treatment.

It cannot be accepted that we leave people without a direct pathway to support, and the best approach to ensure this is, in reality, to provide workplace strengthening in the medical and social services sector, greater specialist training supports and increased funding for telehealth, so that specialists can reach out to professionals working with patients suffering addiction in rural Australia. Some of the workplace strengthening will require federal government support and some state government support, and the best way for this to occur is through a sector-led working group to work closely with governments, both state and federal, to create a national addiction strategy.

One of the most concerning findings raised during the Senate inquiry process was the estimation of unmet demand. We know that approximately 200,000 Australians each year seek treatment for addiction. Estimations of unmet demand sit somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000. This is a guestimate, and a rough one at that, and is just unacceptable on so many levels. In the Senate inquiry, Professor Alison Ritter, Director of the Drug Policy Modelling Program for the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, gave evidence that there had been modelling done to establish state-by-state estimates of unmet demand, but that modelling, despite requests, has not been done publicly.

Debate interrupted.

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