Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform) Bill 2017 implements a range of complex measures across the portfolios of Social Services, Employment and Human Services. Labor is committed to ensuring that the proposed measures are in the best interests of supporting and empowering Australians, not demonising and isolating them. We believe in fairness, we believe in equality and we believe in justice. Many of the measures proposed in this bill certainly do not promote these principles. In fact, many of the measures in this bill will deliver the exact opposite for Australian jobseekers and people suffering with drug and alcohol dependency. We note that there are measures we could potentially support if they were separated from other measures in the bill, and we will move amendments in the Senate to do just that. That's exactly why Labor referred this bill to a Senate inquiry—to ensure that it's scrutinised and to ensure that all relevant information on the proposed measures is available.

However, unfortunately, the government has rushed this process through. It has only allowed a short Senate inquiry into the proposed changes and has scheduled the bill for debate in the Senate on the day that the report is released. That's just not good enough. The government wants to shield these proposed changes from the scrutiny of not just the Labor Party but experts in the field being affected by them.

I want to speak to several schedules in the bill. Schedule 3 concerns the cessation of the wife pension. The wife pension is a non-activity-tested payment. It's been closed to new applicants since 1 July 1995. It's paid to female partners of age pension or disability support pension recipients who are not eligible for pensions in their own right. The wife pension was granted to women solely on the basis of their partner's eligibility for the age pension or disability support pension. As at 2020, it's estimated that there will be around 7,750 wife pension recipients. According to this bill, of these, 2,250 will transfer onto the age pension and around 2,400 onto the carers payment. These women will be no worse off under schedule 3 of this bill. However, 2,900 women will be transferred onto the jobseeker payment. These will be women below pension age who do not meet the activity test for the carer payment. Transitional payments would apply that mean that they will continue to receive the pension rate of payment rather than the lower jobseeker payment rate, but its indexation would cease, meaning that they would be worse off in real terms over time.

It's estimated that around 200 wife pension recipients who reside overseas will no longer be eligible for any social security payment as a result of this measure. These recipients are under age-pension age and would not be eligible for either another payment under an international agreement or a portable payment. So, in actuality, this means that these 200 or so women will up to be $670 worse off per fortnight. The group of low-income women who will be transferred onto the jobseeker payment will suddenly be left with nothing to live on—including the 200 women who are recipients of the wife pension and reside overseas—other than their partner's pension, and they probably have been out of the workforce for many years. It would seem reasonable for this group to be grandfathered to avoid them facing financial crisis, particularly given their small number and, therefore, the minimum cost of doing so.

Schedule 9 of this bill proposes changes to the activity tests for persons aged 55 to 59. It removes the ability of Newstart recipients and some special benefits recipients between the ages of 55 and 59 to fulfil the activity test by volunteering for 30 hours per fortnight. The overwhelming evidence provided by experts to the Senate inquiry considering this legislation was that mature jobseekers actually face significant adversity, including ageism, when trying to enter the workforce. The proposal seeks to adjust the obligations of the 55-to-59-year-old cohort by forcing them to enter the workforce, but in actual fact the government hasn't provided any additional support to help them overcome the significant barriers they face.

Experts in the volunteering sector are particularly concerned that the changes may reduce the number of people volunteering in Australia. As somebody who works very closely with community organisations and not-for-profit organisations in my electorate, I understand that they rely very strongly on volunteers, and any kind of negative impact on the volunteering sector is also going to negatively impact those organisations that are providing vital services to people within my electorate.

We also note that the participation and unemployment rate for the 55-to-59-year-old cohort is similar to the population overall but, once out of work, the length of time a person aged 55 to 59 spends looking for work is 73 weeks, compared to averages of 40 and 50 weeks for those of different age groups. A while ago I held a jobs forum in my electorate, and that was overwhelmingly attended by people within that cohort—people over the age of 50 who are unemployed. I was quite astounded to know that these people don't need more training. They aren't unemployed because of a lack of skills or because of a lack of education. In fact, some of them have PhDs and some of them have engineering qualifications, apart from 20 to 30 years of experience in the workforce.

The government has announced a new program targeted at helping people over 50 back into the workforce called the Career Transition Assistance Program, due to be rolled out in 2020. What I'd like to say about that is that it really doesn't recognise those barriers that our older and mature workers face. Those barriers aren't about their level of skill and they aren't about their level of education. As I've said, many of them have a high level of skill and many years of experience in the Australian workforce, and many of them have education qualifications. In fact, one gentleman who attended my jobs forum has an engineering degree and 20 years of experience in the engineering sector. But, because he's over the age of 55, he's been unemployed for five years and is finding it very difficult to get back into employment.

They don't need retraining. Our older Australians and our mature workforce don't need retraining. What they need is a substantive change in the system to recognise and value the skills, the experience and the education that older and mature workers bring to a workplace. I would suggest that it might be more worthwhile to promote mature workers in workplaces and to incorporate some substantive measures that address the level of ageism that is occurring in our workplaces, because it is those kinds of systemic and substantive barriers that older workers and mature workers, at least in my electorate, are facing. It's not a matter of their not having any skills. It's not a matter of their needing more training. It is a matter of their skills, their experience and their education being undervalued by the employment market, and I think that's where we need to focus our efforts in that space.

I would like to move on now to schedule 12 of the proposed bill. The fact is that the government really hasn't provided any evidence to support the establishment of its drug-testing trial. In fact, evidence from overseas actually goes against what the government is proposing. In New Zealand, for example, a drug-testing program for welfare recipients was introduced in 2013. In 2015, only 22 of 8,001 participants returned a positive result for illicit drug use. The detection rate was much lower than that for the general population of New Zealand estimated to be using illicit drugs. So, if there is no evidence for this proposal, what information is available to show that it will work? We simply don't know.

The government hasn't told us what the cost to the taxpayer of this testing will be, nor what kind of test it will be. Addiction medicine specialists are concerned about the technical aspects of this particular trial, and still no information has been forthcoming. A long-term cannabis user who is trying to address their drug use will still test positive up to six weeks after their last use. But this doesn't tell us if they are using currently. So how can this test, a test that we have no details about, tell us if a person has actually stopped using drugs, if the drugs are still detected in their system six weeks after they've stopped? These are the kinds of concerns that we are raising but that seem to be swept under the carpet by the government. The government wants to pass this bill without asking the substantial questions about exactly how this part of the bill—exactly how this proposed drug trial—is going to operate.

Medical professionals and the drug and alcohol treatment sector have also raised significant concerns about these measures and their impact on the community. These organisations include St Vincent's Health Australia, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, ACOSS and UnitingCare. In fact, no health or community organisations have actually come out publicly in support of the trial. On top of this, the government is claiming that the availability of treatment will be a criterion for selecting trial sites. The Senate estimates revealed that the Commonwealth doesn't actually have access to data on the availability of treatment and has to rely on the states to provide this information. So, again, there is a lot of confusion about how this is actually going to work and, again, no evidence that treatment places will actually be available.

The treatment sector tells us that there are long waiting lists for treatment all around the country. At a meeting in Perth about two months ago, the treatment sector said exactly the same thing: huge, long waiting lists for people who are looking for help with their drug addictions and for beds within drug treatment facilities. The trials that are being proposed by a government whipping up a policy on the run will just increase pressure on an already overburdened system. There is no plan for people who are identified as having an actual drug problem and who can't access treatment because it is not available. So what do we do? We identify that somebody has a drug problem, but then there is nowhere to put them because the drug treatment facilities are already overburdened.

Again, we see a government that is wanting to pass a bill without the support of the organisations and specialists who know best and without giving us any information on how it will work. We can't simply continue to ignore the advice of experts in the field. The advice that comes from those working at the grassroots—those who are working with people who are drug addicted—is telling us that this drug trial is simply not going to work. In fact, it will have adverse effects on those people who are trying to rehabilitate and discontinue their drug use.

Now, we know that the kinds of punitive measures like those being proposed do not stop illicit drug use. You cannot stop drug use simply by incorporating a range of punitive measures or by punishing those who are caught up in this illness. Testing like this can actually lead to people simply using less-traceable but more-harmful drugs like, for example, synthetic cannabis. It can also encourage people to turn to other drugs that aren't being tested for as part of the trial, such as alcohol. What we can see is that the proposed measures do not promote fairness or justice or compassion for jobseekers.

I know that receiving welfare and looking for work is stressful and difficult enough as it is. I've been there. I know what it's like and I've lived through it. It's not something that a lot of people are proud of. A lot of people find it quite humiliating. These measures will potentially make it harder for those jobseekers to provide for their families and break out of cycles of poverty and drug abuse. They will not help or support jobseekers with drug use issues. They will just punish them and make it harder for them to address those issues. (Time expired)

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