Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It would seem that the government has lost interest in its own legislation. It has run out of speakers on its side of parliament. There is a very long list of Labor speakers because we're very concerned about this bill and this welfare 'reform'—and I say 'reform' because really this bill is full of, firstly, malice and, secondly, ignorance. This bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform) Bill 2017, has been done for blatantly political purposes. You can see the conduct of the minister: he's been out there, often peddling the sorts of welfare-bashing headlines that we see in tabloids from time to time, with misleading information given about whole communities. Most recently, there was one in my community where a whole suburb was blackguarded on the basis of 80-odd people not showing up for interviews. So a suburb full of people—a suburb and an area with, literally, thousands of people—was blackguarded on the basis of the few who perhaps didn't show up for interviews for one reason or another. So we know that this government comes to this bill and to this parliament in this area not in a spirit of practical improvement or of trying to design a social security system which provides people with income support between jobs and endeavours to give them help as they seek work; instead, it really does bash them around the ears and adopts a sort of pernicious approach.

There are three areas of this bill where the government's approach will be very, very damaging to their political processes. It's not just that it's wrong—and we know it's wrong—but that it will actually damage them politically, and I think they should think twice about the nature of the politics about this. The first area is schedule 9, about mature-aged workers. My experience with mature-aged workers, in my area, is that often they left school in year 10 or year 11 or year 12 and went to work in factories. They went to work, day in, day out, for years and years and years. They always rocked up at work and always did the right thing. And then one day their factory was scheduled for closure.

I meet people like that all the time. In the middle of the last campaign, I went down to Avery Dennison in my electorate, a little envelope manufacturer—well, it was little; it used to be big, with 400 employees at its height, but it was down to 40 employees during that campaign. And those 40 employees were being made redundant. Those workers, some of whom had started there as they left school and had stayed there for a very long time, did a good job, paid their taxes and did the right thing. Those workers found that when they got made redundant, not only did they not get any help from the social security system, because of the liquid assets test—which the government is further changing in other bills before this House—but that their job prospects were very grim indeed. If you are in your mid-50s, or your early 50s, or even if you're just over 40—if you're my age, 45—your job prospects can be very, very grim.

The problem is that those people, by any measure, have done the right thing in the contract between citizen and government, if you like: they've worked very hard over a very long period, they've contributed to the system and they've contributed to their communities. Often, what they want is a fair go. Now, at the moment the government says to those workers who might not be able to find work again—and that's the grim reality in some instances—that they can fulfil the activity test, which is the number of jobs applied for per fortnight, by volunteering for 30 hours per fortnight. Frankly, when many mature-age workers apply for work they sometimes send in hundreds and hundreds of applications only to get hundreds and hundreds of rejections. And you get a letter of rejection if you're lucky; often you get no response at all. But volunteering allows them some measure of dignity. They can keep volunteering to fulfil the activity test and to contribute to society, as they've done over decades, and not—I don't want to say 'be harassed' by Centrelink or by the job agencies—be put through the ringer in the same way that, say, a young person is who hasn't contributed to the system and who hasn't paid taxes over decades may be. That's a fair acknowledgement of the situation that many mature-age workers find themselves in.

We know that there is age discrimination. We know that the job prospects for these workers can be very grim indeed, even when the labour market is operating well on the macro scale. Often there are regional impacts or individual impacts in terms of their skills. But we know that the work ethic of many of these mature-age workers is really, really good, and that they are often very distraught about not being able to find work. Volunteering gives them a role in the community and in society, and it frees them from the work activity test—which can sometimes be frustratingly cruel, I think, for workers in that situation.

So the government should be very, very careful. In regard to mature-age workers, I doubt very much that this bill would ever have been applied in the Howard years. I don't think that John Howard would have put these mature-age workers, who—through a combination of economic change, age discrimination and lack of skill formation—have now found themselves in a very difficult situation indeed, through this. So I think that the government should think again, and that when the Senate inquiry gives them an opportunity to rethink this that they should think about the provisions for mature-age workers very carefully indeed.

The second area where this bill will impact on my constituents is on jobseekers generally, with the demerit system that would be introduced—ostensibly to avoid people missing interviews and the like. I've had a fair bit to do with this area. Often, I struggle to see the point of the sometimes onerous nature of these compliance systems that we put in place: often they're riddled with error or with human frailty, and often people who are trying to do the right thing get caught out by them. The idea is that we would apply more financial penalties as a result of this new system coming in. At the moment it's projected that the 72,881 financial penalties that are applied every year will rise to 147,000 financial penalties every year. Now, I understand that might sound like a good idea on talkback radio, or when people are bending the arm at the pub. But in reality it diminishes people's capacity to find work and it diminishes their capacity for human dignity, because often the result of those financial penalties is to impoverish them and sometimes to make them homeless. It is an entirely counterproductive thing to apply financial penalties. It doesn't motivate the individual concerned—I can assure you. It often exacerbates the very problems that they face.

The last provision that Labor has concern with is the drugs tests. I can understand people think, 'This is a terrific idea. If only we quarantine their income, that would yield better results.' We had the BasicsCard. I'm not against it in principle, because we implemented a trial in the city of Playford, which is in my community, and I was an advocate of that trial, but I can tell you from personal experience what we found. What we found worked better were the wraparound service that were put in place at the same time. They were what yielded better results. What yielded better results was actually having Centrelink go out to the community. They went out to places, like the Peachey Belt, and had the Centrelink officers visit the community. Those things yielded better results.

This government would have more credibility in this area if they hadn't cut a billion dollars out of the flexible funds in health and other areas, which provided the very services that might assist people getting off drugs. We know, from personal experience and from every credible study, that people are addicts. Addiction is a very complex thing and you need to deal with it in a complex fashion. You can't just apply simplistic notions to it. For all the reasons that were given before, we think these drugs tests are (a) waste of money that could go into treatment, and (b) unlikely to yield any positive result. There are plenty of examples from Missouri and New Zealand and all over the world that suggest you catch very few people, and that the result from catching people is often that you could have actually just spent the money on services and done the job there.

For all these reasons, we think this bill is a very, very flawed bill. It comes down to the government's intentions in this area. This is a government which is in desperate and dire straits politically, and so it is grasping at the most desperate of territory and the most desperate of proposals to try to fix its political problem. I think, particularly for the mature-age-worker proposals, the government will find that these provisions, when implemented, will infuriate a large group of people in the community who are very good citizens, and who find themselves unemployed through really no fault of their own, as a function of a changing economy.

I think the government will rue the day this bill came to parliament and rue the day the minister brought it here, because, once you get past the cheap headlines, what backbench members will find is that they have to face up to these individuals in the community and they have to face up to the results, and the results will not be pretty. This bill, hopefully, will be sensibly amended in the Senate. I hope we can save the government and the community from this minister.

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