Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What do you do if you're a government who's in trouble in the polls? What do you do if you're on the way out, you've been caught out looking after your big corporate mates at the expense of everyone else and you're pressing ahead saying, 'Let's give tens of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts to the big banks at the same time as they're being hauled before the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry and potentially facing criminal actions'? What do you do if you're a government who's sitting watching pollution go up at a time when we have a record heatwave in the Northern Hemisphere and everyone's telling us we need to make sure that we don't leave a planet and an Australia for our kids that are worse than the ones that we inherited? What do you do if you're a government under whose watch youth unemployment and underemployment have reached crisis levels so that we're at the point now where just on one in three young people in this country either hasn't got a job or hasn't got enough hours of work? What do you do if you're this Liberal government? You find someone else to go and beat up on—preferably someone who isn't going to be in a position to defend themselves. If you're this Liberal government, you don't go after the crooks in the corporations, you don't go after the big banks and you don't go after the big polluters—you go after the people who are doing it tough and who are trying to find a job and can't get one. And you blame those people, if you're the Liberals, for not finding jobs that just aren't there.

In this bill, they've decided that the way they can hopefully get a bit of an uptick in the polls—and perhaps get some votes back from right-wing parties that they're leaking votes to—is by treating everyone who's on welfare as a potential criminal. If you are on welfare, if you are looking for a job—you might have lost a job, through no fault of your own, or you might be one of those one in three young people who can't find a job or can't find enough hours of work because, since the GFC, youth un- and underemployment in this country has got worse, not better—well, what's the answer? We're going to treat you as a potential criminal and give the right for government to force you to have compulsory drug tests. You are a person who's suspected to have broken the law through having done nothing more than being in receipt of welfare, and we are going to take away your rights—that's what the government is saying to people in this country who are doing it tough—we're going to call you a potential criminal and we're going to take your rights away.

You don't lift people out of poverty by taking away their rights. You don't solve youth unemployment and underemployment in this country by blaming the victims for not finding jobs that aren't there because this government has other priorities. If you take those steps that the government is proposing in this bill, you actually make the problem worse. The government might as well rename this bill the increasing-crime bill, because that is what is going to happen. Once you say to people that if you have taken drugs and you don't follow some other steps that the government's now imposing on you then we're going to take away your money, then you force people further into poverty. If you say to people, 'We are going to take away your money,' that does nothing to diminish addiction. What it does is push people further and further away from the government system, including potential government systems of support, and it will increase crime.

I don't know how much time this government has spent dealing with people on the front line of drug addiction services, but what these services will tell you—and there are quite a few very good ones in my electorate—is that when someone is truly an addict they will start doing things that you wouldn't expect of that person when they were not subject to addiction. Addiction is like a disease. It forces you to do things just to maintain the addiction. So if you say to someone, 'You're going to have to do X, Y and Z, because we've subjected you to a drug test, you've come back with a positive result and you haven't complied with these other steps, and we're now going to cut your payments'—if someone is in that situation, where they are that in thrall to a drug, then there is every chance that they're not going to respond to it in a rational manner, as a rational, calculating, economic individual might do. They're going to make decisions driven by the addiction. As a result, this government is going to say to them, 'Well, no money for you.'

What do you think someone who is in the grip of an addiction, who now no longer has any money because the government is taking it away from them, is going to do? They are going to turn to crime to get themselves the money for the next fix. That is what the agencies in my electorate are telling me. That is what the health professionals are saying. But this government does not listen, because this is all about the politics for this government. This is all about trying to get the attention away from the fact that they're doing nothing to create meaningful employment for young people in this country. They're doing everything to give money to the big banks and the big corporations, and they're on the nose because of it. So, what do you do? Well, you try to blame someone else in order to shift the conversation. That is what this government is doing.

We have been very worried for some time about the income management proposals that lie at the heart of this bill—which says that because you're someone who's doing it tough, because you're someone who's vulnerable, we're going to take your money and tell you how best to spend it in ways that we wouldn't ever dream of doing for anyone else; we're going to treat you as a second-class citizen and take away your money. We have said from the beginning that when those proposals were first introduced—and they've been trialled and pushed down the throats of Indigenous Australians in this country—look out, because not only is it a bad idea for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders but it's a bad idea for everyone. Once the government says, 'We are now in a position to be able to dictate to you how you spend your money, and if you don't do it the way we like or you don't comply with the conditions that we put on you, we're going to take away your income—and force you to have a card, with the stigma of having to go to the shops with a card to particular shops, where they can dictate their own prices. Because you've now got one of these government-marked cards—or worse; you might have no income at all—and, once the government starts going down this road, it is going to expand to the broader population. We have said that from the beginning, and now we are seeing it in practice. Someone who has done nothing more than fall prey to addiction, who deserves our help to get out of that, and who deserves to have their situation treated as a health issue, will now not only be treated as a potential criminal but potentially find themselves in an even worse situation than they were in to start with—thanks to this government.

There are many things the government could do if it was serious about addressing the root causes of drug addiction. It could stop cutting funding to agencies. It could start with serious programs to tackle our youth unemployment and underemployment crisis in this country—and I'll come back to that, because that is absolutely crucial. Since the GFC, it has become harder for young people to find work, and the work that they find is very often part-time and, as a result—as I said before—one in three young people either hasn't got a job or hasn't got enough work. This is a national crisis. That is what we should be focusing on. What government programs can we put in place to create employment?

Why can't the government spend some of the $50 billion that it wants to spend on corporate tax cuts on building new houses for the homeless instead? That could employ some of the young people in apprenticeships, so that they could learn a trade and we could solve a social problem, all at once. That's a better way of spending the money than giving it to the big banks for a tax cut. Why don't we use some of the money that's about to go to the big banks for a tax cut to build new renewable energy in this country, like government authorities used to do in the states? And again, we'll create some apprenticeships on those, so that young people can get new jobs as apprentice electricians and get apprentice trade work. Why don't we do something about the fact that the mining boom decimated manufacturing in this country, and give some tax breaks to industry so that they can put it into building new manufacturing capacity and tie it to job creation? So instead of a big handout, we say: 'You only get support from the government if you're going to give people new jobs.'

What we've done in this country since the GFC, including under this government's watch, is scrap all of the entry-level jobs that people who finished year 10 or year 12 used to walk into. We've made it more expensive to go off and get a trade or get a degree and, as a result, we now have hundreds of thousands of young people who—at the moment—have never known a steady, full-time, permanent job, and who may never know one in the future. What should we do with them? Let's get them engaged. Let's get government back to some of the things that government is meant to be about. But instead, all this government does is run around with a big stick and say: 'It's that person's fault if they can't find a job.' And if, because they can't find a job, they've found themselves with more time on their hands than they otherwise might have and they've fallen into addiction: 'Well, we're going to punish them for it by cutting them off even further from the system.'

The thing is, probably everyone in this place—probably most people in the country—know someone in their family or in their street or in their workplace who's had a son or a daughter who has fallen prey to addiction. What you want in that situation is to know that everyone has that person's welfare at heart, first and foremost. You want to know that that person is not being treated as a political football and you want to know that the services are there to help those people get healthy again.

I think if it were anyone in this chamber's son or daughter who was addicted, was struggling to deal with it and needed assistance, if they knew that what the government was going to do was say to that person, 'You no longer have any money to live on. That's the sum total of our contribution to you. We are taking away your income', we would be horrified. If, as a result of this government, a person with drug addiction now can't pay the rent then they're going to become homeless. If, as a result of this government, a person with a drug addiction doesn't have any money at all to meet the bare necessities of life, let alone meet their next fix, then they're going to turn to crime and it will be on this government's shoulders.

For the basest political reasons, this government has taken the sons and daughters of Australia who have fallen on hard times and is making their lot even worse, all because they're struggling in the polls and don't have a positive agenda to sell. We will stand up to it. We've stood up to income management from the beginning. We'll continue to stand up to it now. We've stood up against demonising people who have issues with drugs, and we will continue to stand up to it.

Just like the previous time that the government tried to get this through and got knocked back by the Senate, I hope that this gets rejected by the parliament again, because there is a reason you can find next to no-one lining up with the government to support this. A whole string of people, who work in this field and who look after people who are doing it tough, are lining up to say, 'This is a very bad idea' and they are ringing the warning bells very loudly.

I hope that when it comes back to the Senate it gets rejected soundly again, because this is a bad idea that will hurt people. I hope beyond hope that someone I know and care about is never in the situation where, because of this government, they can't deal with the demons that they're facing and, in fact, this government turns around and makes their problem worse. I ask everyone to think if it were your own son or daughter, who was facing these issues, would you really want them to be forced to live with no money at all just because the government wanted to make a political point?

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