Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The election result is terribly disappointing for many Australians—not all, but many. Not so much for us on this side of the House, but for the millions of people who voted for Labor and who share the values we represent. There are millions out there who desperately wanted and still want a change in government in this country. Those people are completely forgotten, ignored by the government and indeed laughed at during question time, like the people in my electorate of Bruce.

I'm not aware of one single election commitment that the government made for my electorate—not one. Not one thing was promised in the City of Greater Dandenong, which is the second most disadvantaged municipality in Victoria—not one. There are 190,000 people who live in my electorate. Nearly half of these people have an annual income under $41,600. They don't get a tax cut. Maybe they get a few hundred bucks at best, compared to the $11,000 tax cut that I get and everyone in this parliament gets because of this government's priorities. Around 7,000 people in my electorate rely on Newstart to try to get by. They don't get a cent. Twenty thousand pensioners in my electorate are rightly worried that this government will again try and cut their energy supplement and reduce their pension. Pensioners right now are angry at the Liberals' too-little too-late change to deeming rates, which is continues to sneakily reduce the pension for millions of Australians.

There are desperate people, thousands of people, in my electorate who've been waiting for years for this government to simply process their claim for asylum. They're now hungry and vulnerable to appalling workplace exploitation and sexual exploitation. Homelessness is increasing. Deputy Speaker, you should see the queues in the soup kitchens and the food banks every day in my electorate because this government took away the $247 payment which was all they had to survive on. It was all they had, and it's gone. The most vulnerable people in Australia, the people who need the government most of all to survive, do not feature in this government's priorities—not one bit.

One need look no further than the NDIS. The Liberals built their flimsy surplus on the back of cuts to disability and a $1.6 billion underspend. It should be a source of shame. You rabbit on, government, about quiet Australians, but the truth is that's just political waffle. It's cover for the cruelty and the lack of care you inflict on the people who most need help. For me, the most important quiet Australians—the ones that matter most—are the people with no voice and with no political power; not those who choose to stay silent and get rewarded for their trouble. Speaking in support of Labor's NDIS bill in 2012, the now minister stated

We all know we need a new system of support based on need rather than state based rationing. The individual must be at the centre of this … able to pick the supports, aids, equipment and service providers of their choice.

Well, right now in my community that's not the experience of far too many people. Most people who approach my office now would be delighted to continue under the state based support they had previously from Victoria. It's the Commonwealth's rationing now that has them living in fear. The NDIS has been starved of resources. Tens of thousands of Australians are missing out each year. The average recipient now is being short-changed by $13,000 a year. On average, participants are using only 50 per cent of their plans, because they can't access the services.

But it's not just about money. The NDIS is being undermined by the Liberals' ideological obsession with attacking, cutting and privatising—the P word—public services. Take the NDIA's staffing. When established, it was projected to have a peak staffing level of 10,595 permanent public servants by last year, a professional, capable staff to help Australians with a disability to access the support they deserve. But that was trashed by the Liberals in 2016. The Prime Minister, when he was Treasurer, decided that 3,000 staff would be enough: 'That will be plenty.' So how, people may ask, is the work getting done? Are 3,000 people actually able to do the work of 10,595 people? Funnily enough, no. The Liberals' insidious staffing-level caps—the ASL caps as they're known—don't save money. What they do is force the agencies to privatise—to outsource—and to waste money on expensive temporary labour hire workers instead of skilled ongoing, cheaper public servants. We have desperate families waiting up to a year for a plan, and as long again for a review when its gone wrong because their initial plan didn't provide the right support. You should get it right the first time. It's cheaper. Plans are now shuffled between and glued together by five different, inexperienced labour-hire workers for over a year.

What the government is doing to cut and outsource the NDIS is bad, but it's not unique. It's all part of the Liberals' ideological escalating attack on public services. It's an irrational agenda of privatisation and cuts. In my first speech—I'll quote myself, as the ministers love to do in question time—I said:

… great societies have great public services, which require excellent public servants …

The Australian Public Service is one of our nation's most critically important institutions. It's responsible to the government but also to the parliament and the people for service delivery and policy advice. A responsible government should see itself as a steward of the APS, nurturing its capability and its knowledge, which has been built up by taxpayers over decades. It's capital, if you like. But in the first five years after coming to office in 2013 the Liberals cut the number of public servants by nearly 15,000. That represents a cut of nearly 10 per cent of the entire Australian Public Service just in the first five years of this mean little government. No wonder people can't get through to Centrelink or get their disability plan done or get a visa for a family member to visit or have their citizenship application processed. No wonder the Liberals consulting and corporate mates are growing so rapidly in Canberra, and no wonder the rorting private labour-hire firms grow ever larger, feeding expensive casual workers to agencies simply unable to employ staff to get the job done.

Of course, no-one even knows the true picture, because the Liberals are addicted to secrecy. They avoid answering questions. They won't tell the truth about the extent of labour hire and privatisation. Apparently no-one knows. No bureaucrats know and no ministers know. It just happens. What's the government's rationale for these cuts? There is none. Literally, the only reason the government has given is that they thought it would be a good idea when they got elected to return the public service to the size it was when John Howard left office in 2007. Since 2007, Australia's population has grown by four million people, or nearly 20 per cent—and their response was to cut the Public Service by 15 per cent. Aside from the growth of the population, the demand for public services has grown even more rapidly because of our ageing population. The challenges we face as a nation are immense, requiring complex policy responses, but the Liberals' brain-dead, moronic response is just to keep cutting, privatising things to their private sector and consulting mates to make a profit on.

These cuts are not necessary to balance the budget—far from it. They sometimes pretend they are, but the truth is that APS salaries now comprise less than four per cent of the Commonwealth budget. Cutting the Public Service again and again is not structural or fiscal reform, and it doesn't save money. The Liberals are wasting taxpayers' money with this obsession with privatisation and outsourcing. We learnt last year through the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit that the staffing caps have driven a shocking blowout in expenditure on private consultants and contractors. This is not political spin. I'm going to give you two quotes. In its submission to the inquiry the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet noted:

With the implementation of staffing caps in the Australian Public Service, agencies have more frequently needed to engage external contractor and consultancy services to fill key roles. Through removing ASL caps—

the government could do that—

agencies may have greater flexibility to recruit specialist staff at a reduced cost.

And the ABS put figures around it, as they do. They told the inquiry that contracted ICT staff are twice as expensive, and non-ICT staff are 125 to 150 per cent more expensive, than public servants to employ. These figures, which do not even include the recruitment fees—you know, those spotter's fees you pay to the agencies—make clear that this high human capital cost therefore has a significant impact on ABS costs and budgets.

This is not an academic debate. It's not 'a bubble debate', as the Prime Minister would say. The Liberals' agenda of cuts and privatisation is hurting every Australian who relies on quality public services. It's not just the NDIA. Take Centrelink for example. Right now, Centrelink is being privatised piece by piece. It started in the 2017 budget when the government cut 250 Centrelink jobs, and since then another 2,750 call centre jobs have been privatised. Thousands of labour hire employees are replacing the public servants. They're sitting there in the department. They're paying overheads to these dodgy private firms to do the same job because the government's so ideologically obsessed with privatisation and cuts.

Over the last two years official figures show that DHS—apparently they've now changed their name to Services Australia; they reckon that might improve things!—spent more than $880 million on labour hire contractors to staff their privatised compliance function, that's robo-debt, and their privatised call centres, that's the one no-one can get through to. Privatisation hasn't improved things for age pensioners, the unemployed or families needing support. More than 46 million calls to Centrelink went unanswered last year. For 5.3 million of those calls, people just gave up. They were abandoned and they hung up. Centrelink pretend that the standard processing time for an age pension is about 49 days, but everyone knows, when you dig into the stats, that most of them take far longer. Then there's the immoral, possibly illegal, robo-debt extortion of the most vulnerable Australians—the debts they cannot disprove but do not owe.

But the worst is yet to come. Things are going to get worse because, unbelievably, the Liberals are now hell-bent on privatising Australia's visa and citizenship processing system. There is a $1 billion tender out right now—the tenders are with the government—which would see thousands of jobs cut from the Department of Home Affairs and for-profit contracts given to Liberal mates. If there's one thing that should be done by public servants, surely it's the assessment and the processing of visa and citizenship applications—people who come to our country. Who can stay? It's extremely private information.

The government will tell us solemnly that we have to privatise it as it will deliver better service at a lower cost. It's absolutely true that we need better service. The Department of Home Affairs is a complete mess. It's a broken department. The most common problem every day in my electorate, and I know the member for Calwell's electorate, because we've spoken about it, is people who are frustrated and crying for help with the visa system or their citizenship application. The government has cut so many staff and so much funding over the last few years—they cut $180 million in the 2016-17 budget—that the system's in crisis. The backlog of visas grows, and there are now over 200,000 people in Australia just hanging out on bridging visas. Their lives are in limbo. They're on bridging visas because they're desperately waiting for years for their partner visas, business visas, student visas and, even now, dependent child visas to be processed. I have Australian citizens who've fallen in love, got married overseas and had kids for a few years come into my office, and their kids are sitting at home on the couch playing Xbox, and have been for a year, because they're literally too terrified to leave the house. They can't start school in a public school until they have their permanent resident visa, or their parents have to pay astronomical fees. Their parents can't afford the medical insurance, and they're not covered by Medicare, so the kids are literally playing Xbox waiting for their visa to be processed.

This approach is straight out of the failed conservative playbook overseas. It goes like this—we've seen this movie—first, they cut the services to create a crisis. Then they tell us the only answer is privatisation. This is my prediction: the private operator, a government mate, soon introduces two fee scales—higher fees for premium services that rich people can pay, and other fees for most Australians, like people in my electorate, who will be told by the Liberals to just suck it up and wait. Second, over time—once the capability of the public sector is being destroyed, just like has happened in the UK—the tenderers rise the prices. The successful tenderer establishes a monopoly. It will be hard to the point of impossible for anyone to compete. Then there'll be up-front costs for government to later insource the function, like has happened in the UK, and the taxpayer gets royally screwed for decades. And third, the private operators donate generously to the Liberal Party.

The evidence for this is right out there in public, in the tender documents. It was reported that in industry briefings for the tenderers, the department noted 'the potential for offsetting the cost of building a new online platform by providing premium services'. Now, that's public service speak for a two-class system based on how much people are going to cough up for their visa. A private operator will chase more profits through higher visa service fees. This undermines the integrity of the program and creates a two-class system, which Australians should roundly reject. It's un-Australian. Just have a look at Britain, at what a mess the mass privatisation of core public services has been. It has higher costs; it has worse services. Then there are the contractors who go broke and are bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions because they're 'too big to fail'. That happens. Look at the Carillion disaster. The government have to abandon their plans to privatise visa and citizenship processing, and, in particular, abandon their plan to privatise it to Scott Briggs, a close Liberal Party mate of the Prime Minister's.

Finally, I'd just observe that this is not the end. Two days before the election, when the government thought no-one was listening, they announced another $1.5 billion of sneaky little cuts to the Public Service to pay for some of their election promises. It's called an 'efficiency dividend' because they're too dishonest to tell us what else they will cut. They've hidden the impact. Their cuts and privatisation agenda are fast approaching a national crisis. Members of this House should call them out forcefully and daily, because Australians do not want their services privatised. I challenge any of the opposition members to go into their electorates and ask their voters: 'Do you want Centrelink privatised? Do you want the department of immigration privatised? Do you want Medicare processing privatised?' You know the answer is no.

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