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

If there's one thing this government's good at, it's punching down. When the economy is tanking, when nearly one in three young people either doesn't have a job or doesn't have enough hours of work, when pollution's rising and we're in a climate crisis, and when we're suffering through record drought, what does the government do? It turns around and attacks some of the most vulnerable in our society. It's exactly what you do when you've got no agenda to deal with some of the big problems that Australia is facing: the inequality crisis and the climate crisis. It's straight out of the old Margaret Thatcher Conservative playbook, of saying, 'If in doubt, punch down and hurt people who are least able to defend themselves.'

I subscribe to a very simple proposition: you don't lift people out of poverty by taking away their rights. At the moment, if you're on Newstart—if you haven't been kicked off it by this government—while you're looking for a job, you are living below the poverty line. In fact, you are living so far below the poverty line that it is a barrier to you finding work. You don't have the extra money to go and get a haircut for a job interview. You don't have the money to go and pay for things if your dentist or your doctor happens to charge you a gap and doesn't bulk-bill. You don't have the money to buy a new set of clothes or go and do that training course. In fact, you don't even have the money for the bare essentials.

We hear from Australian after Australian who is having trouble finding work under this government—because this government just isn't creating the jobs, and I'll come to that in a moment—that it is a struggle to stay alive and they have to miss bare essentials like food. If, at the moment, you are unlucky enough to be made redundant by your employer and find yourself without a job, in many instances you have to go without the bare essentials, like food, because this government is forcing you to live in poverty. And what do they do? Do they turn around and say, 'Well, maybe we can lift Newstart to lift people out of poverty,' as the Greens have been campaigning for for a very long time? No. They say, 'Let's turn around and blame the people who don't have jobs.'

I don't subscribe to the government's arguments. I don't subscribe to this idea that we have to be an uncaring society where people who are doing it tough have to be kicked and kicked and kicked again. But let's just take the government's logic for a moment. The government's logic is that people who are on welfare at the moment are some kind of work-shy people who should be looking for work and therefore should be subject to punitive treatment. That only holds if the jobs are there, and the jobs just aren't there.

One of the things that this government has failed to address—and it is going and kicking the victims, instead of looking in its own backyard at the problems that it has caused—is that, since the GFC, young people in Australia are in dire straits. As I said before, nearly one in three young people either doesn't have a job or doesn't have enough hours of work. Why is that? Well, underemployment amongst young people—people who've got an hour or two of work here or there, who might have a casual job or might be getting a bit of money doing Uber deliveries or might have a casual shift but who want more hours of work—is at high levels. Underemployment levels got higher after the GFC, and they have not come down under this government. So, when you add the youth unemployment rate to the youth underemployment rate, we have a pool of people in this country who don't have stable entry-level jobs to go into.

It is even tougher for you if you happen not to have gone on and got a tertiary degree or a TAFE or university qualification. If you happen to have left school and are looking for a job in this country, the entry-level jobs just aren't there for you. They got wiped out after the GFC, and this government has done nothing to bring them back.

Young people in Australia are at the moment facing an underemployment crisis. We are at the point in Australia where it is no longer enough to go to school, study and do all the right things, because the secure jobs aren't there. Under the employment stats that this government hide behind every time they boast about employment rising, if you work for an hour a week you're counted as employed. That's why looking at underemployment is so crucial; they are the people who have got an hour or two here and there but are crying out for more. It is going up, and it has stayed at persistently high levels under this government.

The government could, if it wanted to, say: 'Well, we have clearly got a problem with so many young people being unable to find the hours of work that they want in meaningful, secure employment. We've clearly got a problem with casualisation and insecure work getting out of control. Let's start some employment creation programs and start simulating the economy. Let's use the record-low interest rates that we've got at the moment to borrow to build housing for people who can't afford it or to build renewable energy to make sure that we avert the climate crisis. Let's give unemployed people a chance to get work on some of those projects.' The government boast about Snowy Hydro, which of course they opposed when it first came around. Well, where is the Snowy Hydro for the 21st century to deal with the climate crisis? Let's get ourselves towards 100 per cent renewables, let's use record-low interest rates to borrow to build affordable housing for everyone so that no one has to go homeless and let's create jobs for all these people. That's what the government could do if they wanted to. But, no, the government say, 'We're going to turn around and kick them.'

Coming back to what I said before, it is no wonder that young people at the moment are looking at the society that this government is creating for them and seeing that even if they do the right thing, even if they finish school and go on and get qualifications, it is no longer enough, because they won't get a good stable job in the way that people used to be able to before. If you want to try and get into the housing market, you will find that housing is at record highs and that you are most likely to be priced out. Then you will look at the future that the government wants you to have, where the record drought is going to become the new normal and where we may hit global warming tipping points as soon as 2030 unless we get at least two-thirds out of coal by then. If you're a young person at the moment, you read that in the newspapers and you think: 'Might this government turn around and do something to help me, like a job creation program, lifting me out of poverty, giving me a bit of hope that we're going to have a liveable future, because they're not going to let global warming get out of control?' No. What do the government do? They say: 'We are going to presume that you are a drug cheat. Just because you don't have a job—despite the fact that we haven't created any for you—we are going to treat you as a suspected criminal, and we are going to take away your rights.' Taking away people's rights has never lifted them out of poverty. Taking away people's rights is not the way to give them dignity. Taking away people's rights is not the way to give them hope.

I shouldn't have to need to go to this, but it is worth recalling that, even on the merit of it, no-one thinks this proposal is a good idea. No-one who works in this field thinks it's a good idea. They all say that once you start treating people like second-class citizens, quarantining their money and saying: 'You don't have the right to spend it yourself. We're going to treat you like a suspect every day, where you have your liberty infringed on, and we're going to subject you to random drug tests. And, if you do drugs, we are going to quarantine you and control your life'—no-one thinks that is a way of dealing with addiction or dealing with people's problems. In fact, you might as well rename this bill the 'Increase in Crime Rate Bill', because what you're going to do is stigmatise people and kick them while they're down, so much so that they're going to decide to disengage from the social security system altogether. And where are they going to get their money?

They're going to get it by breaking into people's houses and taking their TVs, computers and DVD players. That's how they're going to get it, because that is what you have to do if you're struggling with addiction and this government turns around and says, 'We are going to punish you even further.'

As I have said, none of this is about dealing with the issue of drugs. It is about a government deciding to punch down as a way of avoiding the challenges that are facing us as a country, and hoping that the public will fall for it. If you did want to deal with the issue of drugs, if that is what concerns you, then for goodness sake listen to the experts, who say that, when someone has an addiction problem, you treat it like a health issue.

I used to smoke cigarettes, and it took me about five goes to quit—not because I didn't want to; it's just that that's what addiction does. Even though you know it's wrong, you still go back and you want to have another cigarette and another cigarette. It often takes several goes and a fair bit of help to get off it. Other drugs of addiction are even worse, more powerful and more pernicious in their effects. Addiction takes away your ability to make a lot of rational decisions. It takes away your ability, in many instances—especially addiction to many of the harder drugs—to maintain your social relationships. In fact, you often end up hurting them, because they are the ones who are closest to you; they might be the ones you hit out at or that you go and steal money from.

That is what addiction does to you. Addiction eats away at your social connections and your ability to interact with the world. It makes it harder in many instances to get a job and to do all of those things. So, if that's what you are concerned about, the first thing you would say is, 'Well, what do the experts say is the best way to deal with addiction?' And they will say: it's to provide people with the support they need to get healthy again. They say: doing this stuff is the worst thing you can do, because you push people further and further away into isolation.

The government boast that they now have the lowest number of people on welfare. Well, I tell you what: people who get kicked off because they decide to disengage with the social security system because they don't want to be treated like second-class citizens and then turn to crime to make ends meet are the kind of people that the government is boasting about. 'Hey, isn't it great! We pushed up crime levels because we forced people out of the social security system and they don't appear on the stats anymore.' These are people. These are people who might have lost a job through no fault of their own and who might be looking for the next one and might be finding it hard.

If you happen to be in one of the areas of this trial, there are not always a lot of jobs, or good jobs, available for you, especially if you're coming in at entry level, especially if you're coming straight out of high school without any other qualifications. When we have unemployment and underemployment at record highs, when we have people disengaging more and more from the workforce at that level, these are the people who deserve our help and support. If we don't help them, we will be creating a lost generation of young people who have finished their schooling but who don't have entry level jobs to go into anymore because the GFC smashed them and the government hasn't done anything to rebuild them, and who then find themselves being pushed away from the social security system. If the government comes in and kicks them even further, at a time when they might need a bit of help to deal with an addiction issue, we are going to be creating a class of people who are excluded, and potentially permanently excluded, in this country.

So, if the government cared, it would be doing a whole bunch of things that are different to this. The department boasted during the Senate inquiry—I don't know if members know this—that it conducted no consultation before it announced where the trials were going to roll out. It will create problems there. They are going to be problems that the government won't care about but that people, especially young people, are going to have to live with. This bill is all about distracting from the government's problems by kicking people who are least able to support themselves.

We are a wealthy country. It should be within our wit to create meaningful, decent, secure jobs for everyone who wants them, to tackle the underemployment crisis and to say to people, 'If you have fallen between the cracks and you are finding it difficult either to get a job or to deal with an addiction issue, we are here to help you.' I prefer the open hand to someone who is in trouble; this government is giving them the closed fist. They are punching down because it is all that they know. I hope that this bill is defeated in the Senate.

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