Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The answer will surprise that side over there. That's actually what people want. People dream of a job. There might only be two people in the gallery, but there are tens of thousands of Australians stunned by your inability to accept—through you, Deputy Speaker—that drug testing of welfare recipients, to make sure they're ready to work, is thoroughly reasonable. It is not punishment. This building was randomly drug tested without any problem at all. Let's be honest: you can't just sit around, hands folded, saying: 'Intergenerational welfare—it's just going to stay that way forever. Household unemployment, with no-one having a job and children growing up never having a role model with a job, is okay. It's just tough luck.' It is not a life sentence. It's something Australians can transition out of.

What's the proof for what I'm saying? Let's have a look at how state Labor run homelessness. How do they run public housing? They take the housing stock, the transitional housing, and they fill it all with permanent residents. So there's no transitional housing anymore, and the public housing system can't respond. You've got no chance of getting new people in until old people, who have been there for a long time, just depart the premises at some point. State Labor have no idea about how to run public housing. What happens? You get the public housing and then you stay there for life? Do you think that homelessness and public housing are a life sentence? No. We transition out of public housing into private housing, and we work every day in that direction.

Where's the evidence for that? Let's do a bit of actuarial analysis of how that opposition, when in government, ran the welfare system. Since that time—thank goodness, it was 2013—we've seen 390,000 Australians no longer on the welfare system; they're back in the real economy. There have been 90,000 removed in the last 12 months, 2017-18. As long as a government keeps its eye on the transition from public payments and public transfers to moving into the real economy, it's creating vacancies for those that truly need transitional housing.

There's plenty of lip from the other side. None of them are in Queensland, so they don't know just how bad it is.

We believe that every working-age person who's healthy has not only a right and not only an obligation but the true challenge to ultimately enter the workforce. Those in this government never resile from that and never take their eye off it. As long as we have a Labor opposition chirping about how it's an absolute breach of human rights to do a drug test, Australians will continue to laugh at Labor's approach.

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