Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take pleasure in speaking on this particular bill, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Income Reporting and Other Measures) Bill 2020, but perhaps it should have a very different title. As we heard the member for Maribyrnong say earlier, perhaps it should be called 'trying to fix our robodebt mess', 'trying to fix our robodebt stuff-up', or perhaps 'trying to fix an IT implementation that went badly wrong and took money off innocent Australians who didn't owe any money'.

We will be examining the detail of this particular bill very closely and putting the government on notice to get the implementation of the changes correct this time, unlike with the robodebt implementation, which saw many, many Australians pay money when they didn't have to. We're very concerned at the very high risk of stuffing up the implementation of these changes once again. As I said, given that this government stuffed up robodebt and has run down Centrelink services to the point where pensioners are waiting for months to get the pension, the last thing we want to see is people having their payments cut off or being saddled with unfair debts because Centrelink failed to manage this properly.

If people have questions, they should not be left waiting on the phone for hours. All of us in this House—and, I'm sure, in the other place as well—are rung by constituents who have been left on the phone for hours because Centrelink had been cut right down when it comes to staff; it's been run into the ground. The simple fact is that the government doesn't care about people on social security payments. Whether it be pensioners, the unemployed or those with a disability, those opposite do not care. You can see that they don't care from the actions that they've taken.

Since they've held the reins of government, they've tried to cut the pension on a number of occasions. At every single budget they've tried to cut the pension. We hear them say that the best friend that pensioners have is the coalition government. Well, that is absolute rubbish! If you look at the track record of this coalition government, cutting the pension is in its DNA, and the actions of those opposite have proved it. They have tried to cut the pension and increase the pension age to 70 in every single budget, making Australians who have worked all their lives and paid their taxes work longer.

In the 2014 budget they tried to cut the pension indexation, a cut that would have meant pensioners would be forced to live on $80 less a week. This unfair cut would have ripped $23 billion from the pockets of every single pensioner in Australia. Again, in the 2014 budget they cut $1 billion from pensioner concessions, a support designed to help pensioners with the cost of living. How mean and cruel spirited. The people that earn the least amount in our society get the cuts—an $80 cut.

In that same 2014 budget they axed the $900 seniors supplement to self-funded retirees receiving the Commonwealth seniors health card. The Liberals tried to reset the deeming rate threshold in 2014, a cut that would have seen 500,000 part-pensioners made worse off. Then they come in here today and spout this nonsense that the coalition and the Liberal government is the best friend that pensioners have.

In 2015 they did a deal with the Greens to cut the pensions for around 370,000 pensioners by as much as $12,000 a year by changing the pension assets test. If you were a pensioner and you'd saved a bit and had a bit on the side, they lowered the rate of the assets test, meaning that you lost money in your pensions.

In the 2016 budget they tried to cut the pension to around 190,000 pensioners, as part of a plan to limit overseas travel to pensioners to six weeks. We saw the same legislation go through this House before Christmas. How mean to tell a pensioner, who has worked all their life, who has paid their taxes, who has contributed to the building of this nation, that you're only allowed to go overseas for six weeks, no longer, otherwise you get cut off and you have to reapply for your pension. Many people have the absolute right in their pension, in their old age, when they've retired, to go wherever they want for as long as they like. And no-one has the right to tell them that they're not allowed to travel or that they have a time limit on their travel. No-one has that right to tell someone who's worked their entire life, paid their taxes, helped build this country, that they cannot go overseas for a certain period of time. This is just another way to try and cut pensioners' savings, cut pensioners' income, while they give to the big end of town. They're quite happy to spout that and to carry on about it.

These figures are fact. These are things that this government tried to do, so I'm very concerned about this particular bill as well. I've got to say that what we saw with the robodebt disaster was an absolute disaster. Money was taken away from people that didn't owe money. For many constituents that came to see me in my electorate office, we wrote to the minister and asked them to investigate. They went to the appeals and they were deemed not to have owed the amount of money that they were told they had to pay. In fact, we did some calculations, and 80 per cent of people who came to see me in my office either were given money back or had that debt dropped. What about the thousands that paid that money and haven't got it back, or perhaps believe that the government, because it's a letter from the government, from Centrelink which is a government agency, is correct? We have no confidence in this government when it comes to dealing with pensioners and social security.

We saw, as I said, the robodebt scheme unleash this faulty algorithm against the social security recipients who, even if they reported their income 100 per cent correctly, were slapped with debts in the thousands.

This bill, which is named the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Income Reporting and Other Measures) Bill 2020, should quite simply have its name as 'Fixing up the robodebt stuff-up that this government didn't have the ability to admit to'. They didn't have the ability to take responsibility and say, 'We were wrong' and drop it. We have been dealing with for at least that two years, and it has been raised in this place continuously.

As I said, we have absolutely no confidence. We'll be watching this bill, scrutinising it, and ensuring that when it goes to the Senate there is a real eye kept on it to make sure that they don't stuff it up again.

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