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

I rise in support of the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Coronavirus and Other Measures) Bill 2020 as drafted, as far as it goes, and note at the outset that Labor has called for many of these measures for months. The government's self-congratulatory prattle needs to be put in context. Many of these things could, and should, have been done months ago. But it's better late than never. This bill gives pensioners a few crumbs off Prime Minister Scott Morrison's table. It's two $250 payments. The government is racking up $1 trillion of Liberal debt, hurtling towards $1.7 trillion, and that is what pensioners get—$250. The urgency to get this through to the Senate is because that first $250 payment crumb is on 27 November. This is the government that froze the age pension. It is hoping with this $250 that people will forget over seven years of Liberal attacks on the age pension. It wouldn't be a Liberal government, we've come to think, if there wasn't another cut tried on the pension and attacks on age pensioners. This payment is of course for disability support pensioners and carers—$250 of hush money, in effect.

The second aspect of the bill, which we do support, is some concessions for people trying to prove their independence for youth allowance and Abstudy in the Morrison recession. And there is also—this is an interesting measure—a temporary incentive for young people in agriculture to prove their independence for the purposes of youth allowance. If they earn $15,000 over 13 months, the government will take that as evidence of independence. Frankly, I'm sceptical about whether this will work. The government has tried these incentives many times before—and, every single time, they announce one thing but under-deliver. The previous incentives to get young people and people on Newstart to go to the bush and engage in rural work have never achieved their targets. So I will be interested if the minister—whichever muppet they serve up to sum up the bill—could answer the question and inform the House how many young people they project or expect will be accessing this benefit. How many people do they think are going to be incentivised over the next year to go bush and do agricultural work?

The fourth change, which we welcome, allows parents to access paid parental leave where employment has been impacted by coronavirus. Again, this is stuff that Labor has called for for months—entirely common sense. Frankly it is administrivia which, I would bet my bottom dollar, the department served up to the ministers months ago, but it has taken them this long to actually get around to bringing it to the parliament—so constipated is the government's policy process while they are busy making announcements but never actually delivering.

The fifth measure, which we strongly support and have been calling for for a long time now, is the changes to stillborn baby payments and infant death payments. The bill defines a stillborn child and makes much fairer arrangements for families who lose a child through stillbirth or whose child dies before their first birthday. Currently, and quite unbelievably—I wasn't aware of this until I actually delved into this bill—if a family lose a child to stillbirth, they get a higher rate for the first stillborn child and then lower rates thereafter. I suspect that most people in this place would have direct or indirect personal experience of people in their family and circle of friends who have gone through the pain and trauma of this. One of the saddest funerals I have attended, a couple of years ago, was for someone who was very close to me who had lost a baby to stillbirth a week before the baby was due. It took them 12 months before they could get to the point emotionally where they could gather the family and friends and have that shared grieving. I can't imagine the pain. To lose a child is every parent's greatest fear, and it is something that I know members of this House have gone through.

The measures are fine, as far as they go, but I want to turn now to the second reading amendments moved by the member for Barton—which, in effect, go to what the bill does not do. As is often the case with this government when it comes to the vulnerable in Australia, it is not about the little crumbs that they throw at people, the little tweaks that they make, the administrative tidy-ups that they call policy and reform; it's about what they don't put in their legislation but should. The fact is that the hangover from the Morrison recession, however long it lasts, is going to be longer, harder, deeper and harsher than it should be because of the government's tardiness in introducing a wage subsidy and the fact that they are still making active choices to exclude hundreds of thousands of Australians from support that they need—casual workers, people in universities, people working in the arts and entertainment sector. And now, unbelievably, it seems that they are still proceeding with their nasty, ill-timed cuts. With the conditions we're seeing now, you couldn't think of a worse time to make cuts to the support that people are relying on.

Probably the worst thing about this budget in my view, given the people I represent in what is socio-economically the most disadvantaged council area in the whole of metropolitan Melbourne—people who rely on government to get by, people who need some support to get back on their feet through whatever their life circumstances have come to—is that this budget bakes in a cut to Newstart, or unemployment benefits, or whatever you call it now with your marketing spin. You thought you'd rename the program!

If you say 'job' a lot then everyone might think you have a jobs plan, might they not! I know—what a cunning plan, Baldrick! We're going to rename Newstart 'JobSeeker'! Then we'll call the wage subsidy 'JobKeeper'! Then we'll call our $3 billion of cuts to TAFE 'JobTrainer'! They may as well call their wage subsidy 'JobFaker', may they not? We learned at Senate estimates that it's not going to be 450,000 jobs, like the Prime Minister and Treasurer told us yesterday. The Treasury's over there telling the public it will be 45,000 jobs. They should call that one 'JobFaker'. We'll get on to 'MateKeeper' later, won't we—your rorts with Australia Post and stacking the AAT? That's a topic for another time.

The government are running around with their little talking points, saying: 'The recession's over. As the Reserve Bank governor has said, it might be over. We might be slipping back into positive growth, so it's all over; it's all better.' Try telling that to the 1.6 million Australians relying on JobSeeker. I don't think the government has any idea of the abject terror that people trying to survive on JobSeeker have of what's coming down the pipe from this government's budget—a cut back to $40 a day. They tell us—maybe give us a little hint—that maybe they're not going to do that. Tell us what you are going to do.

As the member for Barton so rightly said, 'People deserve the dignity of some degree of certainty.' People who are unemployed budget. They actually count their pennies, to use that old phrase. They know where every single dollar is going—every single dollar. All we're asking for is certainty—to tell people who are surviving on JobSeeker what your plans are and tell them what they're in for. Reassure them they won't be returning to $40 a day. Is that really too much to ask? That's what our second reading amendment does. It says that it puts a positive obligation on the minister to 'announce a permanent increase to the base rate' of JobSeeker and to 'extend the coronavirus supplement' until at least March. The minister has that power. She doesn't need our help here. She doesn't need our advice. She could get an instrument and sign it already. The parliament has already, as part of emergency measures, given the Minister for Families and Social Services the power to extend the coronavirus supplement. But she won't do it.

This bill is a missed opportunity to increase JobSeeker. There are 1.6 million Australians relying on JobSeeker, and the bill should have given them certainty and a permanent increase. How we treat the most vulnerable is a measure of what kind of society we really are, and they deserve certainty. By not giving people that certainty, they face an uncertain and anxious Christmas. The most effective stimulus, as all economists keep telling us, is not tax cuts. It's boosts in the payments in the pockets of the most vulnerable and poorest in society, because they spend every dollar. By not giving certainty and by baking in this cut to $40 a day, that will mean less to spend on local and small businesses in the coming months.

I'd be interested, when the minister muppet turns up with the summing-up dot-points speech to read out, in how many jobs will be lost when JobSeeker is cut. That would be good for parliament to know. What would the economic modelling say when JobSeeker is cut back to $40 a day—or whatever number the Prime Minister's got in his bottom drawer in store for people? How many jobs are going to be lost when that money is taken out of the economy?

We could also talk—as the second reading amendment touches on—about the one million jobseekers. These are the one million people of the 1.6 million people in the Morrison recession languishing on JobSeeker. We could talk about how the budget has abandoned unemployed Australians over 35 who are ineligible for their wage subsidy. Older Australians are the largest single cohort of those 1.6 million Australians on JobSeeker. That older cohort face structural barriers—age discrimination, as the evidence shows—and enormous difficulties in getting back into the workforce, and the government is not making them eligible for their wage subsidies. They're forgetting about them. So I do touch on the second reading amendment that Labor is urging the government to accept. They are to 'extend the $250 per fortnight coronavirus supplement until March, in line with JobKeeper'; to provide better support—not just the crumbs-off-the-table hush money which the Prime Minister announced belatedly in the budget—to age pensioners, disability support pensioners and carer payment recipients, who, as the member for Barton outlined, are 'facing increased costs in protecting their health because of the coronavirus pandemic'; and to 'announce a permanent increase to the base rate' of JobSeeker.

Before closing, I'll make a few remarks about pensioners. The government were caught out with their freeze to the pension. I don't know how they could have thought pensioners wouldn't notice that the government were freezing their pension. Pensioners know about the small increases in March and September; they are baked into their financial planning. The government thought they could just get away with it: 'We'll freeze the pension. That's okay, isn't it? Why would anyone worry about that?' It was only because of the pressure that Labor put on the government—through the media, with stakeholders and with so many thousands of community members—that they acted on it. We fought this government's disrespectful and cruel pension freeze.

Of course, the government has a long track record of cutting, or attempting to cut, the pension. This context is important when considering our second reading amendment, which calls on the government to do more for pensioners, because with the government in its eighth year—after seven years of this government—the record of cuts is astounding.

They still haven't adjusted the deeming rates. They made a little gesture that way a few months ago, but the deeming rates still haven't been adjusted. They're higher than the typical saving rates that pensioners can get. The upper deeming rate is 2.25 per cent and the lower deeming rate is 0.25 per cent. Goodness only knows where pensioners with a little bit of cash in the bank are supposed to get 2.25 per cent—ask anyone in the real world. Maybe the investment banker mates they appoint to the Australia Post board and ASIC or stack their government appointments with through their 'MateKeeper' program could advise pensioners on where to get 2.25 per cent. They might get a Cartier watch for their trouble! You never know; it could be their lucky day.

The government's record of pension cuts should never be forgotten. The Liberals and Nationals, at every budget, have been obsessed with cutting the pension. In 2014 they tried to cut pension indexation, which in 10 years would have meant pensioners being forced to live on $80 a week less. It's lucky we stopped that one. They cut $1 billion from pensioner concessions in 2014. They axed, in 2014, the $900 seniors supplement to self-funded retirees receiving the Commonwealth seniors health card. Continuing the theme in that horror budget, they had a crack at resetting the deeming rate thresholds, a cut that would have seen half a million part pensioners worse off. Then there was the shoddy, shameful deal with the Greens political party, who still haven't lived that one down amongst pensioners—they remember it. They cut the pension to around 370,000 pensioners by as much as $12,000 a year by fiddling the pension assets test. Hundreds of thousands of people were kicked off the part pension completely. Then they broke their promise. I remember that. That went well, didn't it? They said, 'You'll keep the healthcare card,' and they broke that promise. It took them a year or two before they finally backed down and said: 'That wasn't such a good idea. Maybe we should have kept that promise. People were a little bit mad.' In 2016 they tried to cut the pension to around 190,000 pensioners as part of a plan to limit pensioners' overseas travel to six weeks. The government's own figures show that this would have left 563,000 Australians currently receiving a pension or allowance worse off. Over 10 years, in excess of 1.5 million pensioners would have been worse off.

Of course, they spent five long years—this was the current Prime Minister's policy; he sold it as the social services minister and then sold it as the Treasurer—trying to increase the age pension age to 70. There was no empathy and no understanding of what that would do to people, like so many in my electorate, who had engaged in heavy manual labour, whose bodies were wrecked from a lifetime of hard work. They weren't going to treat them with dignity. He only backed down after they rolled Malcolm Turnbull. Remember Malcolm? Whatever happened to him? This guy, his best friend, had his back. They only backed down after they realised they were hurtling towards an election and had to cauterise every wound.

This government's record on the pension is shameful. I commend the second reading amendment to the House.

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