Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on this matter of public importance today, outlining the way-too-many ways in which this government has failed vulnerable Australians. It is a long list indeed, and my Labor colleagues before me mapped out a few of those.

But I want to start with the unmitigated failure of this government to in fact do anything about the national scourge of domestic and family violence in Australia. It is unforgivable—unforgivable. This government had full knowledge of the spiralling increase in domestic violence throughout COVID-19. It knew the way that those prolonged lockdowns, for some families, actually caused not only increased levels of violence for women who were already in violent relationships and their children, but also a phenomenal increase in new incidents of family violence in Australia. The government had that knowledge and those reports at hand. It knew the number of brutal murders that continue to occur in Australia—at least one each week. Despite all of that, there was not a single dollar, not a single bit of new funding, in this budget for women and children fleeing family and domestic violence.

An opposition member: Shame!

It is a shame. It is utterly shameful. Likewise, it is shameful that this government oversaw robodebt. We are about to have a court case in relation to robodebt; I believe it is coming up—perhaps tomorrow. Yet this government saw fit to allow a shocking sort of sneaky algorithm to actually go against vulnerable citizens in this nation. It was a shocking, harsh algorithm that really attacked people with disabilities and their carers, the partners of veterans and people working in the casual and gig economies—people with often insecure income. This was a painful and shameful algorithmic act of political cruelty—that's what that was—and this government is being called out for it. And may the court run its process, because we know that—despite all the promises that this government made to remedy that robodebt—the government has still failed to deliver on its promise to refund victims of the scheme, knowing that there are at least 3,000 dead people's estates that are still owed robodebt refunds. How you lie in bed at night with that knowledge is beyond me. This government knew for a very long time that robodebt was not just a heartless algorithmic weapon of political cruelty; it was, indeed, illegal. It was illegal, and yet it continued in its course.

But let's not forget also the shocking treatment of a whole lot of people who have not had the benefit of any support whatsoever from this government throughout the global pandemic. Let's not forget the students and the universities of Australia that have been left hanging out to dry—and very deliberately so. This government has had at least three occasions where it could have voted to include universities in the recovery process; it chose not to. Let's not forget those more than one million casual employees in Australia who were left with nothing and left out to dry. This is a shameful government with a shameful record. (Time expired)

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