Fiona Phillips (Gilmore, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Maribyrnong for bringing this very important motion to the House. This year has no doubt been tough. So many people who have never been unemployed before suddenly found themselves in the queues at Services Australia, or Centrelink as we know it, applying for government help. When you have always had a job and never thought you would have to rely on the government for help, it is a really tough thing to do. It's a story I have heard over and over again. Not only that, many people had to navigate that system for the first time, creating a Customer Reference Number, or CRN, and getting registered in the system. It could be confusing and difficult, and it often needed guidance from a person on the other end of the phone.

In my electorate of Gilmore on the New South Wales South Coast, we saw more than 5,000 additional people accessing JobSeeker and youth allowance between December 2019 and June 2020. That was almost double the number of recipients receiving help due to the pandemic. But it didn't start with a pandemic. We had the added challenge of the bushfires, with more than 1,200 homes lost or severely damaged and many more people impacted financially.

From early on, I insisted that the government make the disaster recovery payment and the disaster recovery allowance available to those who had been impacted. Both of these payments are accessed through Centrelink. With everything our community has been through this year it can sometimes be easy to overlook essential workers, like those at Centrelink. These public servants come to work every day. They came through the bushfires, floods and the pandemic to make sure that others were getting the help they needed. They endured extremely difficult circumstances, with funding cuts and staffing cuts making their jobs more difficult than they should be. They listened to the harrowing stories of their friends and neighbours throughout the bushfires. They were not strangers in call centres overseas. They were locals who were also getting up every day to the smoke that permeated everything. Many had received evacuation orders and felt the stress and trauma we all did, not knowing where the fire would hit next. Their own homes and families had been under threat, but they came to work. They listened to people's stories. They helped them navigate the system and they made sure they were getting the help they needed. It was tough work. It was emotional and stressful, but they did it.

Then came the pandemic. There were lines out the doors, for hours, of people who—overnight—had lost their jobs. The government's online system couldn't hack it. It crashed from the surge of people going online to access the services. So, instead, people went into their local Centrelink office. It has been a really tough year for everyone across Australia. Our public servants in Centrelink were not immune to what was going on around them. They also did it very tough. I want to thank them for everything they did throughout these very trying times, for being there when we needed them most.

The reality is, this government has made the job for workers in Centrelink harder than it should be. There have been Public Service cuts and restrictive guidelines for disaster payments that haven't fit the reality of the situation on the ground. Robodebt is another clear example of where the government has utterly failed Centrelink workers. The list goes on. But there is another wave of challenges coming: when the government's planned cuts to JobSeeker come into effect and when the government's planned changes to JobKeeper force people back into unemployment queues once more.

We simply cannot afford to see those crucial lifelines ripped away too soon. We need a permanent increase to JobSeeker. We need to see the coronavirus supplement extended further, so it can do its job in supporting the most vulnerable in our community. JobKeeper must keep going for as long as it is needed in the industries that need it. Again, I call on the government to not rip away these supports too soon. We are not out of the woods yet. While restrictions remain in place, local people, local workers, local small-business owners, will need this support. Ripping it away means that our workers in Centrelink will be forced to have increasingly difficult conversations with their neighbours. They'll be forced to turn desperate people away. They'll be forced to work longer hours and watch longer queues. It simply isn't fair on anyone.

See this speech in context