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

I speak strongly in favour of the government's conduct with the coronavirus supplement. I have to confess, I've travelled a fair few corners of my electorate and I've never met a Centrelink and Newstart income replacement recipient not happy with the coronavirus supplement. I challenge the other side of the chamber, in all their confected outrage, to find a single jobseeker not satisfied with the coalition government. I'm happy to meet that person and learn.

This is a nation that has overwhelmingly voted with their feet to say that the work we did in those early weeks, in February and March of this year—many members of parliament, certainly on this side, stood in Centrelink queues and talked to worried recipients. There were 600,000 or 700,000 Australians who found themselves, a number of them for the first time, seeking the support of the Australian welfare system. It fared so incredibly well, in no small part, due to the incredible work of staff in Centrelink offices around the country, who were exemplary. When we look back on that March period, everything was very uncertain. Once uncertainty has been stripped away, in a nation that dealt so wonderfully with COVID, we can look back at the welfare system and be truly grateful.

It's interesting that the so-called architects of the welfare system, on the other side of the chamber, often denigrate the system and call it '$40 a day'. They know damn well there's not a single Australian in this country on $40 a day. When you don't read the Centrelink documentation and you just take some headline number and ignore the supplementary payments you can come up with a fancy number, but there's not a single Australian receiving that payment. It's curious also because that's exactly the amount Australians were getting when Labor were in government. But I didn't hear the '$40 a day' echoing in these chambers from 2007 to 2013.

I think most Australians—certainly any taxpayers who talk to Labor members of parliament—would respect the fact that we tailor the Centrelink arrangements, and sometimes that requires tapering. Tapering is all about providing assistance based on need. You've seen JobKeeper, highly responsive for 700,000 Australians, probably halving the number of people who otherwise would have been completely in penury. We know that number of Australians, around 700,000, have come back into work or boosted their hours as a result of a recovery, predominantly, in household consumption and customer and business confidence. That's all coming back, and that's great news.

You'd expect, therefore, to have a tapering in government assistance. You'd expect there to be pathways back provided through income support for Australians to train—to be able to do online training at a time when face-to-face work wasn't always possible. We paused Work for the Dole projects and individual placements for a time. You'd expect a government to do that, and you'd expect a government to plan into the uncertainties of next year, when some of the restrictions and bottlenecks will be forced upon us by people in overseas countries, where people can neither travel nor confidently work, attempting to come back to Australia. I've mentioned in this chamber before how there's almost a tin ear on the other side to the idea of skilled visas—the 10,000 overseas workers who come here to keep the wheels turning in situations where we can't find Australian workers. That's also of great concern, because that number increases every month. These are overseas workers, working particularly in mining and agriculture as well as services in the major cities. Those overseas workers aren't there, and we're hoping that is a further stimulus to get Australians back to work.

This government is single-minded about getting Australians back to work. We're not over in the corner quibbling about whether it's $40 a day or not; we're actually doing everything we can to open up those pathways back to work. It's not easy to do it. Every job that's created is predominantly the result of an Australian thinking about how they can add more people to their workforce in their small business. They're real people, not just poring over spreadsheets but thinking practically about whether they dip into their own pockets and create another employment opportunity. It's not an easy process or an easy time to be doing it. We say to those Australians, 'Thank you so much for making those jobs possible where, probably, those opportunities may not have existed.' You'd understand an employer basically saying: 'Well, we'll write off the rest of the year; we'll cruise through to Christmas and think about employment next year.' But they're not doing that. They were doing it in September, October and November. They were doing it while states were shut down. They're doing it while people can't fly back into this nation. Employers around the country are the unsung heroes of COVID. That is because, when we dropped everything in March, the pathway back—and some on the other side have recognised it—is always harder, slower and more painful: skills wane, confidence falls and women, in particular, elect not to go back to work because it's all too difficult at the moment, conditions aren't right for them and the opportunities aren't there. So we need to be mindful that many young workers, utterly reliant on wanting to get into the workforce, never had that chance.

These are the great tragedies of COVID, but they're also opportunities for the government. The coronavirus supplement was done in an extremely short period of time. I want to emphasise just how hard it was for Commonwealth departments to basically redesign the payment system in such a short period of time. This is something that we should be supporting, and this legislation today is something about which the other side just need to be humble and honest enough to admit that it worked.

While we may be tapering, Australians intrinsically understand that in the new year we have to allow for that tapering and the tapering plays an important role. The tapering is a tiny signal that we're getting back to work next year. That's not to say that there's going to be a job for every person who seeks one, but remember that, since March of this year, final household consumption has returned to almost where it was, confidence at most levels is back to where it was pre COVID and the cost of living in Australia has not significantly changed. I'm not for one moment going to say it's easy to live on government payments, but it's not so fundamentally different that we have to be supplementing those payment systems in income replacement forever and a day.

It's opportunistic right now to do it if you're in the Labor Party, because there's not much else to talk about, is there? There's not much else to talk about when you're over there except playing on those fairly valid concerns about how things are going to work next year. A lot of people are very nervous about next year, but it doesn't stop the government from recognising the huge move back into the workforce and that, increasingly, it's going to be possible in every corner of this nation to do just that.

It's important to taper JobKeeper at the same time. The Australian Taxation Office has remarkably granular data through Single Touch Payroll for amounts of turnover. They can see how much GST is being paid. They can see the sectors that are recovering and the ones that are not. JobKeeper is agile enough to look after those who were in work back on 1 March. JobSeeker looks after everyone else, and it's done it impressively. My personal view is that we need to continue to watch the progress of the economy because Australia is just one cyclist in the global peloton of economies. We want to make sure we stay at the front. We stay at the front by looking after international education, our greatest service export. We stay at the front by making sure we get skilled visas in as soon as it's safe to do so and by making sure we have hotel quarantine that actually serves the needs of the nation on an industrial scale. We are living in an era of a global pandemic. For goodness's sake, you have to figure out a way to hand out food and dunny roll to people in a hotel room without infecting the workers that do it. That's not a hard challenge, but it's too much for 'Disaster Dan'. He let the disease out and it got into Queensland. Of all the public policy challenges we have seen in our time, delivering food and Uber Eats and dunny roll to people in a hotel room should not be the zenith. This should not be so incredibly complicated that we need to cap the hotel quarantine process and be the only nation in the world too timid, too gutless and too fearful to allow citizens to return. We really can do better than that.

As I return back to the context of this debate, the coronavirus supplement did its job and it did it marvellously. We can't yet predict where things are heading in 2021, but, by goodness, this final calendar quarter has looked really encouraging. I say to the government: we'll be watching carefully. There will be further tapers, and I support those tapers. I've personally made the case that if we were to taper, we could make the gap in the taper effectively an employment subsidy for jobseekers. If the coronavirus supplement were to fall by $50 a week in the future, that $50 a week could accumulate in the form of an income bank for jobseekers, so if they were to be employed, there is a wage subsidy available for the employer. What that does is actually move those who have been waiting for work the longest to the top of the queue. It's a proxy for the urgency of getting these people back to the workforce.

I want to finish with a little-known observation from the OECD; they do some interesting work. What they looked at across the developed world was the number of hours at the minimum wage that an individual has to work to escape poverty. They looked at a few family configurations and they looked at singles as well. What they found is that in Australia, just eight hours of employment a week is required for a single to escape the poverty line—which is a percentage of the median adult income—and around 15 hours for a family to do so. Just 15 hours of work a week to escape the poverty line. That may seem rather simplistic, but it was the lowest in the world. Australia has the greatest incentive to find a way to more evenly spread the pool of workable hours among our population, and we have the greatest likelihood of being able to achieve that. Despite some of the highest barriers to employment in the world and the highest minimum wage in the world, we know that if we can get people even some employment, they don't need many hours to escape poverty. This is our nation's great opportunity. If we were to save just some of that tapered payment in the form of an income bank for a jobseeker, that makes that jobseeker—potentially stream B or C—the most employable person in the shortlist. If we can assist those people, many of whom have no other employment in the household, then we can liberate that household from perennial welfare and intergenerational welfare. It is something to think about.

The tapers will continue, and I'll support the government in doing it. To be honest, if that team over there were in government, we'd be supporting them in tapering too; we wouldn't be taking cheap shots. We're in COVID and we should appreciate that one day COVID will end, and so too will the supplements.

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