Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In a wealthy country like Australia, no-one should be living in poverty while they're looking for a job, and that is especially the case in the middle of a recession, while we have one million people unemployed and many more underemployed and getting by on crappy jobs, with an hour or two of work a week here or there that doesn't allow them to pay the bills. We have an unemployment and underemployment jobs crisis in this country and, so long as that is the case and the government refuses to guarantee a job to everyone who wants one, we should be making sure that no-one lives in poverty. We know that before the pandemic hit hundreds of thousands of people in this country were living in poverty while trying to look for jobs that just weren't there, and they were living on $40 a day. You can't live on $40 a day, which is why, even before the pandemic hit, everyone from the Greens to business groups and economists was saying, 'We've got to lift the rate so that people aren't living in poverty.'

Then, when the pandemic came along, all of a sudden the government was about to be exposed, because a huge chunk of people in this country who had never thought they would find themselves without a job were all of a sudden about to find out just how tough the government had made it for people who don't have work. So the government introduced the coronavirus supplement, a move that we applauded because, all of a sudden, people in this country who were doing it tough had the ability to live above the poverty line. As one person was quoted during the Senate inquiry into this bill as having told Anglicare Australia:

This payment has been like lighting a dark room full of promise and wonder, only to turn the light out because the committee has the power to do so. Please ask the committee to leave the light on for us all.

That's what the person said, because, for this brief period when the government was forced to admit that Newstart or JobSeeker is not enough to survive on, people across this country were all of a sudden able to lead something like a normal life. Being on $40 a day isn't living; it's just barely surviving. You spend all your time just trying to survive and get by, and that actually makes it harder to get into work, because you don't have the money to go and get your hair cut or buy the clothes that you need or do the bit of training that might help you get that next job. You are forced to just spend every day working out how you are going to stretch that $40 a day to survive and feed yourself and ensure that you've got a roof over your head. So for this brief period, as that person told Anglicare Australia, it was like lighting a dark room full of promise and wonder, because all of a sudden so many people who had been living in poverty were now lifted out of poverty.

The fundamental point that the government had to acknowledge, and did acknowledge when they lifted the coronavirus supplement, was that Newstart or JobSeeker was never enough to live on before. The thing is that the cost of living didn't all of a sudden double during the COVID pandemic and it's not all of a sudden going to halve as we start to get the pandemic under control. The costs of keeping a roof over your head and feeding yourself and your family are going to stay. In fact, they're going to increase as the cost of living goes up. But, instead of acknowledging that, the government is actively choosing to plunge people into poverty, and that is what they are doing by cutting the supplement.

We've got to be crystal clear about this: the government could choose to keep people out of poverty, but it is choosing not to do so. And, as we head towards Christmas, the government is plunging an additional 330,000 people into poverty. That will mean the government will have forced a total of 1.16 million people below the poverty line by the end of this year. Just reflect on this for a moment. At a time when the government has managed in its budget to have $99 billion a year in handouts to the big corporations and to the ultrawealthy and at a time when the government has managed to legislate tax cuts of thousands and thousands of dollars a year to the top end of the income spectrum, it is choosing to force 1.16 million people into poverty.

About 2½ million adults and more than 1.1 million children will experience cuts to their income support payment just after Christmas time. And so, as we get towards the end of this hellish year and as we go towards the summer break and people want to spend time with their families and their friends, the Prime Minister's rhetoric of, 'We're all in this together,' suddenly disappears. People are going to be plunged into poverty. It's going to happen at the end of this year, and it's going to get worse at the start of next year.

The government says, 'It's alright, because we're recovering from the pandemic.' Can I tell you what? In Melbourne, so much of the Melbourne economy is based on bringing people together and gathering them in small places. It's what the hospitality economy is built on, but, critically, it's what the entertainment sector is built on with things like the comedy festival, the food and wine festival and, of course, performing arts and live music. It is all based on getting lots of people together. No matter what happens more broadly, social-distancing restrictions of some form or another are almost certainly going to continue for some period of time, if not indefinitely. In other words, the business model that so many people have relied on has been decimated and is going to continue to be in many places. As a result, across the country, you have 12 people for every single job vacancy. There are 12 people for every job that's there. So this rhetoric of, 'Just go and find a job; it's okay—we're all bouncing back,' is just not borne out by the facts, and it is going to be harder in many places, like Melbourne, for industries to get back on their feet and get back to where they were, if they are ever going to be able to do it at all.

What the government could do instead is say, 'As we come out of this pandemic, we are not going to give $99 billion a year as subsidies to big corporations and the ultrawealthy and we are not going to give tax cuts to millionaires,' which Liberal and Labor supported. They could say, 'Instead we are going to put the money into making sure that everyone in this country lives above the poverty line.' That's what the government could be doing. For all their rhetoric about jobs, what they could be doing is offering people a job guarantee. The government could be using this opportunity, this crisis, to invest in a green recovery that will tackle the climate crisis, the inequality crisis and the economic crisis all at once, investing to get us not just to 100 per cent renewable energy but to even more so that we can start exporting our renewable energy to other countries and expanding rather than cutting our education, aged-care and health sectors, all the while building half a million new public housing homes over the next 10 to 15 years that would create 40,000 jobs and 4,000 apprenticeships. With the government invested in nation-building, planet-saving projects, we could turn around and guarantee a job for everyone who wants one.

What is this government doing? Instead of guaranteeing a job and lifting people out of poverty, they're giving billions of dollars to big corporations in handouts and to the ultrawealthy in tax cuts. And, as a result, inequality in this country is going to grow. And do you know what? The fact is that cutting these payments is actually going to prolong the recovery, because people who are without a job and who are on low incomes spend most of the money that they receive on essentials. It's not being squirrelled away into wealth portfolios or shares or going on a yacht. It's going on basic essentials, because you need to do that to survive. So, the money that people on low incomes get, gets turned around as they spend it straightaway on food, on housing, on the essentials of life. That is what small businesses—retail, clothing—and housing and all of those sectors rely on. They rely on that money being there to go out the door again, because that's how you buy things.

It's no wonder that lining up to criticise the government's moves are not just people like myself and the Greens, who are concerned about making sure that no-one lives in poverty in a wealthy country like ours, but you've also got, at the other end of the spectrum, consultants like Deloitte, lining up with many other economists, making the point that removing the supplement altogether by Christmas—admittedly it is going a bit later, but not much—would cost the economy $31 billion in reduced spending and the equivalent of 145,000 full-time jobs over two years. So it's not just unfair, it's bad economics to cut the coronavirus supplement.

What is crystal clear is that the government does not understand what it is like to live on $40 a day, because if anyone had any basic understanding of it you would not be bringing legislation before parliament and putting figures in the budget that say, 'We're going to go back to $40 a day next year.' That's what the government is doing. The government is saying to people as they head into Christmas, 'Get ready to live with significant insecurity for a long time, because pretty soon it's going to go back to $40 a day.' And they're saying that to people who are looking for work when there are 12 people looking for every one job and the jobs just aren't there.

What's the answer? The answer is a permanent increase to this sub-poverty-line payment that we force people who are looking for work to live on. And, in the middle of a recession, as we are battling and hopefully getting a pandemic under control, that is when we need to give people support. I make the point again: the cost of living is not going to halve from the height of the pandemic to now, but the payments that people get will if the government has its way. That's why the Greens are pushing to keep the full rate of the coronavirus supplement and effectively make it permanent so that $1,100 a fortnight is the figure that people who are looking for jobs can live on. And let's do it at the same time as we invest in those planet-saving, nation-building projects that allow us to offer a guaranteed job to everyone who wants one so that we get back to full employment in this country—not the trickle-down definition of five per cent unemployment, but two per cent where everyone who wants a job is able to get one, where there's a job for everyone in this country who wants one and where, if you find yourself without one, then you live above the poverty line.

We can do that, and we can fund free education, and we can get dental into Medicare, and we can build those half-a-million new public housing homes so that everyone's got a roof over their head, if we have the guts to stand up to the big corporations and say: 'It's time you paid your fair share of tax. We are going to cease giving you handouts.' As I said, this budget has $99 billion a year in those kinds of handouts, so the money is there. The choice is whether we want to keep giving money to big corporations or whether we want to give it to everyone in this society so that no-one in a wealthy country like ours lives in poverty. That's what the Greens will be pushing for, to retain the rate at $1,100 a fortnight. No-one should be living in poverty, especially in the middle of a recession.

See this speech in context