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

The Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Extension of Coronavirus Support) Bill 2020 is a largely unnecessary bill. The government actually doesn't need to pass most of it; it's a stunt. The government think they're being clever mixing up a few nice things with a whole lot of nasty things, but they don't even have the guts, the courage, to tell people what this bill is actually about. They're bundling things up in one bill and going, 'Well, if they vote for it, then we can say they're voting for cuts; and if they don't vote for it, then we'll say they're voting against nice things.'

There are a few things, sure, we should vote for. I don't think they actually need the power to continue the coronavirus supplement for youth allowance after December. They could probably do that; the minister almost certainly has the power to do that. But they wanted to put nice stuff in it: continued increases for income-free areas, taper rates, partner income tests—fine, good. Vote for it. They probably don't need the power, given the extraordinary emergency powers that the minister got at the start of this year to do these kinds of things during this pandemic, this national emergency. So they already have a lot of these powers but actually what this is about, astoundingly, is taking the minister's powers away—the very powers that have been used through the pandemic to provide the coronavirus supplement, to provide the increases to social security payments. The government thinks it's being clever. They don't actually want to put a bill before the parliament that says, 'We're going to cut unemployment benefits to $40 a day,' because people might actually clue in that that's exactly what they're going to do. All they're going to say is: 'Oh, we're just adjusting the minister's powers.' If these powers go, if this bill is voted up, in practice what it will do is implement a massive horrible, nasty cut to unemployment benefits.

The bill implements, in effect, the budget that the government just handed down; it bakes in cuts to unemployment benefits for well over a million Australians trying to survive on the unemployment benefit right now. It bakes in a cut to the unemployment benefit back to the old rate of $40 a day. I don't believe anyone in this House can imagine living on $40 a day. I don't think I could live on $40 a day. The evidence says anyone who tries to live on $40 a day cannot actually survive without ending up in poverty. This is a cruel, nasty, mean, vicious, vindictive and downright unfair cut by the government—a government too cowardly to even come here and fess up that that's what they're actually doing. I haven't heard many government members with the guts to come in and say: 'What we want to do is cut unemployment benefits to $40 a day. That's what we're voting for.' They buried it in technicalities and little weasel words, but that's exactly what this bill does.

It's no exaggeration to say that this is the single greatest act by any Australian government to push 1.5 million Australians into poverty. That's what will happen if this bill is passed. Let's be very clear on that. I can think of no other thing any Australian government has done—no single act, no piece of legislation passed by this House—that has, with one vote, pushed more Australians into poverty in one go. In my electorate, well over 20,000 people rely on this coronavirus supplement to boost their income support payments. So, if this bill is passed, what we're saying to those people is: 'You had $550 extra a fortnight that finally got you out of poverty so you could pay your bills and eat. We cut it to $250, and a few weeks ago we cut that to $150, and now we want to cut it to zero dollars, to push it back to $40 a day—$565 a fortnight. Good luck to you!'

The context for this is critical. The government's own budget—these are not my numbers; these are the government's numbers—says 1.3 million Australians are relying on unemployment benefits in some form. That was when the budget was handed down at the start of October, and then, a couple of weeks later, they said, 'Well, by Christmas, it's going to be 1.5 million Australians.' Then, three weeks ago in Senate estimates, they had to fess up: 'Actually, by Christmas, 1.8 million Australians are going to be relying on, and trying to live on, unemployment benefits.' These are the government's own numbers. At the very time when more Australians than ever before in the history of our country need help from the government, the government is in here cutting support.

This morning we saw that the national accounts showed growth, and that's welcome. Growth is returning—3.3 per cent. No doubt in an hour the government is going to come in and trumpet this as if everything's tickety-boo: 'It's all on the way up. We're all recovering.' They going to say 'comeback' to every question, as we heard yesterday from the marketing department, the spin department—that thing that masquerades as a government. They'll say: 'It's all on the comeback. It's all tickety-boo.' Try telling that this Christmas to the projected 1.8 million Australians who are going to be trying to live on unemployment benefits knowing what's coming down the pipe because of this government's budget—a cut to $40 a day. How do you think their budgeting is going to go? And the government wonders why people call it the 'Morrison recession'. Of course there was going to be a recession with the global pandemic, but we call it the Morrison recession because it's deeper, it's harder, it's darker, it's longer and it's harsher because of this government's failure to act and now because of their efforts to cut the support that they put in. That's what this bill does: $40 a day. I really can't understand it. It actually makes no logical sense. Everyone in this country knows the rate was already too low. Those radical socialists at the Business Council of Australia said the rate was too low. ACOSS said the rate was too low. Even their former leader, former conservative Prime Minister John Howard, said the rate was too low and had to be raised. It's a disincentive to work. People in my electorate and right across the country face those dreadful choices: 'How do I afford clothes to go to job interview? How do I maintain my health? How am I going to afford this $7.70 train ticket to get across the city to get to the job interview? It's a trade-off between that and the $5 co-payment to buy my pharmaceuticals for the week for my kid.' That's what real people in the country face, but the government's response is: 'Don't worry about it. Ignore the evidence. Ignore everyone else in the country. We know best; we'll cut it to $40 a day.'

We saw the positive impact of the coronavirus supplement. The small, volunteer-run local food charities that I went around and saw during the pandemic said that, for the first time in living memory, they were not seeing every week the same people on Newstart coming in and asking for food vouchers because finally they had enough money to buy food. They saw a whole bunch of new people who were excluded by the government—casual workers, temporary migrants and a whole lot of other people come in, and the queues weren't shorter—but it proved that giving people that level of money to live with pulled them out of poverty. It also is dumb economics; it jeopardises the recovery.

We know every dollar given to people on social security is a dollar spent in the local economy. To be putting the economic recovery at risk and actually cutting jobs, in effect, in local communities is profoundly dumb when we think about the shared desire across the House to support small business and to support the economic recovery because money is not going to flow. I know in my community 22,000 people next year will have $250 less a fortnight to spend at the shops. What do the government think that's going to do for unemployment? It also confirms this is a wasted recovery.

There is no reform in this budget at all. The government have blown $98 billion, a record of new spending in the budget this year. There's no reform; a trillion dollars of debt, hurtling towards $1.7 trillion of Liberal debt by the end of the decade; not a single idea for change; no jobs plan; no investment in the energy grid; no modernisation; and a whole bunch of slogans we get for manufacturing from the mob that chased the car industry out of Australia. Apparently, manufacturing is important to them now. It's all marketing and spin. There is no direct job creation. They put all the effort into tax cuts, and there's absolutely a place for stimulus through tax cuts, but it's not enough. The government also have a role in direct job creation—in stimulating the economy and spending money directly on job creation. The vision of the government, of course, is for a snapback—'Let's get everything back to just how it was at the start of the pandemic.' Believing their own projections, in four years, unemployment might be back to where it was before the recession took hold. But Australians deserve something much better. They deserve a better economy than we had before.

When we went into this recession, the economy was weak. The government would like you to forget that. Underemployment was at record levels, with over 1.6 million people not having enough hours of work; business investment had plummeted; wage growth was at record lows, anaemic at best, and has now plummeted to zero; and casualisation was at a record levels. Who knew sick leave had a purpose? The pandemic has taught us one thing as a society, as a country: perhaps it should be that sick leave had a purpose. There's actually a purpose for decent employment conditions.

You saw the government's response to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews's fantastic announcement in his budget that he was going to trial a pilot of a scheme for gig workers and casual workers where they may get five days a year of sick leave, the right to be sick. Surely if the industrial revolution back hundreds of years ago gave us anything, it was the right for workers to be sick and not lose their house, be able to feed themselves and, as we learnt, not go to work and infect the rest of the community with a virus. It says everything you know about the government that they reject these ideas. We can be a better, fairer society where people can live on social security and feed themselves and their families when they can't get a job.

Newstart, JobSeeker or whatever you call it raises a question, doesn't it? The Prime Minister loves renaming things. His biggest effort, I think, at the start of the pandemic was to not get the wage subsidy in. He resisted that. There were 100,000 more people who went on the unemployment queue because he was too proud to accept Labor's advice that he should have a wage subsidy. He eventually announced one a couple of weeks later, JobKeeper. That will go in March. There will be nothing left for the international education sector and nothing left for the travel sector. A lot of sectors are going to take a lot longer to recover, but they're in the sight of the gun in March. He renamed 'Newstart' 'JobSeeker'. I wonder if now that he's cutting the rate back to $40 a day he'll change it back to Newstart. We might have JobSeeker gone and we might get Newstart back. That would be a moment of honesty. His TAFE cuts got renamed JobTrainer. We had JobMaker, or 'JobFaker', which was going to help 450,000 people, he told us, except his own officials said in Senate estimates that it was actually 45,000 people—so a factor of 10 exaggeration from the marketing guy.

The government are taking a big political bet with this. You saw how freaked out they were, at the start of the pandemic, about the idea that middle-class Australia might actually discover what it's like to live on $40 a day: 'It's alright for people in Labor electorates and a few buried in National Party electorates in the country, isn't it, because they have no-one else to vote for. That's alright, but we couldn't have middle-class Australia living on $40 a day. Better give them a coronavirus supplement.' So we're taking a bet—aren't we, government?—that everything will be back to normal when you make these cuts in March.

The government's rationale is twofold. They have two talking points on this: 'We can't afford it,' and, 'It's a disincentive to work.' We can't afford it? What a load of rubbish! You're running up $1.7 trillion of debt. Budgets are about choices and priorities—$4,000 an hour to fly Mathias Cormann around Europe in a luxury government jet; government subsidies for Clive Palmer's jet; government subsidies for JobKeeper so executives can pay themselves bonuses from the companies reaping millions from JobKeeper; $30 million for a piece of land worth $3 million; and tax cuts. Tax cuts have a place, but we in this House, when the government's tax cuts are fully implemented, get a tax cut of $16,000 a year. I did the maths on that. That's $43 a day. For each of us, the tax cut that this government has passed as its priority is bigger per day than the government says someone on Newstart has to live on. That's a disgrace. That says everything you need to know about this government's priorities. So don't believe their marketing spin that the country can't afford to keep people out of poverty. It's a matter of choices and priorities. They say it's a disincentive. Well, there aren't enough jobs. There are seven jobseekers for every job. It doesn't matter whether you cut the rate or raise the rate; it's not going to create more jobs. Indeed, cutting the rate in this way will mean fewer jobs in local communities.

But the disincentive argument is not the only argument. It's also about poverty and adequacy. The rate is not adequate to keep people out of poverty, and we have to pay attention to that. Interestingly, there's some analysis. What we've had in a public policy sense with the coronavirus supplement is a great experiment. We had an experiment where we actually put some more money in and we could measure its effects. So what impact has that had on the labour market? It's made no difference to the employment market. Professor Jeff Borland summarised his recent research on the impact of the coronavirus supplement on the labour market as follows:

One is that you could have a substantial increase in JobSeeker without adversely affecting incentives to take up paid work … and … there is no evidence that the higher level of JobSeeker during 2020, with the COVID-19 supplement, has had any appreciable effect on incentives to take up paid work for the people who are receiving JobSeeker.

It's an understatement to say I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised. This is who the Liberal Party is. Cutting the social safety net of this country is what they get out of bed for. It's in their DNA. It's who they are as a party. They exist to protect the people who already have wealth. Don't believe the rhetoric about aspiration. That's to cloak the reality that they exist to protect the people who already have wealth. They've never, ever come in here and increased social security payments for the people who need it most; they've only cut. They pick on the most vulnerable. With robodebt, they were using the power of the state and the Commonwealth logo to scare the bejesus out of people by sending them fake debt notices. But even for the Liberal Party this is a new low: cutting unemployment payments to $40 a day and pushing 1.5 million Australians into poverty. Shame on the government!

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