Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak after the member for Bendigo, and I echo many of the sentiments in her fine contribution to this debate on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Extension of Coronavirus Support) Bill 2020. As we have done before with so many pieces of legislation in this place, yet again it is up to the Labor Party to come and discuss these issues: why some of them are important, why some of them need to be changed, why some of them should be defended and why some of them should be stopped. Yet again, another piece of legislation comes to this House with hardly any government members—I don't think there were any other than the minister—willing to stand up and discuss their own policy. This isn't Labor Party policy. This is the government's policy, which, yet again, none of them want to get up and defend. None of them have the courage, the commitment or the passion for their own policy and their own legislation to get up in this place and bother to talk about it. This bill will affect literally hundreds of thousands of Australians who will return to $40 a day because of what this bill does, yet not one government member turns up and fronts the debate on this bill. This will be their legacy—coming to this place and tearing away support for those people and those Australians who have, throughout this pandemic, relied on government.

This coronavirus support payment began because we faced a global pandemic. I remember the press conference that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer did outside the Prime Minister's office here in this building. They spoke about how there was going to be a wage subsidy for those businesses that had to close their doors, and they spoke about how those people who found themselves out of work as a result of this pandemic would receive an extra $550 a fortnight. Everyone who was out of work was going to be looked after. And then, bit by bit, they walked that back and started pulling away that level of support for Australians. Except one thing hasn't changed yet—this pandemic is not over. This pandemic is still with us. Yes, Australia has put itself in an enviable position when it comes to managing this virus, but the virus is still here. We've seen most recently in South Australia how quickly we can shut down and how quickly things can change. I sincerely hope that no other state in this country or, frankly, anywhere in the world has to deal with another outbreak. I hope that we see it out to a vaccine, an effective vaccine, before another outbreak. But, dare I say, there will be one. This pandemic isn't over.

More to the point, the economic fallout and the economic consequences of this pandemic will be with us for years. The unemployment rate will take years to recover. I hope I'm wrong; I hope we have huge amounts of economic growth. But I'm not convinced yet that this pandemic is not going to take years for us to recover from. Yet we stand here with no government MPs willing to put their name, their voice, their time and their effort into defending this bill which will ultimately bring hundreds of thousands of Australians back down to $40 a day in March, striking them to the poverty line.

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is that through no fault of their own Australians can find themselves out of work. It has happened to my family, it has happened to my friends and I'm sure every single member in this place can point to people they desperately care about who have done the right thing in this pandemic and shut down their businesses and stood down from their work in order to do the right thing by others in our society. What did we see at the start of the lockdowns in April? We saw hundreds of thousands of Australians, many for the very first time in their lives, accessing the JobSeeker payment, the support payment for unemployed Australians, because of this pandemic—through absolutely no fault of their own. In fact, because many of them were willing to do the right thing by others, they were sacrificing. And the businesses that they were involved in were sacrificing some of their operations because government restrictions, both federal and state, required those businesses to not operate in the way in which they usually would.

And what did we see from this government? What did we see from the Minister for Government Services? I remember the queues around the block of thousands and thousands of Australians wanting to access the JobSeeker payment for the very first time. In order to do so they needed a CRN number, and in order to access a CRN number at that point in time you had to go into a Centrelink office. The government just sat there and the minister just sat there until the country and MPs on this side of the chamber were literally pleading with them to change the arrangements to access a new CRN, so that people didn't have to literally line up and gather when we were asking them not to line up and gather because of the pandemic that we were facing.

And then finally the minister said—I remember it well—'We have changed the arrangements. You can now go onto the myGov website and leave your details, and a Centrelink operator will call you back.' That happened a couple of days later after days and days of the queues. And then what happened? The myGov website crashed, and what was the response from the minister? It was that it had been hacked. Except it hadn't been hacked; that was just something that the minister decided to say without any facts or any evidence to support it. Then, when that was pointed out to this minister, what was his response? His response was, 'Oh, my bad.' 'My bad,' says the minister. I'll give him credit: it was one of the first times anyone on that side of the House said 'my bad' and owned up to a mistake in government.

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