Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes) Bill 2025. This bill is seeking to close a loophole identified in the social security legislation by the AAT in 2024. The consequences of this error are that for years the department and the government of the day have been misapplying the social security act, where participants were technically eligible for the higher independent disability support pension rate but were paid the lower rate. Although a drafting error, it calls into question the principles that underpin social security. The disability support pension is already a borderline poverty payment. The government should not be seeking endless ways to reduce it further.

The Greens also have concerns about the scope of backpay that this bill is seeking to avoid. Participants are constantly forced to defend themselves against the state. We saw this at its peak with robodebt, but it endures through schemes like mutual obligations and Work for the Dole. It seems strange, then, for the government to seek to remedy an error that no-one cared to identify for nearly two decades. Time and time again we see participants punished for minor infractions while the government and departments throw up their hands and yell, 'Oops!'

Not knowing your own legislation is not a simple mistake; it's an unbelievable oversight. Denying the higher independent rate on the mistake and understanding of an amendment from 2005 has genuine implications for participants. For these reasons the Greens will be opposing this bill.

We need to seriously consider whether using the machinery of the state to make social security harder to access, more means-tested and more restricted is a genuinely productive use of time. I urge the government to take seriously all the other issues that plague the DSP. The starting point for any genuine reform should be the low rate of the DSP. As a borderline poverty payment, it forces many disabled people into a vicious cycle of poverty, fear and pain. Income support payments below the poverty line mean hunger, they mean illness and they mean homelessness. None of these realities are conducive to finding meaningful, sustainable work. Poverty can have dire impacts on your physical and mental health and your ability to find work and maintain relationships, regardless of whether you are 20 or 60.

The tightening of eligibility for the disability support pension has also forced many people who are living with disability to rely on the lower rate under JobSeeker, which further entrenches poverty and disadvantage. Since 2007 the number of jobseekers with partial capacity to work has risen from 10 per cent to 43 per cent. Nearly half of all people on the poverty payment, JobSeeker, are incapacitated from work in some way. This has coincided with the tightening and restricting of the DSP.

We see the punitive administration of the DSP in other ways with the partner income test. I would like to foreshadow that the Greens will be moving amendments in the Senate calling for an end to the overtly restrictive partner income test under the DSP. The partner income test traps disabled people in abusive relationships. This is by forcing people into dynamics of financial dependency, where they lose access to their own income. Beyond this, the partner income test also genuinely prevents members of the community from getting married out of fear of losing the DSP. Disabled participants should not be punished for pursuing relationships. It's regressive and genuinely undermines marriage equality. This is another instance of the state being used to punish rather than support.

The government can't keep burying their heads in the sand and continuing to ignore the millions of renters, single parents, students, women and people with disabilities all doing it tough. Today there are more than three million Australians living in poverty, including one in six children. Many of those people are either unable to access income support or are relying on payments that are among the lowest in the OECD.

Despite being one of the wealthiest countries on earth, successive Labor and coalition governments have made policy choices that deliberately keep people in poverty, including refusing to raise JobSeeker, youth allowance and the disability support pension. The evidence is clear: one of the single most effective ways to genuinely tackle the cost-of-living crisis is to raise the rates of income support payments. I urge the government to get their priorities in order. Tax breaks for property investors, giving hundreds of billions of dollars to billionaires and corporations, doesn't help the average Australian get through the cost-of-living crisis, and it does nothing for the millions struggling to survive on Centrelink payments.

Poverty is impacting so many Australians, and it is only getting worse. With skyrocketing rents, interest rate rises and inflation, so many people are struggling to get by. From not being able to afford nutritious food, education and housing or the resources to get a job—these are all having a significant impact on people's mental health and wellbeing as well. Poverty is a political choice, and the Greens are fighting for a strong social safety net and a liveable wage that would raise all Centrelink payments above the Henderson poverty line.

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