Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today we are continuing the debate on the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. This legislation contains amendments to the government’s Welfare to Work legislation, which was rammed through this parliament with indecent haste on 1 December last year. We in the opposition protested about this indecent haste, about the failure to consider the details of this piece of legislation and about the failure of the government to consider all the implications that flowed from the legislation. Unfortunately, the government did not listen to us; unfortunately, the government guillotined the legislation in the parliament; and, unfortunately, this has resulted in this legislation being flawed.

As we on this side of the parliament know, this government is driven by an ultraconservative, extreme agenda. So driven was this government that there are inconsistencies in the legislation, so today we are here to fix those inconsistencies. We are here to fix the fact that the government had a very lacklustre approach to this legislation and was driven purely and simply by the fact that it wanted to get this legislation through the parliament before Christmas. It did not seem to be concerned about the overall implications of the legislation or about whether it was properly drafted. If it had been, there would be no need for the parliament to be back here, less than six months later, amending legislation that takes effect on 1 July. So we are amending the legislation before it actually takes effect.

I think there is a bit of a problem with that, and it shows a government that does not have the right approach to developing legislation and to introducing legislation. Rather, it shows a government that does not follow the proper processes, a government that just says: ‘We’ve got the numbers in the House and we’ve got the numbers in the Senate. This is what we want; we’re going to ram it through and forget the debate.’

This bill, as I have already hinted, makes largely technical amendments to the Social Security Act 1991 and the Social Security Administration Act 1999 which are necessary because the first piece of legislation, the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Act 2005, was shoddily drafted. These are basically very technical and minor changes to the legislation. They extend eligibility for the pharmaceutical allowance to partnered parenting payment recipients who have been granted a temporary incapacity exemption from participation requirements. They provide for a seasonal workers preclusion period for students and new apprentices claiming youth allowance and they provide for continuing payments of the higher rate of youth or Newstart allowance and the continuing payments of the pensioner education supplement. I know that we alerted the government to the problems that are associated with that at the time the bill was rammed through the parliament. But they had such a blinkered vision that they were unable to even amend their legislation at that stage so that we had the proper legislation going through the parliament. Along with that, they provide for the pensioner employment supplement, the telephone allowance and other concessions to be paid to principal carers after the death of a child where that death could otherwise reduce the payments. The eligibility will be for a 14-week period.

I cannot come in here and debate this legislation without drawing the House’s attention to that flawed piece of legislation that actually passed through the parliament back in 2005. It was very ill-conceived legislation. It was legislation that, on the surface, the government touted as being to move people from welfare back into the workplace. In actual fact, I believe the original legislation was designed more to penalise those people who are in receipt of welfare payments and to cut the government expenditure in the area of welfare rather than to introduce a well-developed, well-thought-through piece of legislation that would actually assist people who were in receipt of the disability support pension—that is, to help people with disabilities to actually get back into the workforce. I believe that the government adopted an approach that was largely punitive. It did not look at all the implications and it really did not have a considered approach to the best way to get people with disabilities or, for that matter, single supporting parents to re-enter the workforce. Reducing a person’s income level is not the answer to getting a person a job. Rather, the answer to getting a person a job is to improve their skill levels and to improve the opportunities for them to access work. I am afraid I cannot see how this does that.

The previous Labor government introduced a program that I think worked very well in helping people with disabilities re-enter the workforce. That was through the disability reforms that were brought in in the early nineties. That legislation recognised that the best results were achieved when the person who had the disability felt that there was some degree of security in moving from the disability support pension into work. They needed to get support; there needed to be a whole-of-government approach to them entering the workforce. There was support for employers who were prepared to offer them work—not just financial support; there was ongoing support for the people who were prepared to take the risk. In place was a structure that made people feel comfortable about taking the risk of entering the workforce and made them feel that if it failed they actually had some options and could return to the disability support pension.

I will share with the House an example of how even though this legislation has not taken effect—it does not take effect until 1 July—the philosophy embodied within it is already impacting electorates like mine. A constituent of mine undertook employment. He was working around 20 hours a week towards the end of last year. He has a significant disability. During that period of time, he was earning over the amount of money that would entitle him to receive the disability support pension. He felt good about himself, he was studying at the same time and he felt that he was moving towards finally getting back into the workforce. Unfortunately for this constituent, after eight weeks everything fell over. But—and this is the really key factor—he is now unable to go back onto the disability support pension and we are going through the process with Centrelink of having his circumstances reviewed. He still has the 20 points that would make him eligible for the disability support pension, but the simple fact that he took the risk to actually go out there and find a job has worked against him. If this legislation is supposed to assist people with disabilities enter the workforce, I can tell the government that there is one constituent in my electorate who will never try to get a job again if he gets back onto the disability support pension, because the risk associated with it is so great.

Another constituent has quite significant disabilities and has well over the 20 points, but Centrelink has advised him that, whilst he is over the 20 points, they believe that he is capable of re-entering the workforce. He has a non-English-speaking background, cannot read and has a very significant disability that, I believe, would place him in danger of exacerbating his injury or, alternatively, place the people who work with him in danger of being injured. I ask the government: if he injures himself, how will they explain to this man’s family why that happened? If other workers that he works with are injured, how will the government explain why that happened? I believe that the government really need to look at their obligations under occupational health and safety and also at whether or not they are being negligent in forcing that man back into the workforce.

One of the hardest jobs I have had in my life is being a parent. I worked when my children were younger, but I had the support of a husband. He worked too, but you come home at night, you are exhausted and you have just about used every resource that you have. Your children need you to sit down with them, help them with their homework and give them quality time. If I were a supporting parent, I think I would find that very hard indeed. People who receive the parenting payment now are already among some of the poorest people in our community. They are the poorest financially and I would put to the House that they are amongst the poorest when it comes to emotional and physical reserves. What is the government going to do for them? They are going to make it harder. They are going to cut the money that they receive and put in place very punitive mutual obligation requirements.

Mutual obligation, as such, is to be supported, but mutual obligation goes not one way but both ways. I believe that the government has the obligation to provide real assistance to the people it is targeting, to help them get back into work. Cutting the amount of money people receive or, when they are actually paid for their work, disadvantaging them by comparison with other workers is not what I call real assistance. I call real assistance helping them to develop skills and helping them with adequate and affordable child care, rather than taking the approach that the government took in the original Welfare to Work legislation. The further down the track we go the more problems will emerge and the more we will see how the government has failed these people and failed to achieve its objective, which is to get people from welfare back into work.

This legislation does absolutely nothing to help those people on parenting payment to balance their work and family obligations. There are so many areas where this government has failed to recognise the problems that are facing the people this legislation affects. The government has not taken into account the changing face of work, such as the casualisation of the workforce, the fact that many jobs are now part time and the impact that these factors will have on people targeted by this legislation.

Whilst I support the legislation before us today, I have to say that the government fails to recognise the real issues facing people when they are looking to go back to work. Unless the government gives them the right sort of support, both within the workforce and on an individual basis, this legislation is doomed to cause a lot of harm and anxiety to people who really look to the government for support.

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. This bill makes largely technical amendments to the Social Security Act 1991 and the Social Security (Administration) Act 1991 which are necessary as a result of the Employment and Workplace Relations Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Act 2005. These amendments include terminology changes and changes to facilitate more consistent treatment of similar groups of income support recipients. The need for these amendments arises from the Howard government’s incompetent and extreme welfare changes which, in my view, were rammed through the parliament last year. If the government had not rushed this legislation through last year as they did and had they thought more carefully about these reforms and the content of these bills, this particular bill would not be necessary. But here we go again, cleaning up the mess that comes out of an arrogant approach by the government in their rush to abuse their control in the Senate.

Labor opposes the government’s welfare changes but will not oppose this bill, as that would entrench inconsistencies in the application of the new regime. This evening I would like to focus on the reasons why Labor opposes the government’s welfare changes. This is an issue that I am extremely passionate about and have spoken about many times. Labor believes that people who can work should work and that those who are unable to work should be cared for. There is no doubt that everyone benefits more when more people participate in the social and economic mainstream that most of us can enjoy. Labor supports welfare reform that goes far beyond moving people from one welfare queue to the dole queue. Instead of moving people from welfare to work, all the Howard government is doing is dumping people from one welfare payment to a lower welfare payment. Instead of reducing the number of people who depend on welfare, the government is just dumping people from one Centrelink database to another. This is why Labor believes that the Howard government’s changes to welfare are extreme, incompetent and grossly unfair. The changes are extreme because they cut the household budget for families who can least afford it, for no good reason. The changes are incompetent because they do not help people find jobs. They make work less financially worth while because the government now takes back more of every dollar these people earn than ever before.

This evening I would like to focus on the impact the Howard government’s reforms will have on people with a disability. What the Welfare to Work reforms mean for people with a disability is that people who apply for income support after 1 July 2006 who are assessed by a new comprehensive work capacity assessment as being able to work 15 to 29 hours per week will have to seek 15 hours or more of part-time work a week and will be placed on the Newstart allowance or youth allowance. These reforms will not help people with a disability or single parents to get a job. The government itself has admitted that over 200,000 Australians will be financially worse off under these changes, but only 109,000 in their estimation will actually gain work—and that remains to be seen.

The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, or NATSEM, published a report in November 2005 entitled Options for reducing the adverse impact of the proposed Welfare-to-Work reforms upon people with disabilities and sole parents. From the title alone, it is obvious that these reforms are expected to have an adverse impact. I would like to quote from the NATSEM report, which outlines the impact on people with a disability. The report says:

The Newstart Allowance provides a much lower payment rate than PPS and DSP, has a much harsher income test, and is associated with much less generous income tax concessions. As a result many sole parents with school age children and many people with disabilities will receive much lower incomes than under the current rules. Our previous reports suggested that sole parents will be up to around $100 a week worse off and people with disabilities up to around $120 a week worse off under the proposed changes relative to the current system. In addition, most of those affected will face much higher effective marginal tax rates under the proposed new system than under the current system.

The NATSEM report then goes on to state that these reforms will not help people with disabilities to find work. It says:

At this stage it appears likely that a substantial number of affected people with disabilities will be placed on Newstart Allowance but not actually be placed in jobs, due to a lack of suitable work opportunities.

I would argue, as do many organisations representing people with a disability, that people with disabilities will not be placed in jobs for another reason—that is, the Howard government has done nothing to promote or create job opportunities for those people with a disability. The Howard government’s hypocrisy in relation to employing people with a disability is astounding. Its behaviour towards people with a disability is completely unethical. It takes people off the disability support pension and throws them onto the dole. Then it does absolutely nothing, in my view, to help them get work.

The Howard government talks about people with bad backs and malingerers. It has done that for years, in the lead-up to this reform. How many times did we see front-page articles in the press where government spokespeople were quoted as talking about people with bad backs and malingerers receiving the DSP? I have to say that the Treasurer was one of the leading advocates of that particular line. Then the government goes silent and does nothing to help people with real disabilities and chronic illness to gain employment. I have heard so many government members in this debate continue to talk about bad backs. It is pretty pathetic and a pretty appalling method of debating if you are really that confident about the reasons you are doing certain things in legislation.

If the government’s reforms are so good and they are going to get people with disabilities into the workforce, how do they justify grandfathering those very provisions? It is an interesting argument. Wouldn’t that mean that people with disabilities will miss the opportunities to get work that the government are now boasting is going to be available? The answer is no, because the reforms will not help anyone get work. It really mystifies me that, after maligning all of these people and accusing them of malingering and of unfairly living off the government purse for virtually the whole time they have been in government up until these reforms come in, when they talk about these reforms they say, ‘Yes, but we are not going to touch the 780,000 people that we’ve been abusing for the last seven or eight years; we are going to leave them alone.’ I am glad they have in one sense, but why have they? I can tell you why. It is because the political distastefulness of having those people go through the system that is now going to be imposed on new recipients would be too hard politically for them to swallow. That is why. They are going to aim their new regime at new recipients. We need to find the ones who miss out. We need to understand how their lives are being affected by these new rules that are being applied to people who will be genuinely attempting to get support through the DSP in this country in the future.

Let us look at one young woman in my electorate whom I know very well through my constituency. Her name is Kylie—she does not mind me using her first name. She has down syndrome. She is extremely keen to work. In fact, after a great deal of effort over many years by her and her family—but by Kylie in particular—she has really developed some skills. She currently works eight hours a week in a Public Service department here in Canberra and desperately wants to work more hours, but she cannot get them. The public and private sectors have no real incentives to assist people like Kylie and they have no-one to lead the way. The Public Service itself at a Commonwealth level has reduced its proportion of employees with a disability. The Public Service is not showing the way as it should. This government has reduced the proportion of people with a disability it employs from 5.6 per cent down to 3.8 per cent. We heard in the budget that there are going to be 7,000 new public servants. A lot of those people will be in my electorate, there is no doubt about that; there will be new public servants in other parts of the country as well. I want to know how many of those 7,000 new Public Service jobs that are coming on stream are going to be taken up by people with a disability. It is a very fair question, but I have not heard an answer to it. I challenge the government to tell us what its intent is. If it is going to move all these people off welfare, offer all these wonderful incentives and change the world, tell me how many of those 7,000 new Public Service jobs are going to be taken up by people with a disability. I wait with bated breath to hear the answer from the government.

I do not know how the Prime Minister can tell people with a disability to get a job and yet not help them get a job and not put in place policies that we know would work to ensure that people with disabilities are employed at least in the Commonwealth Public Service. It is no secret to anybody who takes the time to think about this and talk to people that people with disabilities would like to work. They would give anything to have a life other than the one they have. They would love to have another chance. They would enjoy participating in the community like the great majority of us have the wonderful opportunity to do. It is not rocket science. The overwhelming majority of them would like another chance and another life in which they could get out and participate more fully than they are able to do.

We on this side of politics have a completely different approach to people with a disability. We believe that, if people with a disability cannot work, they should be taken care of. If they are able to work and choose to work, we encourage them to do so. We give them every support we possibly can. We train them. We do not just shove them onto the dole. I think the government would be most surprised if it looked at cooperation instead of coercion—if it looked at partnerships and the abilities that these people have. The government should stop complaining about malingerers with bad backs and take on the role of promoting these people into appropriate places within our community. The government would be surprised how successful such an approach would be.

We on this side of politics want real welfare reform that tackles the reasons why people with a disability are not working and delivers practical solutions. Real welfare reform gives people a chance of getting the skills an employer needs. Real welfare reform encourages employers to give people with a disability the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. Real welfare reform understands that being a parent is an important job in itself and that work makes families more secure. Real welfare reform helps parents find the balance between supporting their family and raising their kids. Real welfare reform involves strong support from government in breaking down the barriers to participation—such as skills, work-family balance and employer attitudes—alongside fair and reasonable requirements for job seekers. And real welfare reform makes sure people get a fair reward for effort.

In conclusion, I support this bill simply because I have to—because if I do not, life will get too hard for the people who have to live under this legislation. But in supporting this bill, which fixes the technicalities, I am still strongly against the basic philosophy of the government’s reforms in this area. I ask the Howard government to actively help people with disabilities to find work and to encourage the public and private sectors to employ people with a disability. The government should stop treating disabilities or chronic illnesses as if they were crimes and stop automatically categorising people with disabilities as if they have no right at all to the disability support pension. If things were done this way, we would see a far more positive outcome than, sadly, we are going to see under the government’s reform agenda.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006 in pretty much the same manner as the member for Canberra has supported it—that is, with grave reservations. With this bill, the government is attempting to fix its botched job on the substantive bill in December last year when it sought to reform our welfare system in, it argued, an equitable way. I think we can contend that that is not the case. There is no doubt that the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Bill 2005 was a complete failure. Its objectives were, firstly, to ensure that people on welfare were able to participate effectively in the workforce and, secondly, to provide an equitable arrangement for people who are in need of support. Labor believes that people who can work should work and that we should care for those who cannot work. But there has been no significant effort by the government to set up the requirements to ensure that, if we are to shift people from welfare to employment, we can do so in a genuine way.

It has now become a cliche, but it would appear that it is not welfare to work. It is, and it will be for most people, welfare to welfare. People on disability pensions who will no longer qualify will move from a disability pension to the Newstart allowance or something comparable to the Newstart allowance. For them, nothing will change, except there will be a net reduction in the support they receive from the government in order to maintain some quality of life, some capacity to live decently. That is no answer to the problems that have beset us in this area.

Perhaps, before I go to some matters that I would like to raise that I have yet to hear in the debate, I should refer to the reforms that were sought by the government in the substantive bill, because they are of course entirely connected to the amendments that were moved today in the consequential bill. The substantive bill sought to abolish parenting payment for sole parents with the youngest child aged eight or more and for partnered parents with the youngest child aged six or more. Existing recipients, at 1 July this year, will stay on parenting payment unless their relationship status changes or they leave the pension for 12 weeks or more. The bill also sought to abolish disability support pension for people with partial capacity who could work 15 hours or more—which, as we know, is currently at 30 hours—or who could be expected to be able to work at that level within two years, with or without rehabilitation, training or education. Existing recipients at 11 May last year remained qualified. Those granted between that date and 30 June this year will be reviewed.

The substantive bill sought to modify Newstart so that people affected by these changes can be required to seek and accept work of 15 hours or more and undertake other activities as directed by Centrelink, such as an approved program of work. It sought to apply a Newstart style activity test to parenting payment sole parents with the youngest child aged six to seven and to all existing recipients staying on at 1 July with a child aged six or over. The bill sought to remove a number of safeguards from the Newstart legislation and replace them with greater discretion for Centrelink in determining the obligations of recipients. It sought to weaken the suitable work requirement. The definition of ‘unsuitable work’ currently includes work below award wages. This is changed to being below the minimum standards and conditions under the Australian Fair Pay Commission standard.

The substantive bill sought to change the breach penalty rule to provide, among other things, an eight-week non-payment period for failing the activity test or the activity agreement three times in 12 months, leaving a job voluntarily, being dismissed from a job for misconduct, failing to take up a suitable job offer or failing to participate in an approved program of work. The bill was also seeking to increase the obligations of mature age unemployed and very long-term unemployed people on Newstart. Clearly, the Howard government is large on rhetoric and small on reality when it comes to providing the capacity for people on welfare to move to productive employment.

Our concern is that, rather than setting up the mechanisms required, the government has instead placed already vulnerable people in more vulnerable situations. There is clearly no justification for that behaviour, and it is not going to assist in social terms or in economic terms, because it will not arrest the lowering participation of our citizens in the workforce. Indeed, it does not ensure that there will be significant increases in participation. Therefore, it fails on economic grounds. But it also fails on equity grounds, as I have indicated.

This overhaul of the welfare system—the changes to the Social Security Act 1991—will certainly result in awful situations for many people on welfare. But it is also important to note that it also intersects with the government’s Work Choices legislation. I was witness—as indeed you were, Mr Deputy Speaker—to some anecdotal evidence on the possible impacts. We were in a position to speak to people who are currently on welfare and are fearful that they will lose their entitlement under the new welfare arrangements and, in the case of, say, a person on a disability pension, will be forced onto the Newstart allowance because they will no longer be eligible to stay on the disability pension. What of course could happen—and I do not think this is too great a leap to make—is that people will move from their welfare payment to the Newstart allowance and then not necessarily remain on the Newstart allowance because of the increasingly stringent requirements for them to seek employment.

We now know that the most vulnerable person is someone who is seeking a new job or seeking a job. If you are a prospective employee, you are in a very weak position unless you are fortunate enough to have a particularly unique set of skills or skills that are in such demand that they allow you to bargain with your prospective employer. But that will not be the case for recipients of welfare payments who may find themselves no longer paid under that system, put on the Newstart allowance and then offered work but paid in accordance with the basic minima now enshrined in the Work Choices legislation. We hear constantly from the Prime Minister and the government that a prospective employee offered a job on the basic minima, even though workers in that workplace are paid on a higher rate for the same work, will not be coerced to sign an AWA which would give that employee inferior conditions of employment. But of course we know that, if they do not take that job, they will not be a recipient of the Newstart allowance for long under the requirements that are currently in place.

It is important for the parliament to properly scrutinise not only the legislation that is before us and the substantive bill that was enacted earlier but also the way in which the Work Choices legislation and the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Bill interact to the potential detriment of many people currently in receipt of welfare payments. Whether or not it is the intent of the Howard government to force people off welfare and onto Newstart and then force them to take work at the legally lowest possible rate, that will be the consequence of both sets of legislation operating in the workplace.

It seems to me that this legislation and the Work Choices legislation are aimed at the most vulnerable in society. They are targeted at people who may not have much choice, who have not been provided with a great deal of training or support, who may not have a set of skills that give them high employment prospects and who in many cases may not have much of an employment history. Yet these are the people who will be the most vulnerable under this arrangement. It would seem to me that a government that was interested in increasing participation rates in the workforce in this country would be seeking to provide sufficient training and support for people who are able and willing to work. As well as adding new ways of calling people dole bludgers, the government has perpetuated an awful myth—that there is a huge proportion of people on disability pensions, welfare payments or, specifically, the Newstart allowance who do not want to have a meaningful job or, indeed, any job. That is a myth, and it should be challenged. My personal experience, and I think it would be the experience of most people in this place if they were really honest with themselves, is that most people want a decent living and they want to work. And a person with a disability is as likely to want a meaningful job as anybody else, provided it is within their capacities. The nonsense that has been perpetuated that there are huge numbers of people out in the community who are trying to budge on the system is, I think, just that—nonsense.

I will accept, and I think it is fair to say, that there are families who have been unemployed for generations—and not only families but parts of communities. There has been an awful failure by those families to break that cycle, and I think the community has also failed in the way we have attended to that problem. In that circumstance there should be specifically targeted ways to provide assistance and break that culture of unemployment. But in the main, in the general community at large, I think it is fair to say that people want a chance to work, to make a living, to stand on their own two feet and to have the sense of satisfaction that comes from producing and contributing to society and being suitably rewarded. The government, because it does not necessarily have that view about people, seems to want to punish rather than to assist. It seems to want to target or demonise or vilify people who are most vulnerable, rather than trying to find answers to some of the problems that beset the disadvantaged in our community.

Unfortunately the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Bill does not target the root cause of the problems. It fails to provide sufficient assistance for people to shift from welfare to work. Therefore it is my view, shared by Labor colleagues, that it is not a genuine attempt to assist people who want to work. Instead, it is going to punish those people who are already doing it tough. It will push them off one benefit onto a lower benefit and, in the main, they will not benefit in the end—nor, I think it is important to add, will it benefit our economy or our society.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be able to make a contribution to this debate. A major piece of legislation passed last year was a key element of the government’s major reforms to Welfare to Work, and of course what we have got here is a clean-up exercise. Whilst we oppose many of the government’s welfare changes, we will be supporting the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. This debate does give me an opportunity to talk about a number of issues to do with welfare, Welfare to Work and welfare dependency.

I particularly want to talk about the impact of these changes and the broader changes which the government is proposing to make in relation to the administration of welfare payments to Aboriginal constituents of mine in the Northern Territory and elsewhere in Australia. Most importantly, I am concerned about the changes which the government proposes to make, and is making, to the Community Development Employment Projects scheme.

We hear a lot in this place about reciprocal responsibility, mutual responsibility—words which are used interchangeably here—and the need for people to do something and not get something for nothing but actually work when they receive a benefit. It is well worth pointing out to this chamber, and indeed the other place if they actually listen, that Indigenous Australians were well in advance of the rest of the population when it came to the issue of mutual obligation. I do not think that is understood by this community; it is certainly not understood by this parliament.

Those of us who have had any long-term engagement with these issues will know, as I do, that CDEP was first introduced in 1977. I want to refer to a departmental document from 1979. This document talks about the nature of CDEP and the fact that the principles for CDEP emerged from discussions with Indigenous communities particularly in remote parts of the Northern Territory. The first CDEP scheme was at Barunga, just outside of Katherine, and then in the Pitjantjatjara homelands area of South Australia, an area that I started to work in in 1978. One of the first jobs I had to do was to look at the way in which the CDEP scheme was operating and review its operation and see what was happening in relation to those communities. We need to bear in mind what the scheme was created for. The departmental document says that the CDEP was:

... to respond to specific requests from communities for an alternative to unemployment benefits by paying for work done with a view to reducing socially deleterious effects of unemployment benefits particularly in remote communities.

If I were to put that in the context of this current debate and say that Indigenous Australians had come up with a program to do exactly that, I think that I would be cheered. I can imagine the rationalists on the other side of the chamber saying, ‘Goodness, they agree with us!’ We know that Indigenous people were prepared to make those sacrifices, those undertakings, those agreements with the community to work in exchange for receiving a benefit as far back as 1977. What we have seen recently is a demonisation of these people for being on CDEP. It is true that CDEP in part has changed over the years. Initially it was directed, as I said earlier, to remote communities. It changed in the eighties and the early nineties when, in a period of reasonably high unemployment, it became attractive for people in urban communities as an alternative to unemployment benefits when they could not find a job. I would have thought that that was a very laudable and commendable approach to be adopted by a community.

What we have seen recently is rhetoric coming from the government and others that there has been welfare dependency building up as a result of people being on CDEP. Bearing in mind, and I particularly want to address my remarks to communities in remote parts of Australia, the nature of the labour markets in those communities where there are no other options, when people go to the community and say, ‘I want to exchange work for a benefit’—in other words, they want to do something productive for the community and for themselves—I would have thought that that is far from being welfare dependent. That is actually part of the mutual obligation exercise that the government wants us to understand and which, of course, was part of what the Labor Party did in 1995 and 1996 when it introduced the concept of mutual obligation into the administration of other benefits.

In the case of CDEP, it was clear that the Indigenous community was well in advance of the rest of the Australian population when talking about working in exchange for a benefit. What we are seeing now is an argument being developed that the CDEP is about welfare dependency. What it is about in fact is people exchanging their labour for a benefit. Clearly, there are now issues with the nature of the labour markets in metropolitan areas about whether or not CDEP is operating effectively and appropriately and whether it should continue to operate. That is a valid discussion. But it is certainly not a valid discussion when it pertains to those people who live in remote areas.

We understand, when we look at the nature of those small area labour markets, that work options apart from CDEP are all but nonexistent. They are all but nonexistent for a range of reasons, but primary among those reasons is, of course, the lack of a private job market and, importantly, where jobs do exist, the lack of skills—the lack of skills comes from a lack of education, which in many parts of Australia, and certainly in the Northern Territory, has been a result of deliberate government action. Between 1978 and 2001, the conservatives in the Northern Territory government, who ran the Northern Territory for that period of time, deliberately chose not to invest in secondary education in bush communities for Aboriginal kids. You cannot believe it, but it is true. We are currently, I suspect, left with somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 18 who have had no access to any secondary education services. If you compound that by looking at a generation ahead, you can say that we are looking at tens of thousands, prospectively, who have no access to educational opportunity.

If you do not have access to educational opportunity and you go out looking for a job in the broader labour market then it is very likely that you are going to find it very difficult to get one. If you are lucky enough to get an interview and someone asks to test your skills base and you cannot read and write then it is very unlikely that you are going to succeed. Of course, if the prospective employer says, ‘Hang on, why don’t you go and do a pre-trade training course and come back and we will give you the job and even train you,’ they find that these poor, unfortunate individuals do not have the skills base necessary to get into the training course, because there are prerequisites and their skills are not sufficient.

We in this community have to come to terms with a couple of things. One is that, where people indicate their desire to work, as these Indigenous people have done, and they are prepared to do it in exchange for a benefit paid to them by the government, we should not, as a result of them doing that—by passing the work test by being categorised as being employed as a result of being on CDEP—blame them for being on CDEP. What we should say to them is, ‘We want you to move beyond CDEP and get into the broader labour market.’ We found that, in 1995 and 1996, when the previous Labor government had articulated training programs through New Work Opportunities and a whole range of other programs which were introduced during that period, CDEP participants were able to access all of those programs and move out of CDEP and, if they were able to acquire new skills, get into other jobs.

That all changed in 1996 with the election of the Howard government. All of a sudden, the access that people once had to the broader training programs that were operating within the education and workplace area were no longer available to them, partly because the government cut them. They no longer existed. We are now left with the situation where people are finding it very difficult to get jobs outside these programs. What is happening in many parts of Australia is that these CDEPs actually do provide a capacity to train people and provide them with opportunities to get into the broader labour market.

I know the Minister for Workforce Participation, who is sitting at the table, happened to be at Maningrida last week and she met with probably the most successful CDEP operation in the Northern Territory at Bawinanga that employs over 600 people. It has an income of $25 million—$10 million as a result of CDEP transfers from the Commonwealth and $16 million from enterprise development. That is based on the fact that this community, in this case Bawinanga, a corporation at Maningrida, has decided that what it wants to do is create opportunities for people—a very good thing to do. Yet we hear people being pilloried in a general sense for being welfare dependent. Of course, what they are doing is looking for opportunities. And this happens not only at Bawinanga but at other places across Northern Australia. We should not blame people for being on CDEP; we should say that maybe there are deficiencies in some CDEP operations. We might say that the labour market is very restrictive in some areas because of the nature of the local economy, but we should not blame people for being there. And we should not blame people for being on CDEP. We should see CDEP as a possibility for people. In the case of Bawinanga, as I am sure the minister now knows as a result of her visit: no work, no pay. If you do not turn up to work, you do not get paid. These are people who would otherwise be on the Newstart allowance. They volunteer to go on CDEP and accept the conditions—if they do not turn up to work they do not get paid. Can you imagine how many people in this parliament would do that?

When we are talking about change we need to understand that the government’s proposal to change, in this case, CDEP has long-term implications for the potential of people to get gainful employment both within the CDEP programs and without. I have always argued, since being in this place, that because of the nature of these small area labour markets you could see CDEP as providing the basis, the core, of the labour market within those communities and it was quite appropriate for people to do different jobs within the CDEP—in other words, they might start as a truck driver but end up acquiring new skills and managing a workshop. If the CDEP is able to impart those skills through workplace training, as it does in many places, and people are able to move up the employment scale within the CDEP, they should be commended for it.

Instead, what we see is people being pilloried. And we are now seeing changes introduced by the government which come into play on 1 July this year to change CDEP. There are around Australia 32,000 participants on CDEP. We know that some of the key changes which the government proposes to implement are that new CDEP participants aged 20 or under will be paid a youth rate consistent with the independent rate of the youth allowance. This will provide an improved incentive for young Indigenous people to complete their education—so say the government. I wonder. There will be many in this position in remote communities who not only will be not able to complete their education because they will not have an educational opportunity to take up but will also have dependants—some of them. Participants in CDEP urban and regional centres will be required to register with a Job Network member. New CDEP participants in urban and regional centres will be limited to 52 weeks—one year—participation to ensure CDEP becomes a stepping stone to real jobs. Selected high-performance CDEP organisations will be offered options for extended funding agreements for an additional year and relevant organisations will be notified prior to the 2006-07 submissions process and, reinforcing that, full-time students in receipt of Abstudy living allowances or other living allowances are not eligible to participate in CDEP.

What we need to understand about these changes, and others, is that the stakeholders were not involved in the deliberations. There was no informed process of discussion or consultation. The changes have been distributed by fiat by the federal government. I know that there is a great deal of concern. In fact, there was a meeting in Adelaide on Monday of last week where 66 CDEP organisations were represented and attended. I noted that there were some DEWR representatives there. In the same week, the Southern Barkley Aboriginal Corporation had a meeting at the policemen’s waterhole south of Tennant Creek. That is a four-hour drive out of Alice Springs and about a two-hour drive south-east of Katherine. These are remote communities. They had a meeting about these issues, and there were grave concerns expressed.

People from various communities across the Top End have talked to me. In particular, I am very grateful to the Kunbarllanjnja Community Government Council for the work that they did in responding to a questionnaire that I put to them about the changes in CDEP and how they would be affected. Kunbarllanjnja is an inland community about 250 kilometres outside of Darwin, just in Arnhem Land. One concern that has been highlighted is the burden which is going to be placed upon these communities. One of the guidelines requires CDEP organisations to develop plans with participants, who are not subject to compulsory Job Network registration, to identify the participants’ level of work readiness and set out a plan to move them into non-CDEP employment. The requirement for this particular guideline is, I have been advised, an additional burden for the CDEP staff to help all participants—some with severe literacy difficulties—to complete one of these reports.

The guidelines also say that the plan must outline what assistance and support the CDEP organisation will provide the participants. Understand that in these remote communities there are no training providers, there are no high schools. So who are they going to engage to improve the skill levels of these participants? How are they going to be resourced to ensure that they can provide the training that the government will now require them to provide? These communities want a clear explanation from DEWR as to the level and type of support that is expected of them.

Another requirement is that, wherever possible, young people should complete their education and be in a position to accept non-CDEP training and work opportunities. I wonder what happens in the minds of these bureaucrats. What do they understand of the communities they are dealing with? What do they understand about the educational attainment levels of these communities? What do we know about Kunbarllanjnja? We know that they do not have a high school. What we know about Maningrida, where Bawinanga is, is that they have had a high school only for the last 18 months. This serves a community of 2,500 people. By the way, Cyclone Monica demolished part of the school. We did not see the Commonwealth put truckloads of money in, as they did with Cyclone Larry. They put in $380-odd million as a result of Cyclone Larry and not a brass razoo into the Northern Territory as a result of Cyclone Monica. But that is by the way. This community was very adversely affected.

What we need to appreciate, and this is a point that I continue to make and will drive home as often as I possibly can, is that people should not be demonised for being participants in CDEP. People need to comprehend and understand the origins of this program. We need to appreciate that this was initially an exercise where Indigenous people said to the government: ‘We’re aware of the socially deleterious effects of unemployment benefits. We want our community to work.’ So when we are talking about remote communities—and there has been a lot of discussion about remote communities in the last couple of days—we need to understand that the people in remote communities who are on CDEP have done something which other Australians dared not do until it was imposed upon them by this government. They dared not do it, but these Indigenous Australians came to the government and said, ‘We will work in exchange for our benefits.’ I will raise this matter again at a future time. (Time expired)

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Minister for Workforce Participation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—In summing up this debate on the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006, I want to thank all the members who have contributed. However, the member for Lingiari seemed to be obsessing about someone blaming those on CDEP for not wishing to work or for being recipients of welfare on the CDEP program. I can assure the member for Lingiari that, while he might have those preoccupations, not many others do—and certainly not this government. I am very keen to make that clear. Indeed, our CDEP reforms have been very much welcomed both by Indigenous communities themselves and by those agencies that have worked long and hard to help all Australians into real jobs.

This legislation will ensure that the policy intention of the welfare to work changes contained in the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Act 2005 are fully realised and consistently applied. Terminology and provisions in the social security law need to be replaced, amended or repealed to clarify the policy intention of certain welfare to work measures. These measures relate to working age payments. They include allowing payment-partnered recipients who have a temporary incapacity exemption to have access to pharmaceutical allowances, and allowing single, principal carer parents who are grieving the death of a child and are receiving Newstart allowance or youth allowance to continue to receive the same rate that they were receiving before their child died for another 14 weeks after the death of that child.

This legislation demonstrates the government’s commitment to giving people of working age every opportunity to move from welfare dependency into work. These reforms recognise that the best form of support to any Australian, particularly an Australian family, is to assist that family or that individual into real work. For the first time, the Social Security Act will provide for the assessment of people’s capacity and availability to work. This is a shift from the old paradigm, in which people were assessed first and foremost on their level of incapacity or their lack of availability to work. This approach led to many Australians of working age being condemned to a life of welfare. Indeed, welfare has been an intergenerational experience for some Australians, up to the third generation. There are currently some 2½ million Australians of working age in this country who are not in part- or full-time work, and in a time of significant labour shortages this is a real concern for the Australian government. People who are on welfare have aspirations like all other Australians: they want to have choices in their lives, they want to take a holiday, they want to do the best for their children and they want to participate in a local economy which will bring them status, workmates and a whole new set of experiences that life on welfare cannot deliver.

Of course our government continues to insist—as all nations with our capacity to pay will always insist—that there is a strong safety net for those who need welfare. But we as a society should never presume that working age people on income support do not have the same desire that employed Australians have to succeed in life and participate in our nation’s prosperity. We as a government intend to help all Australians of working age to work to their capacity in work that they are able to undertake. No-one denies that the government must preserve a well-targeted social safety net. As I said before, that will always continue to be our government’s intention. In fact we have strengthened that safety net, but at the same time we are encouraging working age people to find jobs and remain employed. At a time of record economic growth and employment growth, there has never been a better time to provide the very important assistance and support for people of working age to enter the labour force in secure, paid employment.

There are also a number of other important reasons for seeking to increase labour force participation. We have a rapidly ageing population. Skilled and unskilled labour shortages are with us now and we know they will continue. Indeed our Intergenerational report and our Workforce tomorrow research has made it quite clear that our country, like others, must face up to the ageing population challenge of baby boomers moving through to their retirement ages in a substantial cohort.

Many businesses are struggling to fill vacancies and satisfy demands for their goods and services, and the work they have is not always at the most highly skilled end. There are also a great number of jobs available in the economy today for people who, if they have the characteristics of, for example, integrity and loyalty a work ethic and dedication and commitment to the job, can be trained on the job and become highly productive workers. I refer to the retail and manufacturing sectors, or it could be in hospitality or in tourism. There are positions in Australia now that our long-term unemployed, parents returning to the workforce, Indigenous Australians and those with a disability have the capacity to fill today in our various regional and metropolitan economies.

So the challenge of implementing welfare reform is to get the right balance between mutual obligation and government support. This must be accompanied by appropriate incentives and support mechanisms to ensure that job seekers are provided with the services they need to get them into work. The government believes that these reforms strike the right balance. Most Australians agree that it is not unreasonable to expect people who are available for and capable of work to participate in the workforce. As I mentioned in relation to the ageing population, we indeed have both economic and social reasons to assist those who can to be either part- or full-time workers in our economy.

I would like to table an amendment to the explanatory memorandum. The reason for this amendment is that the financial impact statement in the explanatory memorandum referred to the Department of Human Services as having costs for these measures. As there are no costs to the Department of Human Services, the reference to that department needs to be deleted. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

Ordered that the bill be reported to the House without amendment.