Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Social Services. Will the minister update the House on the government's reforms to create a simpler, fairer welfare system that better supports people into work?

Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bowman for his question and of course acknowledge his longstanding interest in this area and the efforts that he has put in in helping to research and devise appropriate policy responses. As the member is aware, too many problems have persisted for too long inside the Australian welfare system. Most people in the Australian welfare system inside Newstart never miss an appointment, and yet 100,000 people right now are persistently missing appointments and in so doing decreasing very substantially their chances of gaining employment and improving their lives. Of those 100,000 people who persistently miss appointments, 50,000—almost half—do not appear to have any significant barriers to employment. The reality is that because of dysfunction inside the compliance system there are about 50,000 or so people who regularly miss appointments who do not have significant barriers to employment in their lives and who are in effect gaming the welfare system.

It is not a very difficult system to game at the moment, because of its intense complexity. There are 17 different types of noncompliance events inside the compliance framework. They trigger six different types of failures. In his 2014 report, McClure noted that there were 17 different working age payments with a multitude of rates, eligibility criteria and rules. What all this means is that people sit inside the system in a passive way and they get forgotten, and they do not get the help that they need. So we have a situation in Australia where an older jobseeker is 13 times more likely to find work if they are actively engaged, and encouraged to be engaged, in job search, and yet in our present system, extraordinarily, someone aged over 55 is not actually required to search for work. The number of jobseekers getting a fixed period exemption because of drug and alcohol use has nearly doubled over the last five years, to 5,500 people in September 2016. It is further the case that the number of times drug and alcohol issues were used as an excuse for not turning up to an appointment, like turning up to a job interview, increased in one year by 131 per cent to 4,325 instances.

We are proposing, with the Minister for Human Services and with the Minister for Employment, an overarching and sweeping reform to the welfare system. We will simplify the system, turning seven payments into one. We will redraft mutual obligation requirements to make them consistent and coherent, and that will provide more encouragement and greater support for people searching for work. Finally, we will introduce a completely new compliance framework, after years of dysfunction, that ensures that the problems we have seen in the past do not persist. I think that people can trust us that this is all for the good of people inside the welfare system whose lives at the moment are not being improved because the system is failing. (Time expired)

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.