Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this, the honourable member for Dobell has moved as an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. If it suits the House, I'll state the question in the form that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I continue my remarks in respect to this legislation. In my introductory comments on this legislation, I was making the point that the Morrison government's staffing cuts have forced many government departments to rely on temporary staff and subcontractors who don't always have the experience or training to deal with the complex social issues that Centrelink staff and other departments are confronted with on a daily basis.

Adelaide's InDaily media recently reported on the mental health impacts on employees of those contracted staff, and, in particular, on employees of outsourced Centrelink call centres. One of those call centres is in my electorate of Makin, and it is a Datacom call centre. According to the InDaily report, Datacom Connect is 'one of a number of external labour hire companies awarded Centrelink contracts totalling more than $1 billion since 2016. one of a number of external labour hire companies awarded Centrelink contracts totalling more than $1 billion since 2016'. Firstly, it begs the question: if $1 billion has been awarded to contractors to do work that would otherwise have been done by government employees, public servants, then what have been the real savings for the government in having done that? Secondly, it goes to the heart of what this In Daily story is all about. It talks about not only the impact that the work has had on clients of government departments—and, in particular, Centrelink—but also the health impacts it is having on those Datacom employees and, very likely, other call-centre employees who have been contracted out to do government work. And I'm going to quote excerpts from the InDaily story directly, as they appear:

A Datacom worker told InDaily that staff were paid lower rates than their public sector counterparts.

"We’re on the contract call centre award and it’s just base award rates but … if we were in the public service system, it’s another probably $20,000 a year …

That point is also critical in this debate. These employees are doing government work but being paid at call-centre award rates. That's a back-door method of cutting people's income. The worker goes on to say:

There's no ongoing support.

When we first start, we have half a day with a Services Australia social worker. So, you go through something like self-harm and suicide and then a couple of hours on domestic violence and things to look out for and things to handle in a call.

…`…   …

To have hundreds of people, who are fairly poorly paid and trained, taking calls from hundreds of people can lead to problems.

The InDaily report goes on, with respect to comments made by another worker who was interviewed. This particular worker quit her job after only five weeks. The article states the worker said:

"There's absolutely no incentive to learn the job, because learning the job takes time, and if you choose to learn the job then you'll be running behind and then you won't meet your quotas.

"So you might be tasked with 30 tasks for the day and when you start not meeting that, you've got quality assurance coming down on you really hard. So there's no incentive to learn.

…   …   …

"I did not have a day when I wasn't screamed at by a client, I didn't have a day when I didn't hear from a suicidal caller. I was broken after five weeks. I'd lost about six kilos.

"I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping. It was just existential dread. I was a wreck."

There is more in the InDaily story that I would like to quote, but time won't allow me to do that. Those quotes highlight the two sides of this problem: (1) Centrelink clients are not getting the support and services that they require, because the staff are not adequately trained to deal with their queries and (2) it's having a real impact on the very people who are employed to deal with the Centrelink problems which, as I said earlier in my remarks, can sometimes be incredibly complex and incredibly traumatic, given the impact that they have on the individuals that are calling Centrelink. It also begs the question: how much is it costing society more broadly to deal with the employees of these call centres and these subcontracted staff who are put under incredible stress as a result of the work that they are doing for which they are not either properly compensated for or properly trained for?

This issue and this legislation comes at a time when we have seen greater demands on government services than ever before. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to that, but there have been other contributing factors. We now have around one million people unemployed. We have somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people underemployed. There's going to be more unemployed by Christmas—perhaps 160,000 or thereabouts, according to the government's own figures. We have an ageing society and, along with that, we have issues, such as fires, floods and droughts, which continuously add to the demands on Centrelink staff. We then have new programs brought in like JobKeeper, JobSeeker and now JobMaker, not to mention the issues that we just debated only a moment ago with student enrolments and the like.

These programs, and what is happening in society, come at a time when the government has put a cap on public service employees and cut staff within those government departments. We should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn't simply be bringing in outsourced staff. We should be adding to the team of people who are dealing with these complex situations. The government has announced an additional 5,000 staff. They announced that in March of this year. My question to the minister is: how many of those 5,000 have been employed and were they employed on a full-time, casual or permanent basis? I've never seen statistics to tell us exactly what the situation is but, quite frankly, I would doubt that we have added those additional 5,000 staff. Indeed, are they the people who have been subcontracted out to private call centre operators and the like? We simply don't know.

The additional demands for those programs that I alluded to just a moment ago will mean that we will have very complex situations where people are trying to navigate through what their entitlements are and what support there is available for them at a time when they are dealing with some of the most difficult situations in their life, particularly because of COVID-19 and the likely loss of work. We know that over 600,000 people have already cleaned out their superannuation accounts. That probably means that they have nothing left in their savings accounts either, which means that the next step, in the months ahead, will see even more people become financially vulnerable and, in turn, look to government departments for assistance. Yet those government departments are not properly equipped to deal with them and provide them they support that they need, and that will, in turn manifest, itself in more psychological problems, mental health issues and the like. All of that costs taxpayers money and hurts people in the community, but, quite frankly, it causes additional burdens and costs on government as well. The health department of this country will actually find itself paying out more and more for health issues that arise because of them. So where are the real savings in all of this?

I can't conclude my remarks without speaking briefly about the robodebt debacle. I note that the member for Maribyrnong is in the chamber, and I'm sure that he will have more to say about this. That over $700 million has to be repaid as a result of the robodebt bungle just highlights the incompetence of this government. I had people coming into my office who were improperly billed as a result of robodebt. They were people who were not only reliant on the welfare system but struggling in the first instance, and for them to then get bills saying they owed money to the government—bills that were incorrect—only added to their stress and the difficult situations they were in, so much so that we have heard stories of some of them taking their own lives.

Nothing highlights not just the incompetence of this government but the callousness of this government like running the robodebt program when they knew what it was doing to people out there. I'm sure, Mr Deputy Speaker Georganas, you would have had people in your electorate coming to you, and every other member in this House would have heard the same as I did, that in many cases those debts were causing additional grievance and stress to families. Yet this government pursued them, knowing that it was doing that and knowing that the whole process was not only flawed but, frankly, illegal. It's a condemnation of this government and something that this government will never be able to walk away from, certainly in respect of those families that were left worse off as a result of robodebt, because of the trauma, because of the stress and because of the deaths this government should hang its head in shame.

The public service of this country serves this country well. The government should appreciate what the public sector does, and instead of making cuts to it, which ultimately flow on to the rest of society, given the support people need, it should reinstate those people whose jobs it has taken.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's good to be out of 15 days of quarantine to attend the parliament to talk on this legislation, the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill sets out the proposed framework, or structure, for the newly established executive agency Services Australia, which replaces the now abolished Department of Human Services. There are a number of changes that aim to both update terminology and streamline the reporting lines associated with transitioning DHS to Services Australia. Labor, as a principle, supports modifications to governance structures across the public sector that lead to improved outcomes for the Australian people and for the employees who deliver the services that Australians rely upon, but there is a problem while there is a cap on the number of permanent employees, as the member for Makin so eloquently just said. My colleagues, including the member for Dobell in the last sitting of parliament, have elaborated on the negative effect that the Morrison government's staffing cap has on both services and staff, so I will not dwell unduly on this particular aspect, but for present purposes let it be said that the stifling effect of the cap on the number of permanent employees is a reason for Labor's second reading amendment in the form presented.

I want to talk about the rebrand that this legislation represents. When I look at the mass rebrand of the Department of Human Services to Services Australia I think of one of the most notorious tales from the mad men era of Madison Avenue advertising executives in New York in the swinging sixties. The story is half confected and half based on a real tagline proposed by advertising guru Jerry Della Famina. It features a grizzled adman, a returned veteran from the Second World War still carrying wartime prejudices against the Japanese. The adman is tasked with coming up with a tagline for a new Japanese electronics client, Panasonic. The grizzled adman and former veteran pauses for a while. He thinks contemplatively. He looks at the line of whiz-bang electrical products. And then he proposes: 'From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor'. Well, when I look at this seven-year-old government putting Stuart Robert at the helm, promising a digital 'revolution' in the way that the old DHS services are provided, part of me hopes that his promise may come true. But another part of me can't help but think it's a pledge somewhere along the lines of, 'From the wonderful folks who brought you robodebt'.

So let's talk about robodebt—because, goodness knows, the government won't. Robodebt—or, as its proud Liberal parents prefer to call it, 'the online compliance intervention scheme'—slouched into lamented existence about five years ago. It was introduced as part of the 2015-16 budget measure 'Strengthening the integrity of welfare payments' and the December 2015 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook announcement. Scott Morrison was Treasurer, Christian Porter was social services minister, and Ms Kathryn Campbell was human services secretary. In 2016-17, as more and more disquiet about robodebt's legality emerged, Alan Tudge was human services minister. Robodebt was the holy grail for these digital fetishists. No more pesky staffing costs! No more annoying human intervention! No more troublesome procedural justice or, indeed, that annoying presumption of innocence for Australian citizens—just a magic algorithm, just an averaging tool, that worked out that someone had been overpaid by Centrelink, maybe a decade ago, followed by a very official demand for payment on Australian government letterhead.

Now, the averaging tool was fundamentally flawed. It did not account for changes in people's circumstances. It tried to compare a fortnight of a Department of Social Services payment with a year's annual income across the ATO. It took no account of lumpy income, of the vagaries of economic life in Australia. Many, scared by the official nature of the demand from the Australian government, just handed over the money that they didn't actually owe. But there was an immediate backlash from others, who knew for a fact that they didn't owe the money—people who stood up and said no to the standover racket authorised by the government.

But what was the response from robodebt's architects to the voices of everyday Australians being persecuted by these claims? Well, it was bringing in so much money that it was helping carry the load for the ultimately fictional campaign to get the budget back in black. They were addicted to it in the government. They couldn't stop it. They ramped it up. They needed more of it.

Veteran Centrelink and Services Australia staff proved too conscientious, and they were reticent to engage in this standover scheme on the Australian people. So the Libs did what they love to do: they went out and outsourced it to private companies. Boiler-room offices of casual recruits were set up, and their job was to pressure and compel Australians to settle their robodebts, or else. People who have worked in these boiler rooms have told us that they were forced to work on quotas; they had to basically threaten little old ladies and gents to pay the money, or the boiler-room staff wouldn't get paid. But these workers also had consciences. They recognised what the government had failed to: this process was fundamentally unfair, fundamentally wrong, fundamentally unsound and fundamentally cruel. Many of them quit.

So far, the government must have had the following groups voicing, to some degree, their concerns about robodebt. There were the innocent Australians who didn't want to be hit up for fake debts, the public servants who were told to chase the innocent Australians for fake debts and the private contractors in the boiler rooms quitting because the work was so distasteful to their innate sense of fairness. And there were regular decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal declaring individual robodebts not valid. There have been at least 82 cases in the AAT where decisions were clearly made: 'This was not valid.'

But this government didn't want to hear. They didn't care how the money was got. They did not care how they raised the money, even if it was illegal. This is the worst undermining of the integrity of public service by a pack of rent-seeking, neoright, neoliberal vandals that we are likely to see in our lifetime. I certainly hope that we never see it again. Even last year, advice was leaked that revealed an early plan to expand the scourge of robodebt to groups including the homeless, the elderly and people in the regions. The last 16 months have been a very revealing journey when it comes to robodebt. As we in Labor have been sounding the alarm, the Morrison government's desperately been trying to hold onto its deformed cash cow and keep robodebt alive in some fashion. At every step, the Morrison government has moved the goalposts. They've trimmed their sails and they've performed some spectacular circus backflips.

But they've only ever told us as much truth about the scheme as they've had to. In November of last year, the Victorian legal aid commission was finally successful in its case of Deanna Amato. The federal court said, 'This is unlawful.' The government services minister maintained that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with robodebt even after that court decision. This was despite the Commonwealth not even being able to come up with a defence to Ms Amato's claims. They consented to the judge's order in favour of Mr Amarto. Around the same time, behind the scenes, the Department of Human Services sent an email to all staff, saying that averaging alone would no longer be used to raise the debts. More humans would be brought back in to attempt to tame the malfunctioning robodebt process.

On 15 November last year, the class action which I helped organise went forward. Gordon Legal sent a letter to Services Australia confirming the class action would be proceeding. Four days later, Mr Robert—again, with that habit of telling the truth only when you've been caught out not telling the truth—held a press conference and said they would make a refinement to the scheme, but it would only affect a small cohort. What that meant, in more honest language, was that they were finally heeding the legal advice and putting the brakes on the whole sordid scheme. I think you might remember Mr Robert rising in this place and saying, 'I will not apologise for robodebt.' Things have changed a little, but not completely. Continued pressure on behalf of the victims of robodebt has meant the Prime Minister has eventually expressed regret over this rogue scheme.

Robodebt has been a fraud perpetrated by a government against its people. We should not forget that this is the worst scandal in the history of social welfare, and it's gone all the way to the top of the hierarchy of this government. Mr Morrison started robodebt when he was social services minister, he banked it when he was Treasurer and he's done nothing but whitewash it since being Prime Minister. He only says that he has 'deep regrets' now they've been caught red-handed. I suppose that is better than nothing, but true remorse would be accompanied by an action to remedy and rule out a robodebt reboot.

Minister Stuart Robert has suggested that he isn't really responsible, because he's only been a minister for the last 15 months—at least in his current incarnation. He must be forgetting, though, that he was human services minister in 2015-16, overseeing a key stage of robodebt's rollout. This was, of course, before he resigned from Prime Minister Turnbull's frontbench after breaching the ministerial code of conduct. I'm not going to recount in great detail the member for Fadden's many bungles: the China trip, the Rolex watch incident and the home internet bills—what do you spend $40,000 on the internet? But he's back again in this frontbench, living proof that a souffle can rise twice. Now he's in charge of the robodebt cover-up and clean-up. As robodebt minister, Mr Robert has sent threatening letters to innocent Australians, when, in reality, it is the government that has behaved fraudulently. As minister for robodebt, a scheme that unlawfully accused Australians of stealing from the Commonwealth, the reality is that he's presided over a scheme where the Commonwealth was unlawfully stealing from Australians. We've been saying all along robodebt was immoral. Despite its inaccuracy and despite its lack of procedural fairness, the government still let it run amuck and upset the lives of countless Australians. When really bad examples of robodebt's toll have surfaced, Mr Robert has issued qualified apologies.

I think a low point in this sad and sorry saga of robodebt was the experience of Anastasia McCardel being rung at home and drilled over her dead son Bruce's alleged debt. When they stand over a bereaved mum for a debt that, in all likelihood, never existed, that is sickening. We've raised it in parliament so the government couldn't hide from it, but, for the most part, thousands of sad and often tragic experiences of Australians coming a cropper with robodebt have happened quietly and out of the public eye. There was Norm Austwick, a recently widowed 79-year-old who was hounded for $67 from last century, which he never owed. There was 82-year old Canberra woman Wilma Spence who in July was hounded for $61 dating back to 1995. People officially questioned their robodebts, and, while they were under review, while the whole thing should have been paused, the government went and garnished their tax returns. Minister Roberts said they weren't robodebting disaster areas like Townsville after the floods. But guess what? They did.

We've been saying for some time that not only is robodebt harsh, inaccurate and immoral; it is almost certainly illegal. On 29 May this year the Morrison government finally announced that it would scrap robodebt and repay a small cohort—470,000 wrongly issued debts, worth at least $721 million, to be repaid in full. If it weren't for the COVID-19 pandemic, this scandal and the amount of money would leave Australians with the their jaws on the ground—and it still does. In June, the Prime Minister finally found the words to apologise in this place for any 'hurt, harm or hardship' caused by the scheme—his scheme. If he's really sorry, then I guess there are consequences, aren't there.

But there are no consequences for the architects of robodebt; they're all still there. In a pattern of only admitting what they are still denying when they are able still to deny, they no longer claim that robodebt works fine, as they did for a long time; they no longer claim that robodebt is accurate, as they did for a long time; they no longer defend robodebt's fairness or morality, as they did for a long time. They are even a lot quieter about robodebt's legality than they have been for a long time. These are the new battlelines that the government has drawn on robodebt. None of the cronies lose their jobs or get demoted. No-one admits what mourning parents have known for a long time, and will tell you if you're willing to listen, which is that young adults took their lives because of robodebt.

And under no circumstances will the government agree to Labor's royal commission into the origins of robodebt. I said for a long time that resistance against robodebt was inaccurate, immoral and illegal. Today I say there must be responsibility taken for it and the consequences for those involved. The government owes it to grieving parents to admit the truth. The government owes it to the nation to have a royal commission into robodebt and its origins. For the moment, robodebt's architects are still all there. There is a bright new sign painted out the front of Services Australia. But has the culture changed? A lot of the top Liberal-friendly bureaucrats who like nothing more than outsourcing and ripping money out of these departments and agencies have moved onto pretty good jobs. And what is happening in the culture is that, apart from a few isolated cases of apparent whistleblowing, the bureaucracy has been forced to go along with a clearly immoral and illegal scheme. Where were the 'no' people, the people who were saying the algorithm was malfunctioning? We've taken away too many of the safeguards. Innocent people were harassed unjustly, and sometimes even to self-harm. I'm sure there are many outbreaks of this—the existence of this hollow Public Service treatment. Who is more likely to speak up? A casual worker? An outsourced worker? This is why they should lift the caps. (Time expired)

Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The irony of this government introducing a bill called the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020! This government thinking that the announcement of a change of name—from Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency—to Services Australia would be worthy of a stand-up routine in a satirical comedy venue if it weren't so desperately important to the people of my electorate and the people around Australia that the federal government actually deliver services when they need it and does it in an upfront, honest and reliable way.

It's not just ironic that this government thinks that perhaps it can hide what has happened with robodebt, that perhaps Australians won't think about the way they have attacked and undermined the Public Service. The government allows the purchase by the Public Service of a $3 million block of land for $30 million, to be leased back by the Commonwealth for $1 million, while the ministers are saying, 'I don't want to hear about it,' or 'Don't tell me.' They apparently think the Australian public will just forget about all that because they have has decided to use a phrase like 'Services Australia'. They won't. The Australian public aren't mugs. Certainly the people in my electorate aren't mugs.

I'll tell you what this government should be doing. It should be standing up and acknowledging the amazing work that has been undertaken by Commonwealth public servants for years and decades but definitely in 2020, during this COVID crisis. The people who work at Centrelink and Medicare, those frontline workers who are dealing with the Australian public day in and day out, have an incredibly difficult job. They are dealing with people often in the biggest crisis of their lives and the worst time of their lives, and it is their job to help those people through and to help those people be able to access the government support that they need. Employees at the Department of Human Services at Centrelink and Medicare deserve not just praise—and praise is what they'll get from me and from this side of the chamber—but a government that values them in terms of their full-time and permanent employment and the wages that they get.

It has been a time almost like no other in 2020 for the workload that staff at Services Australia, as it's now called, have had to deliver. We all remember the images of people lined up around the block to get to their Centrelink offices to get help, with many people for the first time in their lives needing to go to Centrelink to get help when the government was just too slow to realise that they needed to accept and introduce a wage subsidy. That period of time was devastating and stressful for so many people in my electorate, like elsewhere around Australia, who needed that help from their government. But it was also stressful and difficult for the employees at the Centrelink offices who were forced to try to help people who were in such despair. They deserve our greatest thanks for their efforts always but in particular for what has occurred. In my electorate, for example, between March and May of this year, the number of people on Newstart, which is now called JobSeeker, basically doubled to about 10,000. The number of people on youth allowance basically doubled to just over 1,000. And all of those people needed to receive help from staff at Centrelink.

We know that this government has made announcements during COVID to increase the number of people who are working at Centrelink and on the frontline. We know that people have been redeployed from other parts of the Public Service. Of course, that's a good thing, but it's just not enough. It's just not enough when we look at a Commonwealth Public Service across the board, not just at Centrelink and Medicare, that has been undermined, undervalued, weakened, outsourced and politicised by a Morrison government and a Liberal government that, at its core, doesn't believe in the Public Service.

One of the ways we in this place all agree on to stimulate the economy during a recession is creating jobs and investing in jobs. The Commonwealth as an employer has a great opportunity to directly invest in jobs, to directly invest in people, by employing public servants, who also, then, of course, benefit their communities by helping those people who need to access public services and allowances during this time of crisis. Back last year when COVID-19 wasn't even a bad dream in people's minds—we didn't know it was going to happen during the election in May—in my electorate of Dunkley we made an election commitment that should Labor win we would employ 40 more full-time employees at the Department of Human Services in Frankston. That would have injected $3 million into my local economy. That's the sort of thinking that we need from the government—not a government that continues to undermine and cut the Public Service.

We know, because the Auditor-General revealed it, that the Liberals have spent over $2 billion on outside contractors since they first came to power. That doesn't save money; it puts a heavy burden on the Commonwealth budget whilst also undermining the Australian Public Service. This government has cut and cut Australian Public Service jobs. By the way—for the benefit of government members—public servants are people. They have families—husbands, wives and children. They have mortgages and other commitments. When you talk about cutting jobs in Canberra, you're actually cutting the employment of real people and affecting the economy. The government have cut and cut. Then what have they had to do? They've had to outsource. They've had to go to the big four consulting firms to get them to do the work that the Australian Public Service would have been doing if only it still had the capacity.

This is a government that, at its core, doesn't believe in a properly resourced Public Service to serve the people of Australia. The Thodey report into the Australian Public Service was released midway through December last year, following a review that received over 800 submissions. The report was considered and deep and put out recommendations not just about how the Public Service could be supported and improved now but about how its capacity should be built for the future. It was essentially ignored by the Morrison government, by the Prime Minister. The range of really important reforms that were contained in that report will not, it would seem, be implemented. There was a very important recommendation that I am urging the federal government to reconsider, because COVID puts into stark relief the fact that the Public Service should not be focused solely on delivery. That's part of the job of the Public Service, but the Commonwealth Public Service is about more; it's about capacity-building and strategic planning. It's about planning for the future. It's about developing a preparedness to deal with the unexpected, to advise ministers and governments on how to deal with crises if and when they arise.

Take, for example—I don't know, COVID? You can contrast the response to COVID this year with the way in which Treasury was able to advise the government during the global financial crisis. In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Treasury undertook scenario planning. It had the capacity and the capability to undergo scenario planning so that, when the worst case did happen and there was a global financial crisis, it was able to provide swift, timely advice about how to respond to get Australia through that crisis, as the then Labor government did. But we know that there has been no pandemic planning under the Morrison government.

For the community in my electorate of Dunkley, Services Australia is fundamentally important. It's important as an employer through the Frankston Centrelink, and many other constituents of mine work at the Mornington Centrelink. It's important as the agency that assists almost 25,000 locals who receive pensions—the 16,000-odd people in my electorate who are on the age pension, the more than 1,500 people who are on carer's payment, the 5½ thousand people who receive the disability support pension, the many single parents who rely on child support—and, now, the more than 10,000 people who are on unemployment benefits. It's really important that Services Australia works and works well, but this government's haphazard approach to dealing with government agencies does not fill me, on behalf of my community, with confidence that it is going to be able to work.

We had the situation earlier this year where, with no consultation with the community and no consultation with the local council, apparently without even the courtesy of telling the federal member for Flinders—who, coincidentally, is the health minister and therefore responsible for Medicare—it was announced that the Mornington Centrelink and Medicare office was going to close. The government said it was because a lease had expired and they couldn't renegotiate the lease. Well, the community wasn't having that. It affects my community in Dunkley because of the people in Mount Eliza and Frankston South who go to Mornington Centrelink and Medicare but also because, if that office closes, where does everyone have to go? To Frankston Centrelink and Medicare, which is already overwhelmed. So, on behalf of the community, I got involved in the campaign. The Mornington Community Information and Support Centre also got involved in the campaign, as did the local community, to say, 'You can't shut down Medicare and Centrelink in Mornington.'

Lo and behold, when we saw lines of people, out on the street, needing to access Centrelink for the first time ever because of the impact of COVID and the government's dillydallying in introducing a wage subsidy, and when those lines included Mornington Centrelink, apparently the government could renegotiate the lease after all and Mornington Centrelink got a six-month reprieve. We've recently heard, because the campaign to force the government to keep that centre has been re-enlivened, that it's going to have another six-month reprieve; they've managed to get another lease signed. This just smacks of decision-making on the run, rather than proper, considered, systemic thinking about what is needed for communities and what is in the best interests of people.

We have a government, as the member for Maribyrnong so articulately covered in his speech, that is the architect of robodebt. We have ministers who presided over robodebt and still don't seem to understand the depth of the damage that caused people in our community—the anxiety and the frustration imposed on people on unemployment benefits and student allowances in my electorate and on women who needed to access maternity leave payments—and now they're overseeing this transition to Services Australia. Everyone in this country is allowed to be cynical about how this government is going to deliver, because it's shown no sign of delivering so far and it's shown no sign of learning its lessons. If this were a satire, it might be funny, but it's not. This is real. For people in my community who have lost JobKeeper and who are going to have JobSeeker cut to $40 a day, it's more than real—it's their lives.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I'm really grateful for the chance to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill is administrative in design, but it raises some incredibly critical issues, and that's why I want to start by thanking the members for Makin, Dunkley and Maribyrnong for what have been three really impassioned speeches about some issues of core importance to the people that we represent.

Services Australia is probably the most critical part of the Australian government. The decisions that we make in this chamber, about policy and about who's eligible for different types of support, are basically conveyed and delivered to our constituents through Services Australia. If you are thinking about Centrelink, Medicare, child support, migrant support, disaster support or, crucially, JobKeeper and JobSeeker, you're depending to one degree or another on the way that Services Australia works.

We are of course having this debate in the shadow of the biggest health and financial crisis that our country has experienced for many decades. How many decades, we won't know for some time. But I think it has really highlighted the fact that this is an organisation that has been neglected by the Morrison government. It has been underfunded and subjected to completely inappropriate staffing caps, and it has badly hurt many of the people that I represent, because of the inability of the organisation to flex in the way that it needed to do when the COVID-19 impacts hit us.

I'm incredibly lucky. I have Oakleigh and Springvale offices of Services Australia. They do an amazing job. The staff that work there are committed public servants who show up to work every day to try to help other people. We need to be doing everything we can to help support them in the work that they do, which is actually incredibly difficult. We always need to remember with organisations like Services Australia that they're confronting people who are often experiencing the worst crisis they've ever had in their lives. Their jobs are difficult, stressful and important and the Morrison government has made them much harder by the arbitrary impost of staff caps.

I'm going to talk a bit more about robodebt in a minute—which I think is the most flagrant example of the horrible impact of privatisation and under-resourcing of public services in Australia that we've seen in recent years—but before we do that I want to speak a little bit about the cuts to JobSeeker and JobKeeper, which have so dramatically affected the lives of the people that I represent in this chamber.

About three weeks ago the Morrison government cut $300 a fortnight from the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments. I want to say straight up that the cut in those payments is nothing short of a total scandal. I cannot think of one single decision that's happened in the seven years that I've been in parliament that has hurt the people that I represent as much as this one single decision. I have 8,000 people in my community who are JobSeeker recipients today. I have 30,000 who are JobKeeper recipients. What the Morrison government did on one day was take $300 a fortnight out of the pocket of every single one of those people. The people in my community are relying on those payments tomorrow to feed their children, to pay their rent, to get schoolbooks, to pay for groceries, to pay for energy bills, to pay childcare costs—all the essentials.

This was an outrage in every state of Australia but particularly so in the state of Victoria. I am giving this speech right now from my electorate office in Clayton and I can see that the Prime Minister has forgotten about the 6.4 million people who live just to the south of where you are at the moment. Don't forget, we are still in lockdown here in Victoria. What the Morrison government has done is take away $300 a fortnight while my constituents can do nothing about their economic situation. I am fundamentally outraged at this decision. I am sure that Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, has got a smart, little political answer for this. He will probably say this is all Daniel Andrews's fault, because he has put the state into lockdown. I have to say that my voters do not care about politics at a time like this. What they care about is the financial security of their families that the Prime Minister has put in jeopardy through these cuts. What sort of person would cut pandemic payments in the middle of a pandemic? We are right in the thick of this thing in Victoria. So I ask today that the government consider these incredibly harsh cuts. It should not be beyond the wit of a federal government to try to create some different policy for the 25 per cent of the Australian population in Victoria who are still stuck in some form of lockdown or another.

The language that the government uses again and again when it comes to coronavirus is that this is somehow beaten and over. I can tell you, from the point of view of a Victorian, from the point of view of a Melburnian, that it is not beaten and over. Melburnians are working as hard as we can to try to get on top of this. We are actually doing a solid to the rest of the country because we know that if we don't get on top of this in Victoria then we're going to see the spread of coronavirus go through the country again and no-one wants that. But could we please have a bit of empathy, a bit of sympathy and a bit of understanding from the federal government, because 6.4 million people should not be left behind as this country attempts to recover from this crisis.

I spoke to some of my constituents about the impact that the JobSeeker and JobKeeper cuts had had on them, and I want to share some of the reactions that they had. Matthew said to me, 'It's about time someone correlates the inflation in mental health calls for Victoria with the government's decision to roll back pandemic assistance during a pandemic.' Anita talks about the impact that the JobSeeker cut has had on her. She is an older female. She said there's nothing in the federal budget for her—just a big cut to her entitlements. There is not much good a tax cut gives you when you're not actually earning an income.

Daniel says: 'Signing up for JobKeeper was due to events beyond my control. If I could do my job, I would. The reduction of JobSeeker is a kick in the guts. All it does is reduce my option of returning to work.' So again I say there are millions of people who are still in lockdown here. We need the support. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Why has the government taken away this essential support at the very moment Victorians need it most? It needs to be held accountable for that.

We are talking about Services Australia today, and it would be remiss of me not to touch on the absolute scandal of robodebt, which so significantly affected the lives of thousands of people I represent in my electorate. Robodebt is what happens when you take the human out of Human Services. What we saw here was a government that is, frankly, completely incompetent when it comes to any type of technology let loose an algorithm without any human intervention to demand that hundreds of thousands of Australians pay debt to the Commonwealth that they did not in fact owe. In terms of public policy disasters, this one would surely be top 3 in the last decade and it deserves its own royal commission, as the member for Maribyrnong has talked about.

I hope and believe that most of us in this chamber got into politics to make a difference in the lives of Australians. Imagine if you finished your political career and your legacy was a harrowing fearmongering campaign in the lives of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country. But that is on the government and that is particularly on the minister who is in charge of Services Australia.

It's estimated that by now $1.5 billion was unlawfully taken from Australians by their government through this scheme. We know from all the news reports how genuinely traumatising this was for Australians. As soon as this scheme hit a few years ago, we were flooded with phone calls by people who had been sent letters by the robodebt scheme telling them that they owed money to the Commonwealth. Of course, like many members of parliament, I spent a long time arguing for constituents who were then found not to have owed any money at all. But I'd like to talk about some of their stories.

One of my constituents, Robyn, was first advised that she had a debt of $5,900 covering three-year period between 2013 and 2016. She was paying off $40 a fortnight towards that debt, not aware that in fact she never owed the money to the Commonwealth to begin with. She had wanted to appeal the debt, but she was told by Services Australia this would take months and months and she was going to have to pay the debt anyway. Robin contacted us because she lost her part-time job and was trying to seek assistance in working out how she was going to pay this claim, and we were able to assist her with the claim. We went with her through the process of dealing with Services Australia, and it turned out that the whole thing was a robodebt error. She'd been paying off this money in the very best of faith, because many Australians, when they receive a letter from government saying that they owe money, take it that this is being done in good faith. Now, the family has gone through horrible trouble over the years trying to repay this debt. It's had to go through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and a whole bunch of other processes, and the impact on this family has been untold misery for years while they've been trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to get rid of a debt that they never actually owed. [Inaudible]

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Hotham, we can't hear you at the moment. Apologies, Member for Hotham. We have a technical difficulty at the moment. On the advice of the Clerk, we will pause for a few moments till we work out what the difficulty is and take it from there. In fact, we will go to the next speaker, which will be the member for Macquarie, and the member for Hotham will have continuation when we resume the debate.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. For many people 2020 was the first time that they'd had to interact with Services Australia, and it wasn't because they had a baby or because they became a retiree but because they had lost their job. It was Centrelink that they needed, and they needed it urgently. They needed to access support to help them through a time when their sudden job loss meant they had absolutely no income completely unexpectedly and brutally. I hope we never see the lines outside Centrelink like we did in those weeks, but clearly the agency was not given the resources to scale up fast enough and to meet the need that was there right in front of them. It is operating on, in business, what we call 'no spare capacity', but its heavy dependence on labour hire means it's probably more accurate to say it operates with far too few permanent staff all the time, let alone when a surge in demand happens. I think this reflects how little the coalition government believes in this fundamentally important government department, which every single person in Australia relies on at some stage in their life, whether it is for Medicare claims, for sorting paid parental leave, for NDIS participation, for accessing the pension and—as those in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury know—for accessing emergency payments at a time of natural disaster. These are usually times of great stress. What we used to call Human Services and what we now call Services Australia needs to be appropriately staffed to meet those needs.

I've spoken to many of the amazing workers in Services Australia across the NDIS, Centrelink and Medicare, and the message they tell me is they do feel under pressure. They are trying their best to deliver a first-rate service to the people who come in. They know the stressors that lead people to reaching out for help. I'm sure every member knows what happens when Services Australia and the different rules that are in place don't fit the needs of the people who've sought help there. They turn up at our offices.

We are their place of last resort, which is why we've had so many people, in the years that I've been a member of parliament, come and seek help. They say to me: 'I've never before contacted a member of parliament, but I just don't know where else to turn on this.' And what they've met is a blockage in Centrelink. The blockage might be that they've been given different pieces of information based on different conversations with somebody within Services Australia. It might be that they just don't quite know how to provide the information that's needed. It might be that there's a delay in their pension application being processed—haven't we seen those? Or it might be that they've received a robodebt for a debt they don't believe they owe or, as so many members have said in this place, that they've started paying only to then find out it wasn't really their debt to pay. In this place we see the situations where things go wrong in Services Australia. We've seen a lot of those in the years I've been in this place.

The frontline workers in these centres have had, in recent times, some of the most difficult conversations you can imagine. When I do speak with the public servants who work there, they absolutely demonstrate to me that they feel they are serving the public, and they want to do it to their very best. I invariably walk away reminded of their skill, the depth or the breadth of their knowledge and their desire to help people who can be extremely vulnerable, whether it's by providing financial relief to those unable to work, by helping people access counselling and social work services or by helping jobseekers to find meaningful occupations or prepare them to re-enter the workplace. But I also see that they have frustrations about the constraints under which they operate and their inability to be able to demonstrate compassion and to be able to find a solution that fits with the individual needs of every one of those clients that come to see them. That really goes to the core—

Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.