Ben Morton (Tangney, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Cabinet) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

The Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Coronavirus and Other Measures) Bill 2020 includes a number of beneficial measures that are primarily directed at supporting people who have been impacted by the economic consequences of COVID-19. The bill provides additional assistance through two further economic support payments of $250 to around five million payment recipients and cardholders in the lead-up to Christmas and the new year, as part of the Australian government's response to COVID-19.

From 1 January 2021, amendments are made so that the six-month period between 25 March 2020 and 24 September 2020 will automatically be recognised as contributing to existing workforce independence criteria for youth allowance. This measures supports young people whose path towards demonstrating independence through work has been disrupted by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The same concession will be available to Abstudy recipients through changes to the ABSTUDY Policy Manual. The bill also creates temporary incentives in the income support system to encourage young Australians to undertake seasonal agricultural work to help address concerns across the agricultural sector about immediate workforce availability for the upcoming harvest season. From 1 March 2021, the new criteria will recognise a person who earns at least $15,000 through employment in the agricultural industry between 30 November 2020 and 31 December 2021 as independent for the purposes of the youth allowance (student), subject to a parental income threshold. The same concession will be available for Abstudy through changes to the ABSTUDY Policy Manual.

The bill will also introduce the revised paid parental leave work test period for a limited time for people who access paid parental leave pay and dad and partner pay who do not meet the current work test provisions because their employment has been affected by COVID-19. This will enable most individuals with a genuine work history prior to the pandemic to qualify for payments under the paid parental leave scheme. The bill also makes amendments to address inconsistencies in payments in relation to newborn children available to families affected by stillbirth and infant death by aligning the amount that eligible families are able to access after a stillbirth or a child's death shortly after birth or within its first year. These amendments also remove discrepancies within the payment system in respect of multiple instances of stillbirth or infant death within the same family.

Lastly, the bill makes technical amendments to child support law to allow for alternative figures to be used in place of the male total average weekly earnings trend figure and average weekly earnings trend figure for the purposes of child support assessment calculations. From May 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has temporarily suspended publications of trend estimates for all average weekly earnings series, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market. Child support law does not currently permit alternative trend figures to be used.

I commend the bill to the House.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think it's important for the House to appreciate what's happening right now and why. That's the first time in a very long time that we've heard a speech from the minister at the table on the motion that the bill be read a third time. It was very well delivered. It was a good speech, I say to the assistant minister. There's a reason why that just happened, and it's that the minister for energy, when it was time to sum up the second reading debate, gave a speech about a completely different bill. The ruling that the Speaker gave a few moments ago was about the debate that we are now in. As I explain these issues, I would say: 'By all means, if you want to take a relevance point of order, go for it.' But no-one took one on the minister, and he was completely irrelevant to the bill when he was talking.

What the minister for energy did does say something about the minister for energy, and it does say something about the entire government. It's a point that needs to be made. Because, after the minister for energy had given a speech about a different bill—and, might I add, not only was that an odd thing to do; it was a speech summing up the debate. Therefore, it meant he had a speech to sum up a debate that had not occurred. The debate hadn't occurred, and yet, fully written, there was a speech summing up the points that had been made in the debate that hadn't been. That's the way this government now treats the parliament.

Some people have rushed around saying, 'Who's to blame?' And some people have referred to who handed him the speech and things like that. Can I say: the government's to blame. It's as simple as that. There are many parliaments around the country—and, not too recently, this used to be one of them—where, when you had a piece of legislation, the relevant minister would come into the chamber and move it, would be here for some chunk of the debate and would come in at the end to give the summing up speech on their own bill. Throughout the course of the debate, they would have had members of their personal staff sitting in the adviser's gallery and taking notes on what was said. And then, when they came up to give the summing up speech, they in fact summed up a debate that did occur, not an imagined debate that was summed up by the minister for energy.

What's behind the minister for energy making an error like this? We're told that he was handed the speech. We haven't been told that he downloaded this one. This is a speech that never appeared on the City of Sydney council website. This is a speech that, in some way, was handed to him. But here's the question: why is it, on the social services legislation, that it's the minister for energy who the government sends in here? Why is it that, on legislation of fundamental importance, this government now doesn't care who is in the chamber for legislation that they are meant to have personal carriage of? If we had a full separation of powers system, like, for example, the United States, we wouldn't get the ministers in the legislature, but here we do. We have the system of responsible government. The concept of that is meant to be that the government is responsible and that the ministers are responsible for the legislation that they deal with. In so doing, the ministers are also responsible for debating that legislation.

This government has just given up on that completely. It's yet another way that the government has decided that the parliament doesn't matter. It's yet another way that a prime minister who doesn't like people disagreeing with him in public—or, I am told, in private—has found to try to make debate as irrelevant as possible, to the point where the minister for energy gave a speech completely irrelevant to the debate he was summing up. Their approach, to make sure that debate is irrelevant, is to debate in an irrelevant way. That's where they've landed. But I've got to say that—and the government should think about this—if you work on the basis that what happens at that dispatch box is simply that someone hands you a script and you read it out, that's a joke. That's not a parliament, that's just a joke. It's a joke if whoever you might employ in your office is responsible for every word you say. You don't care which minister reads it out; whatever they get handed, like a trained seal, they will read those words and no other words will come from their lips. They will sum up a debate that has not occurred, but it doesn't matter because, hey, it's only the parliament.

What happened in this debate when the parliament last sat is without precedent, extraordinary and embarrassing. It's just embarrassing to be a country where the government no longer cares not only which minister deals with the legislation but even whether they're speaking on the right legislation. So I say to those opposite and to the chamber itself: it should not have been the case that a speech summing up debate had to wait for a couple of weeks and for it to come from an assistant minister—

Mr Morton interjecting—

No, I said you delivered it well. I've never heard you that passionate before. But the minister responsible should be the one in here debating it. That should be the case for every bill. We don't just have to look at when Labor was in government; Peter Costello used to take a whole lot of pride in moving his own legislation. You accept the Treasurer won't always be here to sum up the debate. You get the call that it's time for your debate to be summed up, you would make sure to get down here and you would sum up a debate that occurred on a bill that mattered to you. You were the person who dealt with the department to get it drafted, who would take it through the cabinet process and bring it to the parliament and see it through to the final vote. That's the job of a minister. It's not the job of a staffer to just hand you words so you'll act like a trained seal.

So I remind members—we're not going to move motions but, I'll tell you what, we're going to make a point—that this government is treating the parliament as a joke. As a result, they have embarrassed themselves. If an error were to be made, if a mistake were to occur, it's a reasonable presumption that it would have been the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction who would have done it. That's sort of been a bit of a pattern. But on this one the truth is it could have been any of them, because it is rare now for the minister responsible to take any interest or any responsibility for their own legislation. So, those opposite, have a think again about whether you actually wanted to be members of parliament, because if your ambition were to write speeches and contribute to debate, it sounds like you'd be better off being staffers because that's how you get your words onto Hansard with this government. That's the way to make it happen. If that's the way to get power in the Morrison government, good luck to you; you can all go off and get jobs as staffers. But don't occupy seats in this chamber unless you have some intention of making the speeches, taking the responsibility and doing your job.

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

First of all, in addressing this matter, I want to pay tribute to the assistant minister at the desk. He is veritably the Winston Wolfe of this government. He's had to come in and clean up yet another mess, the complete mess that the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction has made of this bill. Why on earth anyone with authority decided to let the minister for energy do anything outside of his own portfolio, which is he is very busy messing up himself, is utterly beyond me and utterly beyond all of those on this side of the House.

But there are some serious issues, as my colleague the Manager of Opposition Business set out. They go to the accountability of ministers to this parliament. It doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to pick up the right speech. There are a couple of speeches before you and a few options to deliver, but it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to pick up the right summing-up speech for a second reading debate and deliver it to the parliament. But if you don't pick up the right speech—I've never seen it in my time; I haven't been here as long as the member for Watson has, but I don't think he has seen this happen before either—and if you don't realise you are delivering a speech that is completely unrelated to the bill before the House, at least have the courage and the honesty and the fortitude of character to come back to the House and admit your mistake. Don't send in the Winston Wolfe of the Morrison government to fix up this mess; come in yourself and show courage. This is the problem with this minister for energy: he makes mistake after mistake in his own portfolio; every now and then, he is allowed to mess up someone else's portfolio; and he refuses to come into this House and fess up. We've seen over the last week or 10 days, through the freedom-of-information process, WhatsApp messages from the minister's office around the dodgy documents scandal that the minister was involved in. We now know from those WhatsApp messages that even the night before the publication of the dodgy documents in The Daily Telegraph the minister's office had realised they got it wrong. They realised that, at some stage on that afternoon, after The Daily Telegraph contacted them and then an office member or a member of staff of the minister went back to the website—

Government Member:

A government member interjecting—

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think you should take a point of relevance then. Given that the minister's summing up speech was about another bill, I think it will sound rather ill in your mouth, Assistant Minister, to take a point of relevance on this. Anyway, the staff members realised that they had read the wrong document, that they had been led astray, and that was about to be published the next day. One of the staff members sends a WhatsApp message to another staff manager that says, Am I reading this right?' They've realised it is not a few thousand dollars, which is the actual figure on the website. They've told The Daily Telegraph that $1.4 million was spent by 10 people on domestic travel in 12 months. Again, it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to do some pretty rudimentary maths and work out that that is $28,000 of domestic travel per person every week for 50 weeks of the year, which is about 20 return flights, every week, per person, from Sydney to Melbourne—and also, if you can find some time between those flights, six or seven flights from Sydney to Perth every single week. But no, they didn't realise that! So the staff member sends a WhatsApp message to the minister—again, before this has ever broken, at a point where they could have pulled it back if they had had the fortitude of character to do so—and says: 'Boss, just a heads up for tomorrow: it's a bit messier than we'd hoped.'

This is a minister who makes a mess of every single thing he touches. There's a lesson from this: do not let this minister touch another portfolio; he's already busy enough messing up his own. And it's not just other colleagues that have to fill in for his mess; we now seen Matt Kean, the New South Wales energy minister, to his credit, having to fill in because this Commonwealth minister is completely incapable of putting together an energy policy that will pull through the investment in renewable energy that the state of New South Wales needs with its fleet of ageing and increasingly unreliable coal generators. Again, a New South Wales Liberal government has had to step in. It's been able to pull together the National Party, the Liberal Party and the Labor Party in New South Wales and put together a very impressive energy policy that will fill a space left by this minister's complete ineptitude.

What really grates with us on this side, though, is not just the minister's ineptitude, his inability to add up, his inability to pick up the right speech; it is the lack of moral fortitude. Any reasonable person would come into this chamber and say: 'I got it wrong. I apologise for the inconvenience to other members of this House for having to come back and do this all over again'—for the Winston Wolfe of the Morrison government having to clean up his mess again. But he just hasn't got it.

Linda Burney (Barton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My colleagues the member for Watson and the member for Hindmarsh have made extremely good and pertinent points about the energy minister. I don't want to dwell on that—I think the points have been made—except to say that the minister responsible for social services on that side of the House is Minister Robert. That might explain a few things!

It would have been sensible, as the member for Watson has pointed out, for Minister Robert to be here in the chamber responding, not the energy minister, who happened to be around at the right time. Unfortunately, the bill that he was referring to had not been debated; that was the next bill in the House. The remarkable thing is that he got through his whole speech without realising it was the wrong speech, which just astounded me. We just couldn't believe what was happening.

But let me address the amendments that Labor moved. We are very disappointed that our amendments, which were modest and which would have meant a lot to many hundreds of thousands of people, were not supported. Our amendments were about considering not only pensioners who are on the age pension but also carers and people on DSP, the disability support pension. Those people have been left behind by this government, as have the 300,000 unemployed Australians over the age of 55, who experience the greatest difficulty in getting work. They've been left behind by this government, and the almost one million Australians on unemployment support, who are excluded from the hiring subsidy, have been left behind. The Prime Minister constantly says we're all in this together. Well, if we're all in this together, the government would have supported the very modest amendments that Labor put forward in this debate. Apart from the energy minister getting the wrong speech and making the wrong speech, it was a complete ignoring of the needs of the groups that I've outlined. Our amendments were modest, they were thought through, and they were not anything that the government should not be considering or that Labor hasn't consistently argued during this pandemic.

I endorse the comments from the member for Watson and the member for Hindmarsh, but I also make very clear to the House that the amendments that the government have rejected are amendments that would have supported many hundreds of thousands of Australians who are experiencing great difficulty, including increased costs, because of this pandemic. When the Leader of the Labor Party spoke, he made the point that prior to the pandemic pensioners did not have to buy hand sanitiser or masks. They did not have to have the PPE that we all know is so critical to addressing this pandemic. That is an extra cost. We know that health costs have gone up. We know that food costs have increased. We know that many people are absolutely struggling, and our amendments went to those people who are finding it most difficult. This side of the House understands those needs. Clearly, the other side of the House is ignoring the needs of the many hundreds of thousands of people that I've articulated.

In closing, can I say that the disregard shown by this government is epitomised by the minister for energy giving the wrong speech in the closing comments on this bill. It just goes to the heart of the lack of attention, the lack of care and the lack of consideration for those people who are going to miss out because the government have not adopted the very modest amendments that Labor has moved.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a third time.