Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Democrats oppose schedule 6 in the following terms:

(1)    Schedule 6, page 29 (lines 2 to 9), TO BE OPPOSED.

I just note the Democrats amendment and also the Greens amendment, which is identical, opposes schedule 6. I will not go over the whole issue again. We have basically been dealing with the substance of this debate in conjunction with the previous Labor amendments. To clarify, the Labor amendments were to enable a discretion for backdating to go for longer in certain circumstances. The Democrats’ preferred position is to keep the situation as it is. There has been no argument put forward, either here today by the minister or, during the committee hearings, by the department, that gives any rationale—beyond this being a simple savings measure—that could possibly justify what the government is doing here.

We have just heard the words—and the minister used them again—that the intent here is to ‘standardise’ and ‘rationalise’. It is typical bureaucrat-speak used to put a thin veneer of harmless-sounding intent over an action that will actually take money out of the pockets of carers. It is not even particularly accurate, I might say. It does not standardise it in the sense of making it the same as most other social security payments. All it does is standardise the carers allowance child and carers allowance adult provisions in regard to backdating. It does not standardise it with any other payments. So even that inadequate explanation is not particularly accurate.

The minister has also said, with some justification—it is the closest they have come, I guess, to some justification—that it does, to use his words, open up the payment to more people because eligibility for the allowance will be determined by the application of the child and adult disability assessment tools, which look to care needs and functional ability rather than a specific medical diagnosis. I certainly hope that is communicated accurately to all of the people who need to know about it. I am not sure that it will open up the payment to more people. But it may make them eligible sooner—that is true. The simple fact is that this is a savings measure that is estimated to save the government $35 million. If it is saving the government $35 million, it will be $35 million that carers were going to get that now they will not. So talking about opening it up or making it available a little bit earlier is clearly misleading if it is suggested that that mitigates what the government is doing. Otherwise, there would not be anticipated savings of $35 million.

To very briefly recap, we are talking about a payment that is $94.70 a fortnight—less than $50 a week. As Senator Siewert emphasised, and as detailed in our additional comments in the committee report, Access Economics, who are not usually pointed to as a bunch of bleeding heart leftie economists, have estimated that carers contribute $30.5 billion worth of care to the Australian community. Whilst I acknowledge what Minister Kemp said about the government’s payments in the area of carers, it is nothing compared to what carers contribute to the Australian community.

I emphasise that when we talk about backdating, particularly with extra care for children—and not just those with significant physical disabilities and things which are more clearly diagnosable, although it obviously applies there—we must recognise that parents often provide extra care for them in those early childhood years and undergo extra costs for quite a long period of time whilst trying to discover what the specific situation faced by that child is and what, therefore, the long-term consequences may be.

I also emphasise that in many cases with many conditions or behaviours that children may exhibit you are looking not just at needing to go to a GP and get a diagnosis but also at getting assessments by specialists—and not just medical specialists but also other types of medical and health professionals, like occupational or speech therapists or other sorts of specialists. You are potentially looking at therapy sessions, particularly for children who may potentially be exhibiting learning difficulties, pervasive developmental delay or, as I mentioned earlier, children whose behaviour may be on the autism spectrum.

In many of those areas there is not a lot of support available for children or their parents who are in those sorts of situations. There is not a lot of assistance available through Medicare, for example. Most of this is not covered by Medicare. Most of these things are not covered in the school system either, certainly not in the public school system or in most private schools. So you are looking at significant amounts of extra costs. If you want to provide the sorts of therapies, for example, that are provided for children who are suspected of being on the autism spectrum, there is a quite significant extra cost and they are often even hard to access. For people in regional, remote or rural areas, it is hard to even access them, let alone afford them.

Those are the sorts of things that parents are focused on with their children. They are not focused on immediately saying, ‘This is good. I might qualify for a payment. I will go down and get it straightaway.’ They are focused on the needs of their children and it can take a long period of time. Frankly, that is why the child disability allowance, going back to at least the 1980s, had backdating provisions longer than other payments. It is for precisely those reasons: because the extra level of care could already have occurred for quite a period of time before the situation is recognised as one that will be ongoing and people therefore then look at whether or not there might be a payment like the allowance for them to claim. That was the rationale for it.

The fact that the eligibility provisions look to care needs and functional ability rather than a specific diagnosis might slightly mitigate that, but only slightly. It does not go to the core of it. The unacceptable fact that this amount of money will be taken from the pockets of carers at a time when they are quite likely to specifically need it not only puts them at a financial disadvantage but also sends a message that there is a lack of recognition of what is involved in these circumstances and what people in the real world are going through and will continue to go through. I think that is a negative message.

I note with appreciation the strong and ongoing support that well-known broadcaster Alan Jones has shown on carers’ issues. I do not always voice praise about some of the things Alan Jones says, but I know he has spoken about this area and I think he is spot-on. I believe one of the reasons that he is strongly committed to this area is that he knows what the reality is for many people: how difficult it is in the real world for people who are caring and people with young children who are only slowly realising that they may be caring for them for a long time. There is a growing recognition of the need to give as much as possible for early childhood assistance and we need to provide more resources in that regard. This is potentially a backward step and certainly reflects a message that is at odds with some of the other messages about the need for more focus on assistance in early childhood, particularly for those children who have different needs.

The harder we make it for carers, the more people there will be who will struggle and the more people there will be who just will not be able to provide the sort of assistance that is needed, particularly for children. In that case, I would also suggest that that actually makes measures like this a false economy. It might in a narrow sense save $35 million for the bean counters who are looking at the column item in this particular department under this particular payment but, if you look at the longer term flow-on costs of making life harder for carers, I think there is a good argument to say that it is potentially a false economy and the costs may well outweigh the meagre savings that are involved.

I make a final plea: it is within the power of any individual on the coalition benches in the Senate to ensure that this measure does not go ahead. It only takes one or two of them to show that individual commitment to this issue. I would suggest that this is one issue that certainly merits that extra piece of commitment to carers. This is a time when I believe it is merited for an individual coalition senator—a Liberal or a National Party senator—to vote along with the Democrats to remove this section from the legislation and ensure that that little bit of extra assistance that can be provided to carers is not lost to them.