Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Vanstone interrupts and says it is three times. Senator, you might want to know that your legislation actually says you can be breached immediately if dismissed for misconduct. You do not have to be dismissed three times. And, in the context of your industrial relations changes where people cannot dispute that they were dismissed for misconduct, that will be one strike and you are out for two months. On the government’s own figures, of the 18,000 people, only 4,000 to 5,000 will actually get emergency payments to cover food. So you will have 14,000 people a year who will not be able to get payment for food or shelter.

The point I want to make is that that breaching regime, which is an extraordinarily harsh regime, is not put into any instrument that comes before this chamber. So you have extremely intrusive legislation, legislation which imposes very harsh penalties on a group of Australians, that apparently the government is quite happy to deal with administratively and bypass the chamber. That is consistent with the way the government has treated the Senate since it got the majority in here—trying to avoid scrutiny, trying to avoid consideration in detail and trying to avoid accountability.

We are speaking about this in the context of Senator Minchin having told us this week how he is going to effectively neuter the Senate committee system, which has been an extraordinarily important part of the way this place has operated for over a decade. The government is changing a system that, in fact, the Liberal Party and the National Party supported when they were in opposition and then introduced. Now the government has the numbers, it wants to take this away from the chamber and completely alter the way in which the Senate operates.

Leaving that aside, the point is—as Senator Siewert indicated—that Senator Abetz, in a debate earlier this week—or it might have been last week—indicated that the social security guidelines and the guidelines in relation to breaching will not be available prior to 3 July. We have been offered a briefing and we are seeking to take that up. It appears there is some difficulty in terms of availability, but that is going to be arranged. But I think the more important issue is that not only is the Senate not aware but the community is not aware of a great amount of detail associated with the implementation of these welfare changes prior to the date they come in.

These welfare changes are due to be implemented on 1 July. The guidelines in relation to both social security and the breaching regime will not be available until 3 July. It is an extraordinary administrative delay and incompetence by this government that, some 15 months after they announced these welfare changes, they are still not in a position to provide to the chamber or to the community the guidelines which set out a great range of the detail of obligations, rights and requirements which will be placed on hundreds of thousands of Australians. People are going to commence this regime without actually being told, or being able to read, what their rights and obligations are from 1 July. Goodness knows how Centrelink is going to implement them if the guidelines are not publicly available until 3 July. I feel for that agency having to try and put in place those changes in such a short period of time.

Certainly the welfare advocates, people who represent the people who will be affected by this, will not have the final version—or not that I am aware of, in any event—but, perhaps as importantly, this chamber will not have the opportunity to consider some very significant changes in terms of their impact—I do not think they are significant in terms of their benefit—on the rights and obligations faced by many Australians. We place on record from the opposition’s perspective that we consider, as do many in the community, the government’s delay and incompetence around the introduction of its welfare changes to be utterly unacceptable to this chamber, but also utterly unacceptable to the many people in the community who will be affected.