Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Human Services (Senator Kim Carr) to a question without notice asked by Senator Siewert today relating to Newstart.

The minister said that he is unaware of any government modelling that looks at the impact of moving 10,000 single parents and their families onto Newstart. When this move happens, these single parents will lose income support, which means they will also lose access to a concession card and potentially lose access to things like rent assistance. And there has apparently been no modelling to look at what this means for these single parents and their children. In other words, we do not know what impact this potentially will have on the income of these single parents.

This policy, as the minister said again in this chamber this afternoon, is supposed to be about increasing single parents' participation in the workforce. The parents that we are talking about, these 10,000 people—and I will come to the broader cohort in a minute—are already working. We are going to see these 10,000 people being moved off income support, and we do not know what impact that is going to have. It is going to drop their income. Has the government not modelled it, or is the minister unaware of it? These 10,000 people are already doing what the government wants them to do: they are trying to have a work-life balance, to work and to support their children. In other words, they are already doing this whole thing about modelling being a good parent, modelling working in a family—and yet we are going to punish them. We do not know how much we are going to punish them, but we are going to punish them and drop their income.

I am very concerned that this policy will have the reverse effect to the one intended. Parents are doing the right thing and working, but we are likely to be dropping their income. What would you do to protect your income? You would potentially reduce the number of hours that you were working so that you could maintain some income support, maintain your concession card and maintain your rent assistance—but, most importantly, maintain your family's income. The government are so obsessed with demonising single parents and with the budget bottom line that they are not even looking at the perverse incentives of their policy initiatives.

I am interested that the minister took offence at my comments last week about him being disingenuous. My question is: why are the government suddenly trying to be nice to single parents, over 10,000 of whom we are moving onto Newstart, dumping them there to lower their income? The government has decided that it is going to try to make it sound a little bit better and say that we will actually be doing what we should have been doing all along—or getting Centrelink to do what they should have been doing all along—and that is making sure that, if a person is eligible for the disability support pension, they should actually be on that; if they are eligible for carer's payment, they should actually be on that. 'We're doing a nice thing now: we're helping these people get on their right payment—those few people we don't dump onto Newstart—and we're giving them all personal phone calls!'

What about all the other single parents and all the other people who are not on appropriate payments? Are we going to be looking after them? Does that ipso facto imply that Centrelink does not treat its clients personally? I have just been sitting through the Newstart inquiry, where I have been assured by the government departments that they treat all Centrelink clients appropriately, give them personalised service and make sure they are getting appropriate employment services. Yet the minister today and in estimates has been at great pains to say how Centrelink now treats its clients with a much more personal approach. The government could not tell me how they had worked out that these 3,000 people were all of a sudden deserving of a different payment. This is a flawed policy. The government should abandon it and appropriately support single parents and their families. These are our future generations that we are condemning to poverty again.

Question agreed to.