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

As my mother used to say, this bill is a bit like Curate's egg—in other words, there are bits that are good and bits that are bad. There are elements of this bill we support and agree with because we do think it is important to provide incentives, in particular for young job seekers. I was in here not long ago talking about how some of the budget measures the government is intending to bring in will significantly impact on young job seekers and young unemployed people. I am glad the government is recognising that we do need to be providing support to young job seekers and this is a much better way of doing it.

This bill seeks to amend two parts of social security legislation. First, it provides that job seekers aged from 18 to 30 years who have been receiving Newstart or youth allowance for at least 12 months will be eligible to receive a tax-free payment of $2,500. If they remain in employment and off income support for a continuous period of 12 months, they will receive an additional payment. That is really good and we can support that part of the legislation. Second, it provides relocation assistance for people to take up a job.

But what we have concerns about is this bill changes the non-payment period or, in effect, the punishment period if you leave employment without a reasonable excuse. In fact, there will now be a 26-week non-payment period before a person can become eligible to receive unemployment benefits. This is the same issue I was talking about in the chamber earlier today. Young job seekers who are unemployed will have to wait six months—well, six months and six weeks so, in fact, seven months and two weeks—before they are given an initial payment. They then have to work for the dole and after six months they will then receive no payments for six months. It is the same argument: how do you expect people to live for that period of time? It also depends very much on what your definition of a reasonable excuse is, and I have had several run-ins with the department in the past about what are reasonable excuses.

When young people move and take up relocation assistance, they quite often move to an area where they do not have family support or the usual supports. They can be quite disconnected from the community and that plays out quite significantly on how they adapt to their work environment. The concerns here are that on one hand we have a positive measure, on the other hand we have one that we think is over the top. ACOSS has raised concerns about the changes of definition around some of the requirements in the bill and we share their concerns. So while the ALP has moved to amend, as I understand it, the exclusion from payments provision which would then revert back to the normal 12 weeks, we would like to knock out the whole of schedule 2 because the whole of the schedule deals with both the exclusion from eligibility for unemployment benefits and extending that to the 26-week period and also some of the definitional aspects of the legislation and we have some concerns about that. It changes the emphasis around how you get penalised and we believe that is a retrograde step in this legislation. We would prefer to see those not changed.

We have circulated in the last sitting amendments to the legislation which would in fact exclude or oppose schedule 2 while supporting schedule 1, which has the sorts of supports we need for young people. We need a much more supportive approach rather than a punitive approach. A punitive approach demonises people and assumes people do not want to work. As I said earlier, classing most of them as sitting around on the couch getting easy welfare is not the way you want to encourage people into work. The way to encourage them is, firstly, to have an incentive approach. The big stick does not work when people are living in poverty; poverty becomes yet another barrier to work. There is evidence to show that but there is not evidence to show that dropping people into poverty provides an extra incentive to work. It does not; it in fact becomes another barrier. So instead of penalising people we need to take a more positive approach, which this one does. It will be interesting to see how this now lines up with some of the other mechanisms that the government is bringing in and the impact the other approach the government is bringing through the budget will have on young people and how it encourages people into work versus a much more supportive approach which helps incentivise people and does not penalise people. It is an approach that works with young people to address their training needs and addresses any other barriers they have to employment. We know that that more individualised approach does help people into employment whereas a much more draconian penalising approach does not.

But the government could not help themselves with this. They brought in a positive but the sting in the tail was schedule 2, where people are penalised for such a long period of time. We believe it is much better to leave it at the current rate. If you are living on nothing, it really is a punishment for 12 weeks rather than 26 weeks; it really is. It is extremely hard for people to manage. I know that because I have had feedback from people who have already experienced, for example, the eight-week non-eligibility period when people were penalised for no-show, for example, through the current process. Eight weeks is a long time not to get any payment, so is 12 weeks, and 26 weeks is just too much. It is six months, half a year, which in fact is what the government is doing with its new approach announced last night in the budget.

So the Greens support the first part of this bill but we do not support the second part, schedule 2. Given that the ALP is, as I understand, still moving amendments, we support their amendments but they are not as extensive as ours, so I indicate our support for the ALP half-step that we have taken but we would prefer that we strike out the whole of schedule 2 because we believe that the amendments that this schedule seeks to make are not positive amendments but take us a step backwards in terms of the definitional aspects of the bill. However, we support schedule 1.