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

The Australian Greens will not be supporting the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Job Seeker Compliance Framework) Bill 2014. This bill, rather than supporting people to find work, really is about, once again, heaping up the compliance burden on people, demonising vulnerable people and increasing hardship. That is what this particular piece of legislation will do. Job seekers around this country are already finding it hard enough to make ends meet and to find work. It is particularly hard for job seekers to make ends meet when they are trying to exist on the completely inadequate Newstart and youth allowance.

In fact, Newstart and youth allowance are now so far the below adequacy that in fact people are inhibited from finding work. There is a growing mountain of evidence which shows what impact hardship has on people's ability to find work and to maintain a connection with work or to re-gain their lost connection with work. The first thing the government needs to do is to improve the adequacy of working age payments. That would go a long way to helping job seekers find work.

This government is determined to take a demonising, punitive approach to people who are looking for work, rather than to support people into work. Older job seekers and those in remote areas, people with disability, young people and long-term unemployed face multiple barriers in re-entering the workforce after a period of unemployment. Figures out this morning show that the number of people with disability on Newstart has increased, putting paid to the government's argument that people on the disability support pension has blown out. In fact, there are now more people with disability on Newstart than in the past. We know it is much harder for people with disability to find work. During estimates, when I was asking the Australian Human Rights Commission—unfortunately, I was not able to ask the Disability Discrimination Commissioner because now we have only a part-time Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan, who is also the Age Discrimination Commissioner. Having two jobs makes it very difficult and I am not having a go at the work she undertakes; it is just impossible to deal on a part-time basis with the issues which need to be dealt with as discrimination commissioner.

At estimates, I asked the Human Rights Commissioner about complaints. The highest number of complaints that the Human Rights Commission gets are about disability and the highest number of complaints regarding disability are about employment. We can see, therefore, that people are facing very significant discrimination when they are trying to enter the workforce. Job seekers with a disability who are on Newstart face a great deal of discrimination, along with the barriers of transport to get to work. If you are a person with a disability, maintaining support in the workplace is difficult. These are the people who are being targeted by this government. Rather than punishing people by plunging them into further financial hardship and putting in place more straightforward compliance measures, this will not help. In fact it makes it harder. The government should be supporting people into employment, providing a much more case management approach and, as I said earlier, working age payments.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics for October 2014 put Australia's unemployment rate at 6.2 per cent. The youth unemployment rate was a much higher 13.5 per cent. We know that this government is also trying to demonise young job seekers and we know from reports coming out that it is even harder for young job seekers to find work than it is for some of the older job seekers. We can see that from the higher rate of youth unemployment. We also know from a recent youth survey by Mission Australia that young people are wanting to work. They are wanting a career. They have some fears about road blocks to their careers, which again puts paid to the government's argument that young people are choosing to sit at home on the couch while getting youth allowance. That is so far from the truth it is laughable, other than that it makes you cry to think that the government is putting around such a furphy, again trying to demonise young job seekers.

The latest figures on job vacancies say there are 137,283 job vacancies. That is down from the figures in some of the submissions that were quoting July figures of just over 146,000 job vacancies. If you look at the number of people on Newstart and the number of people on disability support pension and youth allowance you can see that millions of Australians are looking for work. If you also take into account those who are underemployed—because we know we have significant underemployment—you can see that there are simply not enough jobs to go around. So punishing young people and older workers or those with disability who are unable to find work is unacceptable in a country which says we give people a fair go.

Plunging people into poverty when they already face multiple barriers is yet another barrier to work and leads to further alienation and depression for job seekers. This legislation contains many concerning schedules. We do not think that this bill is redeemable, although we will be supporting the amendments because it is slightly better, but it does not redeem the bill. We are deeply concerned that this bill removes appeal rights. We treat people appallingly and then we take away their appeal rights. It is unacceptable to remove the essential safe guard of the administrative appeal rights for people on Newstart who are going to be subject to these compliance measures. Many submissions made to the inquiry into this legislation were concerned about this measure, including, for example, the National Welfare Rights Network and Jobs Australia. The national welfare rights said that:

Administrative appeal rights are critical to ensure ongoing integrity of the system and the confidence of the public at large as well and social security recipients.

Jobs Australia, the peak employment services organisation of this country, said:

The denial of review rights reduces accountability in the system and may encourage less prudent decision-making.

They are right. It will encourage less prudent decision making because people will now have no access to the appeal rights that are being removed by this legislation.

When you look at suspension and penalty changes, this bill allows harsher, more severe payment penalties, extended penalties, changes to payback, removal of the important warning penalty, changes to penalty start dates and the discretion for the whole payment rather than just penalty payments suspension. There is not the evidence provided for why these changes are required and why the current penalties and sanctions are insufficient. The recent changes, enabling providers to do follow-up appointments with job seekers, has in fact improved attendance. In other words, a more immediate and personal approach, indicating that a supportive approach—get that: a supportive rather than a penalising approach—is working. It was made clear by evidence in submissions to the inquiry that there are several vulnerable groups who will be particularly disadvantaged by these changes—for example, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We already know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander job seekers are subject to financial penalties to a much greater extent than non-Indigenous job seekers. We know that they have been subject to breaches more often than non-Indigenous job seekers. There are a range of reasons for this, including access to transport, lack of service facilities, lack of secure mail services and mobility. It is essential that there are safeguards in place to ensure that barriers do not result in termination of payments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, because we know that there are many reasons why they may not make their connections or their appointments. We also know that they are suffering from a greater degree of disadvantage than non-Indigenous job seekers.

For older job seekers, we are particularly concerned with the provisions in the bill that remove the ability of certain people on Newstart, special benefit or parenting payment, who are 55 or over, from satisfying the activity test via 30 hours of approved voluntary or paid work. This provision dismisses the valuable work that older volunteers contribute to the community. Older job seekers face multiple barriers to re-entering the workforce, including age discrimination. And as the Australian Council of Social Services said in their submission:

… in the absence of adequate public investment in employment assistance and work with employers to shift attitudes towards older workers, the repeated rejections that would result from imposition of the standard requirement to apply for up to 10 jobs a fortnight would demoralise older unemployed people without greatly improving their employment outcomes.

There is strong evidence that age is a distinct barrier to employers hiring job seekers over the age of 45 years. This needs to be addressed with incentives and not punitive messages. Continued rejections for older job seekers—I know from talking to a number of older job seekers—have a very significant effect on their mental health and it also affects their confidence in applying for jobs when they continuously get knock-backs. We do not have a system that is adequately supporting older workers at this point, and we know that there are a growing number of older workers. Already, a third of longer-term unemployed people are over the age of 45, and that has grown by 41 per cent over the last three years. So we know we have a significant problem here, and the government's response is to make it harder rather than putting in place more measures to help older job seekers. The Restart process is a start, but it is not enough.

I have already touched on people with disabilities in my opening comments, and I want to go into this in a little bit more detail. People with disability already face multiple barriers to entering, and also re-entering, the workforce and also engaging with the social security system. As the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations said in their submission:

People with disability experience one of the highest levels of unemployment and poverty, with almost one in two people with disability in Australia living in or near poverty (45%) and almost one in two people with disability disengaged from the labour market (47%).

The comments they made there about older workers being discouraged with constant rejections, people with disabilities are likewise discouraged with constant rejections, having to overcome barriers, dealing with the discrimination that they face and also maintaining their ongoing connection to employment. There is not enough support for people with disability in employment once they gain employment. These changes will adversely affect people with disability, particularly those who are deaf or hard of hearing, who also find it hard to maintain connections sometimes.

In the broader context, these changes need to be seen in conjunction with the other proposals that have been made in the budget—budget proposals that want to dump young people off income support for six months. Those sorts of changes are just simply about demonising young people. Another change to social security that this government is so anxious to push through is: people with disability will not be able to travel overseas for more than four weeks—again, simply demonising people with disability. You also have to look at this in the context of the GP co-payment, and, fortunately, the university deregulation process has just been voted down by this place—that is another area that would have significantly impacted on peoples' abilities to change their circumstances and gain higher education.

We will not be supporting the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Job Seeker Compliance Framework) Bill 2014 because it further demonises vulnerable Australians and increases their hardship. We should be taking a supportive approach to job seekers in this country. We know about the excellent work done by organisations that have come to talk to senators and, hopefully, members of the House of Representatives, and we have had case management examples eloquently presented to committee processes around this place.

A good example of that is the work the Brotherhood of St Laurence does with unemployed young people, and the work that St Vincent de Paul does—and many other organisations working with young people that we have seen around Australia. Those are the sorts of examples that we need to be putting in place. Once again, we see legislation from this government that shows a determination to punish people and demonise them; implying that people do not want to work, something that is simply not true.

This bill removes important appeal rights, an unacceptable step that has been widely criticised. If you take away appeal rights here, what is next? The number of Centrelink decisions that are overturned on appeal highlights the importance of the appeal process—to achieve justice for a start. We know this from statistics we learned at estimates and from previous ombudsmans' reports. The bill also allows harsher, more severe payment penalties, including extended penalties that will expose people to unnecessary hardship. There was no evidence presented to the inquiry into this bill to justify these changes or to explain how the current penalties and sanctions are insufficient.

We know that the approach of working with employment services and individual job seekers is showing success. More individualised support—treating people as individuals, meeting their needs, understanding their barriers and treating them as humans is a good start—helps people engage with employment and start to engage with the process—if they are in fact disengaged from the process. We will not be supporting this bill. I indicate that we will be supporting the amendments because we think they are a step in the right direction. But we will not be supporting the bill.