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

This goes to the heart of one of the failures of this process. This community body is a thought bubble. I do not know how many people currently in this Senate and debating this right now have lived in a small town. I have. I lived in a small town for quite a long time, where we all knew each other. Ceduna and the other towns we are talking about are probably slightly bigger than the town I lived in, but I would hazard a guess that a hell of a lot of people in Ceduna know each other.

Why we are questioning this is that it is obvious that the government has not thought this through. The minister is saying, 'We don't want to dictate every detail,' but that is because the government has not thought through what this means. So if I am on a carer payment, even though I do not have any substance abuse issues or gambling issues, I will be subjected to this and I will only get access to 50 per cent of the cash. So I have to front up to a community body of people I know, in a small community, and start talking about my personal financial arrangements. I am a carer providing care to one of my loved ones, and I have to go through this demeaning process—because that is what it is—with people I live down the street from or people I meet in the shopping centre or down at the shops. That is what we are talking about. That is what the government is setting up.

So how is this trial going to work? That is what we want to know. So what we are saying is that people who are living perfectly normal lives, other than trying to make ends meet on a carers payment, DSP or Newstart, for example, will have to go and expose all their lives to a so-called community body. How is it going to work? How are you going to ensure that people are able to go through this process without feeling demeaned and without feeling like that they have to go begging to a community body to get more access to cash? How can you assure this chamber that people will not be put off going to this body because of the very issues that I have just outlined?