Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a pleasure it is to contribute to this debate on the Social Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 and to follow Senator Paterson. I want to take a couple of moments to address some of the issues that he raised. To stand there and say that in having this debate we are looking after our union friends is bordering on ludicrous. Mr Acting Deputy President, for a bloke like Senator Paterson—whose greatest achievement to date in life has probably been to stay awake in his university lectures—to come in here and talk about family budgets is, well, a little bit rich. Here he is in this chamber lecturing the Labor Party about who we represent. I have to tell you, Senator Paterson, we know who we represent, and in the main it is the ordinary hardworking Australians who go carefully about their business, building the fabric of Australian society. Occasionally, their skills and their expertise do not allow that. But of course, as I think one of the government's ministers stated: 'No problem—if you've got an issue buying a house, just get a better job.' Well, where I live, quite often those better jobs are not available. People go to work every day and make ends meet in difficult circumstances. Occasionally, though they go to work every day, five or six days a week, their income is still not enough and they are entitled to some compensation, some assistance, from a benevolent government. May I say, I think some of the initiatives that they now enjoy originated in the government of Prime Minister Howard, probably one Senator Paterson's heroes, who saw fit to recognise that working families without the capacity to 'go and get a better job' might actually need a bit of assistance.

What we have here is a remnant of the 2014 budget. After the 2014 budget, a very long serving senator said to me that six weeks after most budgets no-one can recall them, but the 2014 budget is etched in the memory of every voting Australian. We know the lifters and leaners speech. We know the whereabouts of the former Treasurer—we know he is in Washington enjoying life large. It was the end of his career, the 2014 budget—the night of the big fat cigar and the glass of wine, when he was playing 'The best day of my life'. It was not the best day of his political life, because he is no longer in the parliament and he no longer enjoys support of his colleagues. Fortunately for the Hon. Joe Hockey, he is now in Washington enjoying a vastly superior outcome to that of most of the working families in South Australia, most of whom are on $52,000. That is probably his grog bill in Washington for a year.

Those on the government side come in here and lecture us about doing work to support these people. It is our duty. It is why we were elected. It is what we are here for. We are here to support working families and people who do not have position, power and privilege. That lot on the government benches are on side with those who have position, power and privilege. They are all for it. They want a $50 billion tax cut for them. They want to look after position, power and privilege.

On the Labor Party's side, we are very proud to be on the side of those who occasionally need a leg up. They do not need it all the time. People on our side of the political spectrum are successful. They are small businesses, upper-middle-class people who have make good, people who have enjoyed a free tertiary education. They are loyal Labor Party members. But we all recognise that there are people who occasionally need support, whether it is because of geographical reasons or whether it is because there was a decision to shut down manufacturing industry and, in terms of motor vehicles, put potentially 200,000 Australians out of work. There has to be recognition of their circumstances, and occasionally there has to be government intervention in terms of making sure those people get a fair shake. That is a humane, ordinary political measure, but it does not come naturally to the dry economic rationalists, like Senator Paterson, who have never had a day when they have had to worry about paying a bill or a mortgage, who have never been worried about whether there is enough food to feed their children, who have never had an unemployed neighbour who is struggling from week to week and needs to come and borrow a couple of bucks to get through till the weekend.

Let's have a look at what the government are doing. They are actually making a $1.4 billion cut to Australian families. Their argument is: do not worry, we are just going to give it back in another way. Those people whose rate is frozen for two years will be worse off. This means that 1.5 million families will be worse off, and, most importantly, those who cannot yet vote—2 million children—will be worse off. Is that what Senator Paterson and his side really want to do?

They go on about fixing the budget. All senators in this place are across a number of committees. I am on the Public Works Committee, and I am not impressed with the way this government spends money. Some 85,000 square metres of new property has been leased at a cost of $900 million. There is no real justification of the need for the new property. It will cost $250 million to fit it out and $256 million to put furniture and chairs and tables in it. To add insult to injury, they are borrowing about $150 million of that and paying $44 million in interest. Then they come into this chamber and say that someone on Newstart is getting too much. The Business Council of Australia recognises that Newstart is a disincentive for people to be able to find work. If you are on Newstart, there is not enough to allow you to clothe yourself, get the amenities of life and present properly for a job interview.

The government cannot keep cutting these areas. It is counterproductive. And it wants to make them wait longer. Senator Hanson is saying, 'Well, they just finish school and get on the dole.' I do not know any people like that, but I do know that people on Newstart are doing it extremely tough and this government wants to make it tougher. There will be 1.5 million families and almost two million children who will be worse off. There are 600,000 households that are on the maximum rate of FTB A. That is an acronym; no-one understands what 'FTB A' means when you use acronyms. We are all fond of this sort of jargon, but the guts of it is this: their income is less than $52,000 a year, and this is for a family. They have to pay their rising electricity costs, they have to pay all of their rising grocery costs and they have to pay their public transport costs.

I will digress for a moment. No-one has actually written to the American government or to America and said, 'Thank you for inventing hydraulic fracking and making yourself self-sufficient in fuel,' because the one thing that has not really gone up in price in Australian society is the cost of fuel. However, if you are on a Newstart payment, it is still a significant impediment to filling up a car's petrol tank. I do not know if Senator Paterson has ever realised this, but at many services station there is now a minimum purchase amount. There is a $20 minimum at the service station I go to. If you are only getting 150 bucks a week, a $20 minimum when you go to the service station to fill up the tank for that job interview during the week is a pretty severe impost. We are making it tougher for them—tougher, not better. It is an absolute disgrace.

But those over there on the government side will rest easy because those with position, power and privilege are who they are looking after. Their main game is to give big business a tax cut funded out of budget repair which attacks those in the economy least able to defend themselves because of where they live geographically, because of the reduction in manufacturing or because they do not have the educational qualifications that would enable them to get that better paid job that someone on the government side said they should get. They have no worries about house prices, just 'go and get a better job'. These people are completely out of touch with reality. They ought to climb out of their ivory towers, forget about power, position and privilege and start mixing with ordinary Australian workers in ordinary Australian electorates. I dare say there are plenty on the backbench who would understand and recognise what I am saying, because they probably do move in circles a little bit less august than that creme de la creme who purport to be the leadership of this Liberal government. I reiterate: a lot of these measures that will be cut would have originated with the Howard government recognising the place of families in Australian society and their need for these measures.

We get accused of filibustering. I do not think it is a filibuster when you carefully and appropriately identify what is coming. At the end of this vote, what is coming in this budget is a regurgitation of Joe Hockey's horrendous 2014 budget—the one that got him the sack, if you like; the one put the entire government on the nose, if you like; the one they celebrated with a cigar and wine as 'the best days of our lives'; and the one that was going to repair the whole of Australian society until people actually understood what it was doing. It was the antithesis of what the electorate wanted.

So we have moved on. We have moved on from the Hon. Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, we have moved on from the Hon. Joe Hockey as Treasurer, and they are at it again. They are building up, coming in here, lecturing us about our opposition to what is a dastardly attack on ordinary Australians going about their business and trying to make ends meet.

Let's just talk about some of the things that this bill will do. This bill will also freeze, for three years, the income-free areas for all working age and student payments. Think about that. They are entitled to a payment and they are entitled to the income-free area. I would have thought, in order to get someone off a payment, you would be more generous in what they could earn income free. You would be more generous, not less generous. Look, if somebody is on Newstart and is able to get three months' work up the Riverland picking fruit or learning new skills, I would have thought you would be more generous in that area, not less generous. Through that investment, people may then, through some casual work, be able to get their endeavours recognised. A reasonable employer may say, 'Look, I have to move a bit; I can get a bit of assistance from the state government of South Australia—$10,000 for a worker. Maybe I can make a go of this and we'll offer them some employment.' But instead of making that more accessible, this bill makes it less accessible. They are freezing the income-free areas for all working age and student payments. This means that, for three years, the income test applying to payments for single parents, jobseekers and students will not keep pace with the cost of living. You are almost consigning people to endless poverty because you are not allowing them to go out and have a go. I mean, if they go out and have a go and it is reduced and they get into the bureaucratic red tape, and they cannot get back to paying their bills, they end up completely behind the eight ball. This will affect 204,000 Australians on the lowest incomes. It is particularly of concern with Newstart. The Australian Business Council recognises that Newstart is actually a disincentive for people who get it to actually get a job. They are not getting enough money to actually present at an interview in a way that will gain them employment. That is not the unions or the Labor Party is saying. That is what their mob is saying—that Newstart has fallen to such a level that it is an absolute disincentive to prepare people for work.

They come in here and say that we are opposing it because we are supporting trade unions. We are opposing it because what they are doing is manifestly unfair. It is bad enough that is manifestly unjust and unfair, but it is also economically stupid. It is economically stupid to consign people to a poverty rate payment where they are not able to move off it. To reduce the income-free area is madness. It does not keep pace with inflation; it does not keep pace with anything. What are these people supposed to do? What the more enterprising of them will do is seek cash payments. They will try and go around the system. If I was in that situation, I would not be shy about it. It is manifestly economically stupid to reduce the income-free payment. You should be actually making sure that people can earn as much as they can in a robust manner so as you can move them completely off the dole, and then everybody wins. But, no, that is not what this government is doing.

Waiting periods—they want to extend the one-week waiting period served by recipients of Newstart and sickness allowance to recipients of parenting payment and some youth allowances. They want to make it harder for people who are already doing it pretty tough to access financial hardship exemption. Basically, you will have to prove that you are experiencing, say, personal financial crisis before you can access any of the remedial payments that might help your circumstances.

Malcolm Turnbull, obviously, has never met a person who has struggled on Newstart. He may say that he has, but the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull has clearly not looked through the world from the prism of Newstart payments. Good luck to the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull; he is a very successful character. He is worth more money than most in the parliament and I do not begrudge him one cent of that. But I do begrudge a government that looks at it through a totally punitive prism and says that the $143 that you may be able to earn income free is going to be frozen. We are not going to allow it to go to $150, $155 or $160.

The reality is that we should be more adventurous in this space. We should be allowing these people to take on employment for six months, hoping that we move them completely away from that bloody horrendous poverty trap. But we do not do it, because we have that party over there—One Nation and Senator Hanson—alleging that the only people on the dole are people who do not want to work. Well, that could not be further from the truth. I do not think I have ever met a person on Newstart who actually wanted to be on Newstart. It is an accident of their educational circumstances, geography, personal health or mental health in a lot of cases. They all want to move off it and we—and I would include Labor in this—have not done, in recent history, a good job of designing a system that allows them to move away from poverty. And this makes it worse. It is draconian.

For the moment, we have beaten the five-week waiting period, but, make no mistake, as with the penalty rates issue they will just keep coming. Senator Paterson—it is led by that sort of type. He has never had a real job in his life. The only thing he has ever done is stay awake through three university courses. Now, he is a senator over there lecturing this side of the chamber about how workers think and how workers feel in the real electorate because he has this prism that says, 'Our debt is rising.' I tell you what, why doesn't the government actually look at the debt and say, 'What is for infrastructure? What is productive debt? What debt have we borrowed for infrastructure? And what is the productivity factor on that borrowing?'

If you excised that, looked at your income, looked at your recurring expenditure then you may have a valid case. If you have got income and recurring expenditure, take out your productive debt, take out the debt for infrastructure, but they do not choose to. They lump it all together because they can frighten people with bigger numbers to attack the most vulnerable people in society—those on Newstart, those on parenting payments, families earning less than 52,000 bucks a year. You have got school fees, rising electricity costs, grocery costs, and this government is coming in here expecting us to say: 'You have got the numbers so we are not going to have a debate.' I am looking forward to debating this for as long as we possibly can. I am up to the challenge of pulling people like Senator Paterson into line. His budget at the moment is how much can I spend everywhere? His budget is not how much do I need to save?

The reality is we are here to represent ordinary hardworking Australians who, in a lot of cases, are still doing it extraordinarily tough. If I go back to Newstart, it is a disgrace that we have not got a system that allows people to take a job, earn a reasonable amount of money over six months and then vacate the system, vacate the whole Newstart process. The system is really punitive. If that does not work for them, they then go back to: how do I survive? Do I have to go couch surfing for a living?