Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Cashless Debit Card) Bill 2017, is a good bill which seeks to remove the restriction to three sites for where the government can implement the cashless debit card. Australian Conservatives support the cashless debit card. I note the comments made by a very philanthropic Australian, Mr Andrew Forrest—he's been right to advocate its broad introduction. I also note the comments made by Mr Andrew Forrest when he called the Greens 'the party for paedophiles' for opposing this reform. I'm only quoting what has been attributed to him, but the rhetoric he used seeks to point out the terrible cost of the dogged clutching to ideology that we see with the Greens and others on topics like these.

The Greens and others refuse to accept that business as usual for Indigenous communities simply cannot continue. There are terrible human costs and terrible economic costs to too many families and to the Australian community. Reforms like these are working. They are delivering benefits to Australian families—Indigenous or otherwise. They are ensuring that welfare money isn't spent on grog, on smokes, on dope—on all things that the Greens seem to love—but are instead spent on food, on nappies and on the things that not only a family needs but a mother knows a family needs.

The Greens, the purported champions of women, the ones who parade around with their white ribbons, are on this occasion refusing to back Indigenous mothers who want to put food on the table and protect their kids. Instead they're backing the abusive husbands who seize the money, drink it away and commit all manner of crimes. We cannot allow this to continue; we have to break this cycle. We have to stop business as usual, and this bill goes some way to doing it. Let's not forget, this regime allows 20 per cent of the welfare payment to be spent how the recipient likes. Eighty per cent is on the card, and they can do as they want with the rest. It's a rough and ready principle, the 80-20 rule.

I will focus my comments today on the implications in South Australia, not just because it's my home state and not just because Ceduna, on our state's far west coast, has been a successful trial site and is a place I have visited many times but because, if the media reports are to be believed, the so-called SA-BEST party, as the Nick Xenophon Team will soon be, are going to kill this reform today. It's not just the Greens who are obstructive in this space; there's a far more cunning and slippery character: former senator Nick Xenophon. He's the aspirant for the South Australian state seat of Hartley. He's the grand inquisitor, who's launched enough inquiries to make Senate clerks weep. He's flip-flopped and, as the Leader of the Government in the Senate has said on a number of occasions, has wibble-wobbled like jelly on a plate on policy that he knows works, because he doesn't want to offend the left-wing base that he courts. I don't buy, and many Australian people don't buy, the Xenophon sensible centre nonsense. His voting record during his time here is absolutely clear. He voted in divisions more often with the Greens than with any other party. Premier Weatherill, the South Australian Labor Premier, might try to claim Mr Xenophon is a Liberal but that's nonsense. His voting record shows that he is of the left through and through, and you cannot hide from those facts. Mr Weatherill's rubbery figures are designed to paint SA-BEST as a conservative party. I'm not easily offended, but Mr Weatherill has certainly struck at the heart of offence in suggesting that Mr Xenophon is a conservative or that his party is a conservative party. I haven't found that the SA-BEST team have actually put their name to a single conservative initiative. In fact, everything that Labor have stood for has pretty much been backed, to an even greater degree, by the Xenophon team, and I suspect that Mr Weatherill is only worried that Mr Xenophon is chomping at Labor's base.

Notwithstanding that he's no longer here, everyone understands that Mr Xenophon is pulling the strings of the group called the Nick Xenophon Team, even though he's given up his part-time job with fellow Senator Griff that was designed to get him through the financial hardship of running for his third house of parliament. I note that Mr Xenophon has lodged a name change with the AEC to change the name of the Nick Xenophon Team to SA-BEST.

Yet again, I would say that the Australian Conservatives are leading the way. We recognise the cult of personality does not work for the interest of the body politic and it doesn't work for the interest of the Australian people, and yet that's precisely what we have seen with the Nick Xenophon Team. The Australian people want principled parties now; they're looking for people who are going to stand by their convictions rather than just jump on any populist wind or weather vane change to get themselves some more attention.

But, of course, I would argue that the South Australian media will chair Mr Xenophon around the state, promoting him—unquestioningly almost—and painting him as a Playford reborn in the interests of South Australia. Of course he's nothing of the sort, and here on the cashless debit card we see precisely the type of ambulance-chasing, get-the-headlines behaviour of the Nick Xenophon Team writ large. Let's remember that the leader of the Nick Xenophon Team/SA-BEST, zipped over at taxpayers' expense over to Ceduna, in my home state, where this cashless debit card trial was announced. The local mayor, Allan Suter, a good man, was—rightly so—a very strong supporter of this regime.

And it's worked. I know it's worked because I've been there and I've looked at it myself. Alcohol abuse in that community has slumped. There are better outcomes for everyone in the community as a result of this, and yet too many left-wing ideologues from the sterile comfort of this place expressed opposition to the schemes. But out on the ground, where people have to live with the reality of social breakdown that occurs as a result of abuse, not only of substances but of welfare payments—and, quite frankly, even worse abuses of the most human tragic kind at the coalface—people are crying out for these reforms.

I will go back: Mr Xenophon flew to Ceduna because he wanted to look concerned for the cameras. He's quite fond of quoting that character from The Comedy Company, for those old enough to remember, Con the Fruiterer. He's always, 'Looking, looking, looking.' He created division in the community; he stirred it up, saying, 'There was division and we needed to keep looking and looking to find a better solution.' Braver souls, I'm happy to say, stared him down and said, 'No, it's actually time to get on with it.'

I also know that Mr Xenophon's protege, the member for Mayo, in the other place, told The Guardian today that they want there to be a 'social licence' for a rollout in other areas. A social licence. That's also known as an 'opinion poll'. And that's the precise SA-BEST/Nick Xenophon Team model: opinion polls. In South Australia, we've always been able to predict where the Nick Xenophon Team would land on a particular issue, because we just have to look at the polling on that issue. It's blatant populism. It's worked a charm for him, because he and his team have been untrammelled about the principles behind the decisions they're making. But I would say that following polls slavishly isn't leadership, it isn't moral fortitude and it isn't significant rigour for making decisions in this place. It's not doing the right thing; it's choosing the path of least resistance. And, frankly, it's gutless.

The Xenophon approach is to be the rooster on the roof of every house, the weather vane, blowing whichever way the hot air of opinion polls is blowing. The member for Mayo, whom I might add is almost like a protected species for her fellow left-wing travellers, she's not going off to the High Court. Somehow that shop has closed around her to keep her safe from the High Court. I find that quite extraordinary—once again, a lack of accountability by those who squeal the most about delivering outcomes and evidence based policy.

Yet some of the strongest attacks against Mr Xenophon come from the Australian Labor Party and their useful sock puppet, the union movement. They loathe Mr Xenophon because he's prosecuting the left-wing political case better than they are. He is quite literally crushing the Greens in South Australia, cruelling the high ambitions of Senator Hanson-Young, who may be enjoying her last years in this place. In fact, Mr Xenophon is not so much siding with the Greens as slowly taking them on and taking them over as well. Some would say he's a Justin Trudeau in a cheap suit.

But I come back to the point of this bill. Here we have it. We have the Nick Xenophon Team stopping reform that can save lives in regional and poorer communities. They are stopping reform that reinforces that welfare payments are not a right but a privilege to help you step up from poverty, not to leave you in it. And this reform, if the media reports are correct, will fail today because the left-wing parties—the Greens, the Labor Party, the Nick Xenophon Team, and others who profess to know best—will join ideologically as one on this reform. This reform opposes the leftist narrative that people in this place will cling to even as it leaves people languishing in poverty and despair and has proven to be a broken model.

Today I have focused on the Nick Xenophon Team because, of those of us on the crossbench, they are the reason that this initiative is going to fail today. That disappoints me because I think Australians deserve better accountability from their politicians. I think Australian communities deserve better from their politicians. I think those who are most troubled by substance abuse in the communities—the families that are welfare dependent and are missing out because of the actions of some in their households—will rue the day that this important reform was blocked by the Nick Xenophon Team and others.

So I make no apologies that the Australian Conservatives wholeheartedly support this bill. I think it needs to be rolled out much more widely in the welfare space. I think we need to ensure that this is not just targeted at Indigenous communities and that it is applied liberally across all welfare recipients but with a particular focus on those areas most in need. We're considering moving amendments to apply this regime to all welfare recipients under the age of 21. It would seem like a moot point given the circumstance in the reporting today that this important reform is going to fail.

I commend the government for their pursuit of this reform. I think it's important. I want to commend Mr Andrew Forrest, whom I have seen in this place many times walking around trying to lobby very, very hard for this important reform. And it's encouraging to see a successful businessman not give up the ghost and leave it to other people but actually get in here, into the trenches, and try and convince some people here who have their minds closed to the fact that something else needs to be done if we're going to have a meaningful impact in reform. I congratulate him for it. I only wish that he'd been more successful in his efforts. I make no blame for him, because it is not him. It is not his efforts. It is the intransigence of others opposite who refuse to open their eyes to the fact that there is a better way in dealing with welfare in this country.