Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I speak this morning on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Cashless Debit Card Trial Expansion) Bill 2018, once again dismayed to hear the discriminatory and absolutely factless rhetoric around those who access and utilise their right to access the social safety net that we are once again descending to. We don't seem to be able to have a conversation about the nature of our social safety net, about the realities of being vulnerable in modern-day Australia, about the true nature of poverty in this country, without indulging ourselves in the most disgraceful rhetoric. If I hear once more in this place that the best form of welfare is a job by those who have sat in this place and not worked any semblance, in the last 30 years, of what the vast majority of the Australian public would consider to be an everyday regular job then I will puke.

We are so disconnected in this place. With the average income of those who sit here, the privilege from which we so often descend to take up these places and the absence in our everyday life of interactions with the realities faced by the vast majority of the Australian people, we do not know or experience—and we block our ears when people come before us and tell us about—the realities of life. This bubble in which we exist and this profound sense of unreality by which we are surrounded, combined I am sure with a wilful ignorance, are the only factors which can explain a legislature's desire to enact such a destructive, corrosive and fundamentally baseless policy as the cashless welfare card.

My esteemed colleague Senator Rachel Siewert has on more occasions than I can remember elucidated to this house in great detail each individual element which is so flawed and wrong about this proposed scheme, and yet it has fallen on deaf ears. It has been ignored, because fundamentally those in the government who propose this way forward do not care. They do not believe that poverty, vulnerability and economic struggle are the result of systems failing. They subscribe to the absurd belief that poverty is the result of moral failing and that success and living in wealth and comfort are the result of moral virtue. This is the world view to which this government subscribes, and it has the cheek, the audacity and the bloody-minded ignorance to suggest over and over again that the most vulnerable, those who are most struggling, must pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that if they cannot then that is their own fault. I notice at this moment that the honourable Father of the Senate, Senator Macdonald, is exiting the chamber.