Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Income Reporting and Other Measures) Bill 2020. Dealing with government agencies and accessing government services should be made as easy as possible. There should be no unnecessary complexity. But unfortunately, time and time again we've seen the opposite occur under this third-term Liberal government. While the government likes to encourage a view of Centrelink recipients as dole bludgers, many receiving an income support payment actually have part-time work and would like to work more but are unable to find suitable employment. For these workers they need to report every fortnight to Centrelink the hours that they work. But because their pay periods and their Centrelink reporting periods do not overlap there can be confusion. They need to calculate what their expected income will be when reporting to Centrelink. Sometimes this can be difficult and confusing, particularly without the use of payslips or if you're working a small number of hours in multiple jobs.

The bill before us today will change the way income is reported to Centrelink so that is reported when a person is paid, not when it is earned, and Labor supports this bill. ACOSS and other stakeholders also support the changes brought about by the bill, which if properly implemented are expected to make dealing with Centrelink easier for people on social security.

While this may seem a minor technical change it will improve the accuracy of income reporting by removing the requirement for people to estimate their total pay based on the number of hours worked. In most instances people will receive their payslip before reporting their income. The shift to reporting income when it's paid will more closely align the receipt of employment income with the timing of Centrelink payments. This will also make it easier for people to manage their budget, as they will know exactly what they are getting and when.

The bill will also enable Centrelink to use single touch payroll information from the Australian Taxation Office to pre-fill income for Centrelink reporting. But let us be clear, the changes in this bill will not automate reporting. Individuals will still be required to check and to certify income that is pre-filled using the Single Touch Payroll System. However, the bill will improve the accuracy of income reporting and will reduce incidents of over and under payment. For many, the new reporting system will be more straightforward. They'll find the prefilling of Single Touch Payroll convenient when it commences. The bill does not make any changes to payment rates, thresholds or eligibility to criteria for payments.

We're putting the government on notice that they need to get the implementation of changes right as, unfortunately, this government has a history of mismanagement. We've seen time and time again an inability for this government to successfully implement policy. Labor is very concerned that the government runs a high risk of botching the implementation of these changes, because they have a track record of bungling any project involving the use of information technology. I'll take just a few minutes to outline some examples of their recent bungles.

We've all seen and been contacted by constituents regarding the government's robo-debt disaster, a project which, despite their protestations, was found to be illegal and described by an retired AAT member as extortion. The government's robo-debt scheme unleashed a faulty algorithm against social security recipients who, even if they had reported their income 100 per cent correctly, were slapped with debts, many running into thousands of dollars. Robo-debt used a crude calculation of annual income obtained from the ATO and then created a discrepancy by comparing it to Centrelink recipient's fortnightly income. In some cases, a decade had passed since the reporting period in question, leaving many, often formal social security recipients, shocked and distressed that they would have to retrieve pay slips from an old employer who may have gone into liquidation or simply not kept records. They were supposed to find these documents in order to prove that they did not owe the money to Centrelink. Figures obtained through the Senate also found almost 2,000 people died after receiving a robo-debt notice. That's completely outrageous. Low income Australians have been targeted by a flawed and illegal robo-debt program.

At estimates, it was revealed that the department took money from 73 estates of people who had died, totalling $225,000. The Liberals have done everything they could to keep robo-debt under the radar, with Centrelink never appealing judgement at AAT to level 2, where the reasons for decisions are made public. They have taken up to 553 days to settle a decision of the tribunal and allegedly intimidated robo-debt victims to stop them appealing their cases.

Australians have had enough of mopping up after the Liberals' mistakes. The government should just admit they are wrong, pay the money back to victims and apologise. On this side, we believe it's important to provide efficient, user-friendly government services and systems. We do not support cuts to the public service and the outsourcing of government work to its agencies customers, which is what it tried to do with robo-debt's unfair reverse practical onus of proof. People were guilty until proven innocent. The government have also spent almost $2 billion on the My Health Record system, an e-health scheme that doctors and patients refuse to use because of legitimate privacy concerns, including breaches. Currently, half of the 23 million records are empty. We all remember the disaster of the 2016 Census where for almost 48 hours Australians were unable to access the Census website due to a series of denial-of-service attacks, incurring a $30 million cost blowout to the Turnbull government. It was the worst run census in Australian history and one of the worst IT debacles Australia has ever seen.

Other disasters include the 2019 myGov outage, where technical difficulties brought down the online government service portal for an entire day when people tried to access ATO accounts and lodge their income tax returns. We've also seen the deliberate attempts to run down Centrelink services to the point where pensioners are waiting months to get the pension and people are waiting on the phone for hours to get service. The minister, Mr Stuart Robert, was determined to close down the Kingston Centrelink, near my office, before a campaign run with the support of the member for Franklin, Julie Collins, and myself was successful in keeping the office open.

Despite the success of that campaign, there remain ongoing concerns about the quality of services at the office because it is being co-located with Medicare and Service Tasmania. It is not about the quality of the staff; it's the quality of the people able to overhear people's conversations. I've been in there on numerous occasions and heard people's private banking details that they have had to talk about. Other offices across the country have closed or suffered a reduction in the amount of help that can be provided. This happened at Huonville in the Huon Valley, not too far from my office as well. Waiting times on phone calls to Centrelink offices have exploded, with many people waiting hours or simply giving up.

Given this track record of mismanagement the last thing we want to see is social security recipients having their payments cut off or being saddled with unfair debts because the government has failed to manage this change properly. I really hope that the government can be trusted to correctly implement this change and that, when people have questions about the change, they are not left waiting on the phone for hours. It's absolutely critical that the government has the right systems and resources in place to make this work, because, if it doesn't, many Australians on the lowest incomes could suffer as a result.

Stakeholders at the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee's inquiry into this bill were particularly concerned about the government's ability to roll out these changes successfully. The Australian Unemployed Workers Union told the inquiry:

While we support the idea of making income support reporting simpler, the recent experience with robodebt offers salient warnings about the harms that arise when the algorithms that inform income imputations do not reflect the reality of variable income many underemployed workers experience. The robodebt experience shows how the design and digitisation initiatives too often occurs in a vacuum, with insufficient testing of the concepts on human subjects and with a disregard for the suffering that arises when these initiatives fail to work as intended.

The National Social Security Rights Network raised the following concerns about the transition from the current reporting arrangement to the new arrangements proposed in the bill:

We're particularly concerned about the transition periods, where we understand that people will actually need to do some manual calculations to make sure that the period that the data relates to is correct. That particular period is, I think, going to be fraught, and there are going to need to be additional resources from Services Australia to support people through that period.

Then Anglicare Australia shared concerns about the government's ability to effectively manage change to systems and pointed out the importance of investing in the systems on which so many Australians rely in order to make them simpler and better to use. They said:

Centrelink has not demonstrated its organisational ability to enact automated systems. There is a lot going on at Centrelink at the moment, and it would be really good to see demonstrated consolidation of the current lessons to assist in the future changes. These changes must be seen as an investment into a better system for Australians. They will not work for the people using Centrelink if they're viewed as a cost-cutting exercise. An investment outlook will involve careful design and testing, but it will, ultimately, deliver better outcomes for everyone.

Australians need access to functional government services, not for taxpayers' money to be wasted mopping up mistake after mistake because the Liberals can't be trusted with digital service delivery. In addition to the recommendations in the committee report, Labor senators on the committee recommended that the government take all reasonable steps during the period of transition to the new income reporting system to detect, confirm and correct overreporting of income. This is essential to ensure payments are correct and reflects the government's moral duty of care to use the available information and systems to make sure that social security recipients receive accurate payments.

Labor senators also recommended that the one-year review of implementation of the changes proposed in the bill be conducted independently and that consultation with experts and social security recipients be part of the review process. We need to ensure that the review of these changes is done correctly. We don't want to see another whitewash, like the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet sports rort report was.

While Labor supports the changes in this bill, unfortunately what this bill doesn't do is clean up the Morrison government's robodebt debacle. Many Australians have incomes which change from fortnight to fortnight due to insecure or intermittent work, often in the gig economy or balanced with study and other commitments, and rarely do they have the same number of hours each fortnight. This bill has the potential to make it easier for them to accurately report their income to Centrelink and reduce the potential for making mistakes in the reporting process. However, it's these workers who are most likely to be affected if the government bungles this important reform. I call on the Senate to support the bill and on the government to, for once, actually implement a policy change correctly.