Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Simplifying Income Reporting and Other Measures) Bill will change the way income is reported to Centrelink so that it's reported when a person is paid, not when it's earned. That should be a straightforward development. Perhaps it's my lack of knowledge about the relationship between the administrative and the legislative way these things are managed that it seems remarkable that something so straightforward, in a system that is so complicated and difficult for so many Australians, requires legislation rather than just regulation, but there we are.

Eighty per cent of the people who report income to Centrelink receive working-age payments, like Newstart and youth allowance. However, an increasing number of age pensioners are also reporting employment income. The bill will improve the accuracy of reporting by taking away a lot of the guess work. Currently, social security recipients are in the unusual position of having to anticipate their weekly income without a pay slip—not something that Australians in other circumstances are required to do. This shift will allow recipients to better align their employment income with their benefits and allow them to more effectively manage their budget. It will allow Centrelink to use the Single Touch Payroll System information from the Australian Taxation Office to prefill income for Centrelink reporting. For many people, this will be more straightforward and vastly more convenient than the current system. It will reduce the occurrences of under-reporting and over-reporting of income, which have been the basis of the government's scandalous, heartless and failed robodebt scheme.

I note that the Australian Council of Social Service and other stakeholders in this field support this bill on the basis that it will make the lives of social security recipients more straightforward. However, they—and we on the Labor side, here—remain sceptical about the implementation of the process. Australians who receive social security benefits, whether it's Newstart, youth allowance or the age pension, deserve a transparent and efficient system. Unlike the minister and some of the other characters over there, Newstart is not a punishment for people. It should be designed to sustain people with a reasonable standard of living and make it easier for them to seek work, not harder. That the government has fallen so short on all measures in their administration of social security is shameful.

Labor will support the bill but we remain deeply concerned with the system. The government has run down Centrelink services across the country to the point where Australians are waiting months for their entitlements. There is a cumulative effect of this neglect that those on the other side probably find difficult to understand. The average waiting time for people trying to call Centrelink has now expanded to 15 minutes and 35 seconds, but many people have reported being in the queue for many hours. There's no more compelling example of this than robodebt. The government's now jettisoned its practice of sending people debt recovery notices based solely upon the Department of Social Security's income average of ATO tax data. It's a faulty algorithm that heartlessly punished vulnerable people even when they reported income correctly. For all their rhetoric of promoting work over welfare, it was people who had intermittent or insecure work that were punished the most heavily. Comparing an average annual figure to fortnightly income for these people is absurd. To do so retrospectively is even more bizarre. In some cases, a decade had passed since they'd last reported their income.

A useful comparison is this week the government pushed legislation through this place, then passed an amnesty for unpaid superannuation for employers to report 26 years of unpaid superannuation without penalty—no penalty at all. They have tax data now to detect unpaid superannuation going back decades. It's the same data, albeit deliberately miscalculated, that inspired the robodebt scheme. They will never go after a shonky employer who hasn't paid their workers' superannuation. They will never implement a system that ruthlessly accounts for stolen wages. You lot are all too happy to unleash a Kafkaesque nightmare on poor and vulnerable Australians who can't find a job because your economic model has failed.

Exactly what the government knew and when is now a matter for the courts. We know because of emails made public this month from the department's legal counsel warning the scheme was illegal. We know the Federal Court last year ruled that there was no legal basis in the Social Security Act to use income averaging as a sole proof to raise a debt. And we know the government is retreating from the scheme and has frozen any debts related to it.

It was an absolute tragedy, perpetrated by the government. Some people died after receiving robodebt notifications, many of them at the margins of our society. And when somebody died, having had a debt struck up under the robodebt system, did that stop the government? No. They took money from 73 estates of people who had died, totalling $225,000. For all the time that the government was carrying on about the robodebt scheme and defending it, they were punishing these people with an illegal scheme that took money from dead poor people. All the marketing, all the affectation, all the phoniness left these people behind. In particular, what should not be forgotten when Australians consider the robodebt scheme and the way this government is dealing with people on social security is a consideration of what happens to people in country areas who lose their jobs and in particular those seats represented by the senators here and the members in the other house from what passes for the National Party in today's politics.

The Nationals represent some of the poorest electorates in the country. According to the ANU study, they include the seat of Mallee, where 16.9 per cent of households live below the poverty line; the seat of Page, where 16.4 per cent of households live below the poverty line; Hinkler, where 16.2 per cent of households live below the poverty line; Wide Bay, 15.9 per cent of households; Cowper, 15.5 per cent; Maranoa, 15.3. per cent; Lyne, 15.2 per cent; and the seat of New England, 15.2 per cent of people below the poverty line. These are communities where being poor is tough, and it's isolating. Depending on where you live, unemployment and underemployment are often high. Access to education and training is much more limited. Even access to basic health care for some Australians living in country towns on social security is much more difficult, much worse than it is in a big city. They are places where it is a long way away from Centrelink, hard to get decent internet access and in some cases difficult to get phone reception. When a system becomes cruel and bureaucratic, it's regional people who suffer the most.

There is evidence that poverty in regional and rural Australia is getting worse. A recent study by ME Bank showed that household financial comfort in regional Australia is sliding, with a 14 per cent decline in financial comfort in regional Queensland and similar declines in regional New South Wales and Victoria. The gap between regional households and metropolitan households has grown substantially. It's part of a larger story—a story of the cities growing richer and the regions being left behind, factories that have closed and services that have been shut. And the growth of the finance sector and the services sector never made it to some parts of the country. Rural labouring jobs and blue-collar professions that once delivered dignity to working class Australians in rural towns never came back. When a factory closes in a regional centre, a third of workers retire, a third of workers find another job—usually a job that is impermanent and much worse—and a third of workers never work again. The jobs went, but the people stayed there.

The largest group of Newstart recipients in Australia is people aged between 55 and 65. Many of them are regional workers who expected to have a good job—until the day that they didn't. How many of them got caught in a wave of economic change as the labour market changed under their feet? How many of them are languishing in regional towns, quietly trying to get by as it gets harder and harder to make ends meet? And the government's robodebt system made it immeasurably harder for those people. What's worse, for many of those people it took away their dignity as well. How many of them had been stuck waiting for the call centre, for Centrelink, for hours on end?

How many of them were sent illegal robo-debt notifications? How many of them struggled and skipped meals to pay to the government money that they didn't owe?

And where was the so-called party of the bush? Where was the party that promised to protect them? They would have known. For years, every MPs office has been flooded with constituents trying to navigate this baffling and cruel system. The National Party didn't do anything about it. They didn't even try. I'd be delighted, really, to find out that The Nationals did try, but there is no evidence to support that proposition. It doesn't matter either way, I suppose. The National Party hasn't stood up for working-class people in country towns. They're really good on the podcasts, really good on the political cosplay in the hi-vis vests and really good on wearing the funny hats and doing the routine. But when it actually matters, delivering for country people and delivering for working-class people in country towns, these people are nowhere to be seen. Even worse, they are enablers of cruel and heartless government policy that strips jobs away from these places.

And when people lose their jobs, what does the National Party do? Well, it's become pretty clear in the last couple of weeks. Last week, in the context of another policy debate, one of the characters who is one of the movers and shakers in the National Party, Senator Canavan, spoke on renewables in the energy sector—a form of energy that he doesn't like and that he's opposed to—and what was the worst thing that he could find to say about renewables in the energy sector? When he thought of the cruellest insult that he could mount, what did he say? He said that renewables were the 'dole bludgers' of the energy sector. I thought it was the cruellest, meanest thing that he could say. He thought it would get him a big cheer on Twitter. It says a lot about who the modern National Party is, who they represent and what they really mean when they talk about social security.

It was an odd claim to make, in that he was trying to suggest that the renewable sector is propped up only by government money. It immediately preceded a campaign that he's launched with his friend the member for New England for billions of dollars in government subsidies for a coal-fired power station that will never be built—that, if it were built, would be hopelessly inefficient, would drag the country backwards in technological terms and would make power more expensive for ordinary Australians. It's an odd thing to say. But the worst thing about what he said is that when he was trying to summon up the worst kind of insult, what he said was 'dole bludgers', and what he really meant was the tens of thousands of people in Wide Bay, Hinkler and Maranoa, where 15 to 17 per cent of households live below the poverty line, in communities where work has disappeared, in no small part due to the failure over the course of the last seven years of what passes for a government on the other side of this chamber and in the House. The worst kind of insult he thought he could level at the poor old renewable sector—I don't know what they ever did to Senator Canavan—was that they were 'dole bludgers'. He should be ashamed of it. It says a lot about the politics of the government.

It's the same philosophy that drives the government's approach. When the current minister, Senator Ruston, was challenged about lifting Newstart, she said that increases in funding for Newstart would go to drug dealers and publicans. The contempt that the people on that side of the chamber have for ordinary Australians who can't find decent work, who can't make ends meet, is absolutely palpable. It's driven their approach to this policy. We have to do much better. We should do much better, but we should pass this bill.