Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on the government's failure to deliver a plan for jobs and economic recovery while more than a million Australians are currently unemployed and a further 400,000 Australians are going to lose their jobs by Christmas. They sort of have a plan—that is, to trash the environment and trash universities and students' chances of going to university, while the government are fostering a fossil-fuel, gas-led so-called recovery, which of course it won't be. That is not a plan; that is the road to disaster for both people and our planet.

While the government seems to be willing to stop at nothing in order to achieve that, we are deeply concerned that they are condemning Australians to live in poverty come September. What will life look like for millions of Australians after the rate of coronavirus supplement is cut by $300 a fortnight at the end of September? And there is no plan for what happens after December. People don't know what happens after December. It could go to $40 a day after December.

An additional 740,000 people are going to be pushed into poverty come the end of September because, once that $300 is cut from the coronavirus supplement, it takes that payment below the poverty line. The poverty rates for people on JobSeeker and youth allowance will return to 23 per cent. And 1.1 million children will be living in households where the income support payments are cut. More than 400,000 Victorians will have their income support payments reduced. People will be pushed into rental stress and default on their mortgages. And what does that do to our economy? I'll tell you what: it sends it into a nosedive. When you take that money out of our economy, you are into a nosedive.