Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I move opposition amendment (1) on sheet 1164 revised:

(1) Schedule 1, item 44, page 10 (after line 21), after section 1262, insert:

1262A Minister must immediately consider required modifications

As soon as practicable after this section commences, the Minister must consider whether the period for which a determination can be in force under section 1263 should be extended to allow determinations to be made for as long as the impacts from COVID-19 continue to exist.

Example: This could allow for the continuation, after 31 March 2021, of the extended partner income test, $300 income free areas and eligibility rules for people who are self-employed or sole traders.

This amendment calls on the minister to consider extending the beneficial regulation power that has been used to increase the partner income test, increase the amount of money a person can earn before they lose the payment, and make it easier for sole traders and self-employed people to access unemployment support. The minister has said a lot in this place about the extra support that has been extended to sole traders and self-employed people through the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments; however, in this legislation the government does not want to extend that power, so we are here calling on the government to consider extending that power on an ongoing basis so that the government can be flexible in responding to the needs of people.

Earlier in the year, at the beginning of the pandemic, we negotiated a general regulation power with the government. Labor pushed the government to do that. The government rightly used that power to intervene and help Australians struggling in the time of the coronavirus. This included paying students and apprentices the coronavirus supplement. This was particularly important because students and apprentices would have lost access to their part-time work and Newstart would have gone down to the base rate. It also enabled the minister to double the partner income test to around $80,000. This helped households where one income earner had lost their job. Around 100,000 households benefited from this change. It also enabled the minister to increase from $106 to $300 the amount a person could earn each fortnight before their payments started tapering out.

As I highlighted before, the government has been very happy to talk up the support it has given sole traders and the self-employed access to. The government says it wants to do the right thing, monitor the situation and keep Australians supported during the time of the coronavirus. It should be doing these actions. Just as our opposition to schedule 1 on sheet 1161 would have enabled the government to keep making higher payments, here again the government should be allowing itself the flexibility to do the right thing by Australians.

We're not worried about too much power being in delegated legislation in the case of the government taking this action, because the government would need to bring back primary legislation to do this. We think it would be a good thing to do that. Just like the increased payments themselves, we need to see changes that continue long after March because the impacts of the coronavirus, as all economic reports show, will continue a long way past March. There are projections that 1.8 million people will be unemployed and that that will continue to grow.

As all of us in this place know, the government has already said that it's going to phase out JobKeeper. Once JobKeeper is phased out we will have to rely on the sustainability of those businesses to pay the wages of their own workers. Sadly, some of those workers will end up on JobSeeker payment, and the minister should have the flexibility to enable people in that environment, sole traders and self-employed people, to continue to access unemployment support. We want to see concessions continue. There'll be double the number of people on unemployment payments in Australia for some time, so the government needs to be held to account on this. We call on the government to make these changes, just as we call on them to raise the rate of JobSeeker.