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

I rise to make a contribution to the debate on the COVID-19 Disaster Payment (Funding Arrangements) Bill 2021. This bill establishes a special appropriation to allow the Commonwealth to fund the COVID-19 disaster payments. The recent two-week lockdown in Melbourne was the first following the end of the JobKeeper wage subsidy. This left many workers, particularly casual workers and those on temporary visas, without a source of income. That takes me, first off, to the fact that we are doing nothing about addressing the increasingly insecure work in this country and the fact that so many people in this country have to put together a series of casual jobs, with insecure hours, resulting in insecure wages, which leads them to being in this position where they are without income, in many instances, from the two or three casual, insecure jobs that they may have.

The government ended JobKeeper much too early, despite warnings that there would be more COVID outbreaks, particularly when you bear in mind the issue around the failure, the shambles, of the rollout program for the vaccines and the failures in hotel quarantining. Hotels are not meant for quarantining. They were absolutely essential as stopgap measures when the pandemic first hit, but we've had a significant period of time now to put in place secure, purpose-built quarantine facilities modelled on the Howard Springs approach. It's not as if Australia doesn't know what works and hasn't got the experts that have been providing expert advice on what does and doesn't work—not to mention the fact that, while the government mouths the words about aerosols and the need to improve ventilation, and says, 'Yes, we're paying attention to aerosols,' we still don't have nationally consistent guidelines on aerosols. They mouth the words but they're not doing much about it. Because of that, it was inevitable that we would have further COVID outbreaks, unfortunately.

The government very cruelly cut the JobSeeker payment, as we know. They did the right thing at the beginning. We all in this chamber said they were doing the right thing in terms of doubling the rate of JobSeeker. But in the midst of this pandemic they took that away, in a cut-by-cut process, and then pretended that they had increased JobSeeker. I say 'pretended', because it was $40 a day and now it's just under $44 a day. I challenge anybody on the government benches to try and live on $44 a day. We all know you can't, and the government know that, because they doubled JobSeeker at the beginning of the pandemic. They did the right thing. They knew people couldn't survive on just $40 a day in a lockdown, and they doubled it.

This morning I was at a breakfast about women's economic futures. Terese Edwards, the CEO of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, very clearly articulated the benefits that that doubling had for families, particularly single-parent families, single mothers. It had a significant positive benefit. And here the government is not taking those same measures but just doing something so that they can say to the public: 'We've increased JobSeeker. Don't you worry about that. We've increased it.' Well, a measly $3 a day does not address the significant poverty that people are living in. In the middle of the pandemic, people are back to trying to survive on a payment on JobSeeker of just $44 a day.

This bill gives minimal support and does not go far enough to ensure that people who can't work or have additional costs due to lockdown are adequately supported. It's simply inadequate. It really is just plain cruelty that people on income support are denied access to this disaster payment. There's the low rates and the way it's being imposed—and I will go into more details about that in a minute—but, to add insult to injury, people on income support can't get it. We know very well that people on the JobSeeker payment, youth allowance, DSP and carer payments also lose work during lockdowns and face additional costs to stay safe at home and healthy during lockdowns.

This bill also says that if people have some savings, what they call liquid assets, above $10,000 they are not entitled to any payment at all. So if you've been saving for your first home and then you found yourself without any income, through no fault of your own, the federal government says, 'Dip into your home savings and do it potentially indefinitely.' If some people drew down from their super and put it into their savings to try and get through the lockdown, they will get punished for doing something that the government encouraged them to do. In other words, they are having to dip into that to get by when, if they hadn't done that, that money would still be in their super. If they have done this, they're not going to be able to get access to this payment.

This bill needs to be fixed. It has a number of flaws. This bill needs to be fixed to ensure that people don't fall through the cracks and to ensure that people aren't left in poverty during these lockdowns. If we had an income support system in this country that gave people enough to live on and didn't condemn them to poverty, we might not have to be in this situation where the government has to make hotspot-by-hotspot refinements. If everybody had, at a minimum, an eligibility for the amount of money that they, in fact, got when JobSeeker was doubled, which the government by its own admissions knows is what Australians need to live above the poverty line, we might not need to be making such special purpose payments.

Let's fix our social security system. If the minimum wage were higher and casual work and contracting didn't leave people living hour by hour on the work that they can find, struggling to make ends meet, we might not need to have these sorts of payments quite so much. If people weren't in insecure work, if people didn't have to stitch together several casual and insecure jobs to make ends meet, we might not be in this situation. The government should look beyond asking, 'What is the very least we can do?' They need to look at what has happened as a sign of a huge problem of growing inequality in this country and growing insecure work and look at how we fix it. Instead, we have a piecemeal approach that leaves people anxious and insecure, which has a significant impact on their wellbeing.

We have already seen the huge impact that the pandemic has had on people's mental health, wellbeing and anxiety. We have seen a huge increase in the need for mental health supports, for example. Of course the pandemic is having an impact on everyone in this country, but if you literally don't know where your next dollar is coming from it has an even more significant impact on your wellbeing and mental health. We have a huge problem where we have a significant number of people who are literally living pay to pay, week to week. If they miss shifts or if they have to pay for extra services because of lockdowns, they are simply unable to make ends meet. It is critical that people who have lost income through lockdowns have access to adequate support to ensure that they can put food on the table and they can keep a roof over their heads. The criterion set by the government in the middle of Victoria's last lockdown just doesn't do it. It doesn't go far enough. Too many people have been left behind and have just been ignored.

The Greens will be moving amendments, which I have already circulated in the chamber, to fix this bill and to make it fairer. The Greens amendments will remove eligibility criteria requiring the Chief Medical Officer to declare a location a hotspot; change the eligibility criteria from more than seven days to seven days or more; remove the criteria requiring recipients to have liquid assets of less than $10,000—that's simply unfair to so many people who are saving to try and buy their own home, for example—and remove the criteria preventing people on income support from accessing the payment.

I ask the Senate to support the Greens amendments so that we can fix this bill and ensure the disaster payment is accessible to more people. This will help ensure that people are not thrown into poverty, or having to dip into their savings for a home, every time there is a lockdown. On Tuesday, we had a debate on the housing crisis in this country. We have people desperately saving for a deposit on their first home, which we know is increasingly hard to do in this country, and the government is saying, 'You use that money when there's a lockdown.' It's not their fault that a lockdown is imposed; it's the fault of the current failures in quarantine and in the vaccine program, but the government says: 'You pay for it out of the deposit you're saving for your first home.' They've struggled to put it together and they're struggling to afford a home, because of the increasingly unaffordable housing market in this country, but the government says, 'You dip into that deposit and you pay for the lockdown.' That is not fair. That is not what I would call a fair Australia. Our amendments will make this bill and the payment fairer, so that fewer people in this country are condemned to poverty and so that the COVID crisis doesn't fuel the poverty crisis in this country. We know that more and more people are falling below the poverty line. Without the Greens amendments to this payment, that will continue to happen.

We will be supporting Labor's second reading amendment. I ask the chamber to support the Greens amendments in Committee of the Whole to make this bill fair so more Australians are supported and so that we do the best we can for people if they have to go into lockdown—not the least, which is what this bill does.