Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of my colleague's disallowance motion before the chamber this morning. Many of my colleagues have spoken, in particular this week, about poverty actually being a political choice. Unfortunately, what we see is that this government and successive governments that have been elected have kept people in this country in poverty. I think it's shameful that we continue to place the blame on individuals, many of whom cannot work for various reasons. I said in my speech on Monday on the strengthening the safety net bill that we can't forget that these are not just numbers; these are not just statistics. There are real people at the core of this issue. These are people who are isolated, people who have been crushed by the poverty that they experience and by the actions this government subjects them to, people who this government has chosen to keep in poverty. It's disgraceful. Labor have actually made that choice based on the right-wing media continuing to trumped this up, the media machine that makes the disability support pension in this country inaccessible to the people who need the support.

Before the election, there were Labor senators in this place who signed a committee report that recommended there be very clear changes to make DSP much more accessible. As we have seen, when in opposition, Labor members also called for the rates of JobSeeker and other income supports to be increased. Members said they couldn't possibly live on these payments. So there's a lot of rhetoric when people are in opposition. When they get into power, they change and they don't stick to those conversations and commitments or sign up to those reports. They have the opportunity and the power to make those changes within the system when they get into government. What do we hear now? We hear crickets—absolute crickets—when it comes to standing by the commitment of that committee report to make those changes.

Yesterday, in this place, the government had the opportunity to increase income support above the poverty line, but they again voted against it. Today, they have the opportunity to ensure that the support for DSP offered can be accessed by those who need it the most. The true colours and the true priorities of this Labor government are becoming clear. That tagline, 'No-one left behind,' is a joke. It's an absolute joke. We have billions of dollars being spent on tax cuts and new submarines and a $20 billion estimated surplus, but no money is going to be found for some of the most vulnerable people in our community, and I think that's a disgrace.

Senator Rice already talked about the 2021 inquiry into the adequacy of DSP established by my predecessor, former senator Rachel Siewert. The members of the major parties sat in those hearings and heard the absolutely devastating evidence of the impacts of insufficient payments and accessibility and the impact that that's having on the lives of Australians. Some of those same senators are in this place today voting against the recommendations of the report.

What I have seen in my time is there are many, many barriers to accessing DSP, and getting a full diagnosis is a requirement before anyone can access DSP. This alone can be a huge undertaking. I'm going to give you an example of that. In 2002, I left my then job and went and worked in the machinery of Centrelink. I worked under the Australians Working Together framework that was developed. I was one of 400 personal advisers that were put in place within Centrelink to talk to some of the most vulnerable target groups in Australia around being work ready or being job ready, as they called it, because their push was to get everyone back to work.

There were two categories that were covered under my mandate as a personal adviser. One was the recipients of Newstart allowance who were temporarily incapacitated. These are the people who were long-term unemployed, who had to go and get a medical certificate every 12 to 16 weeks to say that they couldn't look for work. Then there were the people newly claiming Newstart, who either were Indigenous Australians, were recently released from prison or had certain exemptions to the activity test. Those people, again, were in a very vulnerable target group and were people who regularly had to have contact with Centrelink about disability support and trying to get access to the DSP.

In my experience as a personal adviser, my job was to identify what those barriers were, and nearly every single one of those people that sat in front of me talked about their experience of being able to access and of being able to tell people what that looked like on a day-to-day basis for them. These processes were time intensive and costly. They exposed people to lots of trauma. Their concerns about this were particularly in relation to psychosocial issues and even the medical trauma that they were experiencing if they had to have surgery, and people just didn't get it. They didn't get it. On the conveyor belt of assessing DSP, they didn't understand the lived experience of some of these people. It was actually quite devastating. My job was trying to articulate that to the people who were in the claims area looking at these claims.

If a condition is not considered permanent and stabilised, as Senator Rice already said, it is not considered for DSP. And that is an issue. It doesn't take into account the episodes or rapid onset of disease and injury from accidents, and it does not allow for people to tell their stories. People with psychosocial disabilities in particular were a large cohort of clients that I saw. I was in the Gosnells office in Western Australia. It has a majority of very low-socioeconomic households, and people with mental health illnesses were particularly disadvantaged because of this. It was hard for them to articulate their stories and be listened to by people who had those skills.

This week I've spoken in particular about how difficult it is proving your status or your identity or your issues, and I've used the example of the native title determinations. We've had lots of debates around cultural heritage this week, and people continue to not understand the intangible cultural heritage attached to that. This is about stuff that's not written down. There's no physical evidence of that so people think it's not real. This is a very different circumstance and consideration, but it's the core principle of that which I am trying to articulate is important for people seeking to access DSP. We're asking them to prove something that they know is fact and that is important to them using evidence from people who don't share their lived experience or don't fully understand that in order to acknowledge the government's programs or legislations.

We know that this system, both through that report that Senator Rice was talking about and through the intensive committee work that she's done—she's carrying on from the work of Rachel Siewert—that this is a real issue, particularly for people who have DSP. These processes cause an amount of trauma that I can't even go into. People are terrified of what the system brings. In fact, they would rather avoid going into these offices. They would rather avoid picking up the phone and sitting there for hours before speaking to someone in Tasmania or at another call centre who, frankly, doesn't give them the time of day. This is the experience that they're having.

I want to share one example of that. This is a constituent from New South Wales who said: 'My struggles with health meant I had to leave tertiary education, especially while trying to rent on JobSeeker. I couldn't keep up with the full course load. It was nearly impossible. It makes my mental health worse. By the time I moved away from my studies I was actively suicidal and my chronic health conditions were even worse. Trying to find work feels like lying as my ability to do what's needed fluctuates every day. I am told I have a chance for DSP with my reports from specialists. Now imagine telling your employment service provider that all you can say is you're on a waitlist, over and over again, and hearing nothing. I was able to afford to see another specialist because I had the coronavirus supplement. I'm truly hopeful that my reports will be seen as enough, because the judgemental stares from the DES people are just as wearing on my mental health as trying to figure out how to afford mobility aids or medication.'

This is a very clear example of someone whose experience articulates all of those struggles for people. What the Greens are asking is for the government to take this into consideration when we're talking about accessibility for DSP and to understand that these have been articulated in these reports. We know it's not the first time that government has ignored the experiences of communities and inquiries, and it definitely won't be the last time, but time and time again we continue to see the two major parties in this place make big promises whilst they're in opposition and then cower away from them and ignore them when they're in government. And yesterday, with the increase to JobSeeker and to welfare payments, they had the opportunity to do that and again failed. We're seeing that again today, to the detriment of people with disabilities.