Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

At the beginning of the committee stage, it's important that we engage with the substance of the bill before us, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024. Yet this bill is of extremely little substance. JobKeeper is a poverty payment. With rents soaring and groceries going through the roof, people on income support are increasingly hungry and homeless, and I think that it's a special kind of cruelty to force people into poverty, tell them you're doing what you can to help them and then have the government only offering a handful of payment increases. We are a wealthy country, and we should be increasing income support for people who are on the lowest incomes in the country and who, as Senator Pocock and Senator McKim said earlier, are not going to benefit from the stage 3 tax cuts that the government has been telling everybody that everybody is getting. Minister, do you think that people living on income support, which is well below the poverty line, should be forced to continue to live below the poverty line?