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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Human Services (Senator Ellison) to a question without notice asked by Senator Siewert today relating to Centrelink.

I draw the chamber’s attention to the comments made in Senate estimates on 29 May by Mr Carters from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations when I asked him about the data on the number of Indigenous breaches. I asked:

Could you tell me how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been breached since 1 July 2006?

Mr Carters answered:

This data is actually on our website for the first quarter of Welfare to Work. For the quarter ending September 2006.

If senators care to visit the department’s website, they will see that the data for the September quarter is in fact no longer on the website and therefore not available to the public. If they look closely at the webpage, they will note that the page was last modified on 2 April 2007, which is nearly two months before Mr Carters assured me that the data was on the site. I am sure that, when I asked the then Minister for Human Services, Senator Ian Campbell, a question on these statistics on 26 February 2007, these figures were in fact on the site. You might ask yourself: why would a website be modified in April 2007 if it contained only data from the previous June?

Returning to my questions in estimates: I went on in that same session to ask Mr Carters for more recent figures, from later than September 2006, which he could not supply. He told me, basically, that it takes a little while to compile this data and that was why it was taking so long. When I asked when the updated data would be available, he told me:

... we are expecting to put the next quarter—

and that is the next quarter, from September to December, mind you, 2006—

up on the system fairly soon, so it is only a matter of weeks away.

I asked, ‘How soon?’ He said, ‘Weeks.’ I asked, ‘Weeks?’ He said:

Yes, as early in June as we can.

Now June has gone and so has July. This is unacceptable. It is also inexplicable. You would think that it would be very simple and straightforward for Centrelink to compile that data and have it made available. We are talking about data from 1 July 2006 to 30 June 2007. You cannot tell me—and I do not believe for one minute—that the government do not know how many people have been breached under their new punitive Welfare to Work regime. This is supposed to be their shining new welfare reform approach, and they are telling me and expecting this chamber to believe that they do not know how many people have been breached. And then why take the existing available data off the website?

I can tell you that the data that was made available earlier this year, for the quarter to September 2006, showed a very alarming increase in the number of Indigenous people that were breached during that first quarter. For example, in Western Australia there was an increase of 133 per cent in the number of Aboriginal people breached. Do you think this could be the reason why the government are not giving us this information—that they do not want to demonstrate the fact that the number of people being breached under the new punitive Welfare to Work regime has significantly increased, particularly the number of Aboriginal people? To go by the anecdotal information that I am being told by people on the ground, they believe there has been a significant increase in the number of people being breached, particularly a significant increase in the number of Indigenous people being breached.

Anecdotally, I am being told on my travels that in fact there are rolling breaches because once an Aboriginal person has been breached and they have been given their eight-week no-pay penalty—particularly if they have to move to get support from families—they are not receiving letters that inform them what they have to do next, so they cannot therefore go in for their reinstatement interview and therefore are being breached again. There are rolling breaches or people simply dropping off the books. That is of course very convenient for the government because the government can then claim that those people have come off welfare and therefore have presumably got a job. That is not true: they have in fact come off welfare and do not have any income support.

I put to the chamber that this is in fact why the government are not presenting this data. Even if they have not got the data for the whole financial year, surely they have got the next quarter’s worth of data available. Again, it is not being made available to the community. That is very convenient, during the period of the debate on the NT intervention, when their own policies are driving people to be breached from their shining new so-called Welfare to Work reforms, which are not reforms at all, because they are harming the community that they claim to be protecting. Come on, give us the data. Where is it? (Time expired)

Question agreed to.