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 Kim Carr) to a question without notice asked by Senator Siewert today relating to single parent income assistance.

At the start I note that the minister did not answer the fundamental question that I was asking, which was: is the minister aware of the impacts that this policy change is having on single parents and their families? I would suggest by his lack of an answer that he is not aware of or is ignoring those impacts.

My office has been receiving a steady stream of visits, phone calls and emails from single parents—mainly single mothers, because as we know, over 85 per cent of the single parents who are affected by these changes are in fact single mothers—talking to us initially about the fact that they were told they were not going to get the pensioner concession card. If you read the letters, they were pretty devastating letters—and I can tell you that I had a lot of pretty devastated mothers ringing and talking to my office about the fact that they were not going to have the pensioner concession card. Some of them, as the Minister for Human Services said, had been told that it would continue but then they got a letter saying that it is in fact not going to continue.

Although the minister did tell the chamber what happened and about the mistake that was made, the issue still remains that those who have actually been taken off any form of income support do not have access to the pensioner concession card, when Centrelink's own website says that when people transition from payments they get to keep the pensioner concession card for a transition period. That is apparently not occurring. We are still chasing that up.

The other really significant issues are, for example, that the Centrepay arrangements did not get changed when people were moved onto Newstart. So there are defaults happening on payments—not to mention the fact that people of course do not have the same amount of money and cannot in fact pay those bills. Utility payments are not being made. People are being forced to wait a significant period of time while they get an appointment with Centrelink and, in the meantime, their payments have been cut or have been changed because of their moving onto Newstart and they do not know what is going on. There is a growing demand for not-for-profit organisations and emergency relief organisations, because single parents just do not know where to turn when they cannot afford to pay their bills or cannot afford to feed their families.

I asked the minister about whether families are being told to use their school bonus to pay their rent and their utility bills instead of in fact paying the bills that we all know that we get in January when the children go back to school. These children are not going to be able to go back to school with books, uniforms and those sorts of things, because their parent needs to use that money to pay for their most immediate food bills, rent bills and power bills. I have had people tell me that they are having to move out of their homes—their current house—because they cannot afford the rent anymore. Of course, the government says, 'The reason we're doing this is to encourage people into work.' We know that that group of single parents, out of all those receiving income support, is the cohort of people that are seeking work the most.

This morning there was a rally outside this place of single parents who are bringing their message and are currently meeting with members of parliament around this place. The message is there—they were bringing their messages to this place. There are rallies all around Australia today with single parents saying, 'Enough is enough.' At that rally I heard people's accounts of conscientiously looking for work. I had one mother who went for an interview: she was applying for an interview to assist at a hair salon, which involved cleaning mirrors, cleaning up, sweeping the floor and making tea and coffee. She was told that they had got someone with more experience. They knew she was a single parent. I have heard other accounts where people have tried over and over again to get work, but we all know that it is very hard to maintain, in particular, permanent or full-time work when you are also caring for your family.

This is our future generation we are talking about. We already have one in six children in Australia living in poverty. This move by the government has condemned another generation of children to be living in poverty, because you cannot survive on Newstart. It is not a life, to be bringing people up on Newstart, and this government should be ashamed that they have dropped 87,000 single parents and their families into poverty.

Question agreed to.