Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to address the issue of the Newstart payment, and the commentary and debate about that. I think it's fairly instructive to place on the record first up that I honestly don't know how anybody can survive on Newstart. The standing costs in my household would outstrip Newstart on a daily basis, and that's without looking at things that you eat or do, or your car or electricity costs. Clearly, there is broad consensus right across society and also in this place that the fiscal amount is inappropriate. It's also instructive to look at the comment of the Hon. Mathias Cormann that it's a 'transitional payment'. It's clear there are less people coming into Newstart, and there are a substantial number of people who don't stay on Newstart for 12 months or longer, but some of the underlying statistics really do need careful evaluation. The prevalence of long-term unemployment has risen from 13.4 per cent in April 2009 to 22.9 per cent in April 2019, so there are a large number of people who are on it for longer than 12 months. The proportion of Newstart recipients on payments for more than a year has climbed from 69 per cent at 2014 to 73 per cent in 2016, and, according to the department's own figures, to 76.5 per cent in 2018. So at any one time the overwhelming majority of people surviving on Newstart are doing it for more than one year.

This is a real tragedy, because in the short time I've been in this place, both in government and outside in opposition, I've had the opportunity to visit Centrelink facilities in various parts of South Australia. I go to the social workers in those places and say, 'How is it possible that people are structurally unable to get into the workforce?' They'll point to various reasons, but the one that stuck in my mind particularly was dental. Once your teeth are not in a good shape and once you're unable to articulate and openly communicate with people at an interview or in any sort of area, you become withdrawn. They pointed very clearly to the cost of dental remediation and health as a huge impost, a huge impediment, to people actually gaining work, to going through the interview process and doing things that would get them back into the workforce. We all know that the cost of dental health is expensive. It's expensive and considered expensive by people who have full time employment. But we don't have any ability for those people to be referred to a specialist program to get their teeth fixed so they can actually smile at an interview and articulate their case more clearly. So little areas of concern like that are completely not addressed.

I stood in the Centrelink office in Port Pirie and was chatting with people coming and going. A young lad came in, clearly agitated, clearly very upset, a bit dishevelled and not on the top of his day. He was pointed to a phone, and after 30 minutes he got that phone and started banging it on the counter until someone came out and actually interacted with him as a human being. What transpired was that there had been a death in the family. He knew there was an emergency payment through the Centrelink system so he could get a bus fare to Melbourne and attend his grandfather's funeral.

The people who work in this area are unbelievably under pressure and they're dealing with a completely inflexible system, which in some cases is almost inhumane in the way it treats people. It does need fixing. It doesn't need fixing just by a rubber stamp of a dollar or a dollar amount at the headline figure. It needs a fundamental root and branch review. We need to look carefully with an economic lens on what we're going to do to move these people forward, because we cannot continue to consign an enormous amount of people to an inordinately long time in a very, very punitive system of which there appears to be no way of escaping.

If you are suffering from a need for psychological counselling, if you're suffering from a family breakdown, if you've got nowhere to stay so you're on the street, you've got a pittance to survive on and you're expected to boot and suit and go for 30 job interviews a month. This doesn't appear to be the real world. This 46th Parliament should be doing what this parliament should do properly: in a completely bipartisan way evaluate this critical area of social policy and improve it. We will never agree on all matters, but there should be enough decency in the parliament, there should be enough decency in this chamber and in the other place, that we don't politically score points on this issue. We see and walk past people in Canberra, in Melbourne, in Adelaide, who are homeless. If your income is $555 a fortnight as a single person, I don't know how you get a roof over your head. I don't know where you get a roof over your head if you're bereft of family support. When you're not able to get a charitable institution to provide you with a room or a bed or whatever, where do you get the roof over your head? We're continuing to see this in cities all around the world and all around Australia, and we should be doing something about it.

I think that the reference that's gone through this place in recent days is an inordinately well-structured piece of work. It does not go to just the adequacy of payments. We all know, politically, if there's an agreement to increase it, people will say, 'Well, that's been absorbed, and now we want more.' What are we doing about the structural reasons why people cannot get back into interacting in the workplaces, which they would benefit enormously from? And we need to look at the impact of geography, age and characteristics. I know from interactions through my office that we're increasingly seeing people who worked all their lives—in fairly low-paid occupations—who may have accumulated an injury or two along the way. For whatever reason, the business they were in has gone bankrupt or closed, and they've been placed into the jobseeker market at a mature age.

The classic example is a constituent of mine who's 63 years old. His future is Newstart until he gets an increase when he gets to the pension age. He wants to work. He carries an injury; he can't stand for long periods of time. Employers make selective decisions. That's the way the world is. If you put in for job applications and someone has an impediment that is an injury which has been compensated in the past and restricts their performance, they're not likely to be at the top of employment selection. So he's facing three or four years on Newstart, and it is debilitating. The fact that he can't do what he's always done—participate in a workforce, have friendships, have disagreements, do the normal things of life—means he then starts to get a psychological injury because all of a sudden he thinks the problem is him. We shouldn't be doing this. This is wrong. We should be immediately acting in a bipartisan way to look at a forensic deep dive into the structural causes of this and we should be trying to fix it.

I'm instructed by my colleague Senator Dodson. He makes really insightful comments. Who are the actual beneficiaries of this institutionalised poverty? You could be cynical and say, 'Well lots of public servants work in this space managing the criteria, managing the compliance, managing the paperwork in and paperwork out and managing the stats up and stats down.' If we were to add all of those costs of the institutionalised operation of Newstart, maybe there would be some money around to be able to pay a higher dividend for those unfortunate enough to be in this situation. Some of you may know that I'm fond of the game of golf, so I do know this: Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur golfer in the world, when he was at the bottom of the deepest part of the British open, in a bunker, chipped it up four times and it came back down to the same spot; his caddie said to him, 'You know, Mr Jones, the definition of madness is to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different result.' That's what we're doing here.

We've been at this for a long time. The institutionalised report that we got is that there are a lot of people unable to move after 12 months. There are not enough funds going in there to sustain themselves. There is not enough effort going in there to understand and attack the issues that are causing this institutionalised, long-term poverty. We need to do something about it, and doing the same thing is not going to cut it. This parliament, the 46th Parliament, should do a real deep dive into this area and start addressing the simple and clear things which people in the sector will identify. They know what is causing people to be not able to front up to interviews, not able to complete job applications and not able to undertake the training activities. We don't need an increase of people living in poverty on the streets of this country.