Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the only good things to come out of last year was when the government upped JobSeeker payments by $550 a fortnight. I know how much that money meant to people. It gave more than a million Australians a chance to breathe. They finally had their head above water. There are people out there who had been getting by for years on hardly anything at all, and they had found that really hard. For the first time in a long time, they saw a meaningful rise in their incomes. They could pay their rego, put their aircon on without having to worry about the cost or buy their kids a cheap laptop so they could do their schoolwork online. For the whole lot of people who lost their jobs through the pandemic, those who went on JobSeeker payments kept things on track while they waited for things to pick up again.

The government says they're going to take away that coronavirus money in March. When that happens, a single person will have to find a way to live and look for work on $283 a week. I can tell you we've seen all this before, and it's not much to live on. There are going to be a lot of people out there who just can't get by on such a tiny amount of money. Some of them will have to stop paying rent on their homes. They might find themselves having to move further away from where the new jobs are. They might not be able to afford their car registration anymore. I don't want the government to push people into desperation in a couple of months. Government policy shouldn't create desperation. That's a pretty basic standard, I would have thought. But I also understand where members of the coalition are coming from when they say that the supplement needs to be scaled back and that, if we kept the coronavirus supplement at $550 forever, we would start to see problems with people choosing to stay on welfare instead of getting back into work. I get that. This is the thing: if we go back to the old JobSeeker rate, people just aren't going to be able to keep their heads above water. At the same time, the government aren't going to raise the rate. They're determined to go back to the good old payment rate when the coronavirus supplement ends in March.

There are some people who want to hit the government over and over again about how awful they are for not raising it. I get that. It is awful that people are going to have to go back to living on nothing. But no matter how much we stomp our feet about it there are going to be jobseekers who need help and who are not going to get it no matter how much outrage there is going on and no matter whether or not they are getting food in their bellies for every meal that they should be having. There are other people out there who say we've just got to focus on getting people into work instead of raising the rate, and they're right too. But the thing is that living on nothing makes it harder to do that when you can't afford the shoes, the suit jacket and the bag you need to show up for a job interview and look like a good candidate and compete with the rest of them.

What makes it worse is that, when the government wind back the COVID-19 support, they're going to go back to the old income test that we had before. That test takes 50c out of every dollar someone on JobSeeker earns after they've worked for more than three hours a week. There's no carrot at the end of the stick. It takes 60c out of every dollar they earn from working more than seven hours a week. Once again, there's no carrot at the end of the stick. The government like to cut taxes because taxes discourage people from working. When the government clip 30c in every dollar you earn, they say that's enough to make people want to earn less. I agree. What I don't get is how losing 30c in the dollar stops you from wanting to work but losing 60c in the dollar apparently isn't a problem. We reward people going from JobSeeker into a job by taxing them at a higher rate than what Malcolm Turnbull is currently paying. We pat them on the back and say, 'We're proud of you, mate,' and then we shake them down for half their money. How is this supposed to help and encourage people to go back to work?

I want to find a way through this. Using the old method is unthinkable. It is just not working. I'm not talking about money for nothing here, and I'm not talking keeping it the way it is either. We can do better than punish jobseekers for getting a job. It is just not encouraging. It's not working. There are much better ways of doing it and we could come out on top and so could the people out there who are on JobSeeker. But, right now, we need the carrot at the end of the stick, not punishment, because that's done whoop-de-doo. It's gone from seven hours to 12 hours to 18 hours. That's how that's supposed to work. That's the reality of it. That's how the cashless debit card is supposed to work. You're supposed to have a carrot at the end of the stick. That's in Twiggy Forrest's Creating parityreport. We've got to have a carrot at the end of the stick, but we are still using the old method. We have a perfect opportunity to reset how we deal with this and we're not doing that, and I have to ask why.

I want to now speak about the media bargaining code, because I find this quite amusing to be honest with you. The major parties are falling over themselves to support the media bargaining code. I get that. Google and Facebook haven't got a lot of friends in this place right now. There are plenty out there. Trust me. They love them. But cool your jets, guys, because this code is not as crash-hot as you think it is or as it might appear. Google and Facebook bring eyeballs to news companies. They help people find their news these days. The cost of delivering those eyeballs isn't free. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars for Google and Facebook to make a product good enough to take over the whole market. It's paid for with advertising. Google's basically got a monopoly on the search engines. If you want to run any advertising against search results, you've got to go through Google.

The code would mean that some of that advertising revenue that Google gets from companies would be required to be handed over to news companies. Google has three options here. It charges more for advertising to keep its profits at the same rate, it charges the same amount for advertising and its shareholders just take a hit or it pulls out and goes elsewhere. No media companies get a benefit and no Australian consumer gets a benefit.

I get that Google is a big, bad boy right now, but, let's be honest: it's only as big as it is because it has a better product than its competitors. How about that? That's how it works in big business. It is using its money to improve the standards of its products, and that's a good thing for consumers. We get a better service and we don't have to pay for it. If you don't believe me then spend a day using Yahoo, and good luck to you with that!

So Google has a monopoly, and it has three choices: if Google is made to pay more for that monopoly then they're just going to pass on that cost to their consumers, because there's nobody else who can compete with them on that price. They're a monopoly. They don't have any competition. News Corp and Nine don't care about that; they're not the ones who would have to pay the piper. The ones who pay for it are the people who rely on digital ads to promote their businesses. This is what really, really gets me: they're plumbers, they're florists, they're pizza shops, they're hairdressers and they're shoe stores. They aren't making millions, I can tell you. Their advertising budget is tiny—absolutely tiny! It is measured in three or four figures.

Taxes can't turn a monopoly into a market; all you're taxing is the end user. For Google, that's the advertiser; it's the small business out there. I'm no big fan of Google or Facebook—don't get me wrong—and I think we need more good journalism in Australia. I tell you what, we could certainly do with that; I think we'd all have to agree on that. And we aren't going to get that by sitting on our butts and waiting for some decent rain. But if we want Google and Facebook to contribute to a better society, let's just tax them. Don't create a code. Common sense is to tax them—just make them pay some tax!

I don't know if they should get a special set of rules but I don't think they should get a special exemption either. If we want decent journalism, let's pay for it out of the tax. Make it tax-deductible. Expand grants for quality journalism and invest in regional newsgathering. Back public broadcasters and don't keep taking bricks out of the walls, saying that they've got enough left not to notice the difference. Sooner or later, they won't have enough left. Invest in newswire services like AAP which are independent not-for-profits that exist only to deliver news, unbiased and accurate, from anywhere to everyone for no other reason than because news matters.

This code deserves a bit more scrutiny than the free run it's getting right now. Not everything that hurts the big, bad company of the day automatically becomes good, not when the ones who end up paying the bill aren't the big, bad companies at all. They're smaller than News Corp and Nine; they're smaller than them. They're the ones in my backyard, trying to survive and keep their doors open and their businesses open. That's why it's so much easier to ignore it when they're being thrown under the bus, and it is just not fair. It is not fair that you pay advertising money for small business— (Time expired)