Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The opposition will be supporting the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024. But, sadly, two years in, Australians are paying the price for a succession of bad decisions and wrong priorities by this government. We will be supporting these measures because Australians are poorer after two years of Labor government. Australians have rarely in our history been able to look back from one election to the next—without overstating it, without overblowing it, without trying to throw the political rhetoric out there—and say, 'We are actually poorer than we were at the last election.' Sadly, that is what will happen at the time of the next election.

We will support the proposals from the government. These include, in schedule 1 of the bill, increasing Commonwealth rent assistance; in schedule 2 of the bill, making some very minor amendments, including some flexibility amendments, to JobSeeker arrangements; and, in schedule 3 of the bill, improving access to work and providing greater flexibility for those on carer payments. It's pretty uncontroversial stuff, but it's a bandaid on the bullet wound of what's being felt by Australians throughout the country under this Labor government.

If you've got the average mortgage in Australia today, you're $35,000 worse off. After three budgets, we've seen terrible stewardship of the economy. We now have more core inflation, and the fact that we have homegrown inflation is troubling even the hard heads in the government. In the immediate aftermath of COVID, clearly the Australian economy was hit by inflation that had flowed from the supply chain issues and material shortages that were global phenomena. We wore the pain and did as every other trading nation in the world did, but what's occurring now is actually homegrown inflation. Whilst inflation is going backwards in almost every competitor country in the world, or in most economies that we would compare ourselves to, we now have inflation remaining stubbornly high here in Australia, and that means interest rates will have to be higher for longer. That's an immutable fact. It doesn't matter how much the Treasurer tries to spin this; the reason why this is relevant to the bill is that ultimately the Social Services portfolio is trying to paper over the cracks that are emerging because of the terrible mismanagement of the Australian economy by the Albanese Labor government.

The truth is that no social services budget or portfolio measure can ultimately paper over the gaping cracks occurring in the economy right now, which are hitting families extraordinarily hard. The truth is that food prices are up by more than 10 per cent and the cost of housing is up by 14 per cent. This year, from April to April, in the housing sector we've seen rents rise by nearly eight per cent. Since the government have been in power, we've seen rent increases of more than 20 per cent on average. If the average is 20 per cent, I can say right now that there are many parts of the country where rents are up by 25, 30, 35 or even 40 per cent. There's nothing that the social services minister can do, even with a modest increase to Commonwealth rent assistance, to address the issues that are before Australians at the moment.

There's nothing the social services minister can do to assist families which have an average mortgage and are paying $35,000 more than when this government came to power. That doesn't even account for those families—those in metropolitan Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and in most of our metro areas in particular—who have mortgages well above the average. These people will literally be spending tens of thousands of dollars more to service their mortgage and put a roof over the heads of their families.

We're supporting this bill, but what Australians don't want to see is the self-congratulatory patting on the back that we see every single day by this government—about how they're doing wonderful things for the Australian people. People are struggling out there and in a way I've never seen in my lifetime. Sadly, this is something that we often see with federal Labor governments. Labor are always saying, 'We just have very bad timing.' The poor, old Labor governments just have bad timing. They think that they just inherit these difficult circumstances. No, you don't inherit them after two years in government and after three budgets; you are making this problem. Your difficult circumstances are your own fault.

The lack of budget strategy and lack of strategy to put downward pressure on inflation and to reduce interest rates mean there is nothing the poor social services minister can do to address and alleviate the issues that are being faced by some of our most vulnerable Australians. Before the election, we were promised by her Prime Minister no fewer than 97 times that he would reduce power prices by $275 per household each and every year, and that was for the level it was in 2022. Power prices are now up by more than $2,000 since that time. We all thought it was pretty heroic for the Prime Minister to make those promises before the election, but, no, that's how he sold himself to the Australian electorate. Some of us wondered if there was something that he knew that we didn't know or if he had something up his sleeve that we didn't. Well, no, the truth is that the Prime Minister clearly made a decision to say whatever he needed to say to deceive the Australian public and get them to vote for him, while he knew that he would not be able to deliver thereafter. What do we see now? We see electricity prices up by 20 per cent and gas prices up by 25 per cent. Again, there is nothing the social services minister can do on her own to address the pain that is being felt by Australians.

I'll finish where I started. After two years of an Albanese Labor government, Australians are poorer than they were when the government came in. That's not open to interpretation. There wouldn't be anybody in Australia who would argue with that—apart, perhaps, from those opposite. It's not an area that you would be able to credibly debate politically, even if you tried. Australians are poorer than they were two years ago. The dollar doesn't go as far as it did two years ago. Housing costs are demonstrably higher than they were two years ago. Real wages have gone backwards under this government. On every single metric, Australians are doing it tougher than they were when the Albanese Labor government came to power just two years ago. So the Minister for Social Services and this government are not going to get a pat on the back from us for giving a tiny bit back with one hand when they have taken a massive amount away with the other hand over the past two years, from households and from Australians who are really struggling.

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

I rise to speak to the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024. This bill implements the woefully inadequate changes outlined in the budget in social services. This bill will not even touch the sides of the cost-of-living crisis being felt most acutely by people on income support payments.

JobSeeker is a poverty payment. With rents soaring and grocery prices going through the roof, people on income support are increasingly hungry and homeless. A bill that moves less than one-half of one per cent of jobseekers onto a slightly higher payment isn't a solution; it's a sick joke. It's a special kind of cruelty to force people into poverty, tell them you're doing everything you can to help them and then offer a payment increase that is so small they will barely notice it. This higher payment, which only 4,700 people will now be eligible for, still falls over $200 short of the disability support pension. Instead of taking actual leadership, the Labor government has resorted to rearranging deck chairs. We are being asked to take seriously a minute increase for a very tiny group who in any sane system would be on the disability support pension.

Rather than investing money in measures to provide people with a liveable income, Labor continues to force millions into a punitive, privatised mutual obligation system that enriches for-profit job providers and allows them to make life-and-death decisions about the poorest people in the country. It's a total sham, and it's appalling. The increase to Commonwealth rent assistance that this bill will give effect to amounts to $1.30 a day which, in the face of unrestricted rent increases, barely touches the sides of a runaway crisis.

More and more people are being forced into homelessness. My office in Gladstone is directly beneath the department of housing service centre. On most days, we have people walking into reception immediately after they've just been told by the department of housing that there's nothing that can be done for them. They come in for help because they're desperate. I want to thank my staff who deal with these desperate people every day. It is hard and draining work. The government tells them that they can't help. Charities and community organisations are overstretched. Even with income support and rent assistance, there's still nothing affordable for these people in the private market. They're young people. They're old people. They're white. They're First Nations. Many of them come in with kids. None of these people deserve a life of housing insecurity—waking up every day in the park, in a friend's garage, on a friend's couch or in their car—wondering, 'Is today the day I'll finally find a place I can call home?' The line between having a home and having no home to go to has never been thinner.

If Labor was really serious about tackling the housing crisis, it would phase out the massive tax handouts for property investors that are denying millions of renters the chance to buy a home and it would invest the savings in a mass build of public housing and coordinate a rent freeze and a cap on rent increases. We have a Prime Minister who once said JobSeeker should be increased. That's a fact. He said that people shouldn't be in a position where they can't afford to live. Well, there are millions of people in this country who can't afford to live—and it's getting worse. People are getting pushed to the brink and, instead of doing the one thing we know will help, we have a Treasurer crowing about a surplus and responsible budget management.

Here are some facts for Labor. More than three million people in Australia experience poverty. That's right now, today. Over a third of all households are experiencing food insecurity. This is hunger. This is skipping meals. This is buying less nutritious food because it's cheaper than healthier options. I want Labor to really pay attention to this. In 2019, 30 per cent of all suicides in Australia were by people receiving the disability support pension and what we used to call Newstart. When income support payments increased during the pandemic, the suicide rates of people on unemployment payments fell 37.4 per cent. If I were the Treasurer of a wealthy country like ours, this is what would keep me up at night, not whether I could manufacture a fake budget surplus so News Corp can give me a gold star. In a cost-of-living crisis, a surplus isn't an achievement. It's money left on the table. It's money that could have gone to lifting millions out of insecurity, misery and desperation. Labor's surplus is an unmitigated moral failure that doesn't even stack up economically.

One in six children in Australia experience poverty. Again, this is right now. It's today. This means kids turning up to school with an empty stomach and going to bed hungry at night. In my last decade of work as a teacher before I entered parliament it was clear that a growing number of families in the community where I worked were falling deeper and deeper into economic insecurity and poverty. I had students coming to school hungry and nodding off at their desks because they were running on empty. I had kids who couldn't get their homework done in the evenings because their parents literally couldn't afford to keep the lights on. I had senior students who were struggling to keep up with their assessments because they were working several nights a week and on weekends to supplement their family's income. I had students who were unable to engage in the curriculum because they couldn't afford a laptop or a home internet connection. We were forced time and time again to cancel more and more excursions because so many parents and carers just couldn't find the $10, $20 or $30 to cover the cost of an excursion.

For years now, experts, advocates and people with lived experience of poverty have been united in one single call: raise the rate. The government's own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, chaired by a former Labor minister, no less, has recommended for two years running that the single best method for tackling the cost-of-living crisis and alleviating poverty is to substantially raise the rate of income support. The Liberal controlled cost-of-living inquiry has heard overwhelmingly in submission after submission that the single most effective way to tackle the cost-of-living crisis is to raise the rate of income support payments. UnitingCare Australia said:

… government-administered income support rates need to be increased, to ensure recipients have the means to cover their daily expenses and overcome poverty.

Headspace said:

In order to provide adequate support for those in need, income support payments, including JobSeeker and youth allowance, need to increase above the poverty line.

Sacred Heart Mission said that the solutions to alleviating this crisis are clear and available and that:

Raising income support payments to a liveable level above the poverty line would be the single greatest factor in poverty reduction in Australia.

Homelessness Australia, the Community Housing Industry Association and National Shelter jointly said:

Any meaningful impact to alleviating housing stress for lower income households must also include a permanent increase in the level of income support beyond the current inadequate routine indexing of pensions and payments.

These are the voices that Labor continues to ignore.

The Sex Discrimination Commissioner referred to rising income support as a preventative measure, saying it will stop homicides. We've seen hundreds of prominent women and non-binary people from across the community, union, business and academic sectors and civil society call for a substantial increase to JobSeeker and youth allowance as a matter of critical economic security. The Greens believe that the current social security safety net cannot be described as "decent" nor safe. Keeping people in poverty on JobSeeker and youth allowance is a fundamental issue of safety. It's not just the Greens saying this. We have wall-to-wall support across community organisations, advocates and people who are currently living in poverty.

We need to be very clear about what the budget surplus represents. It represents a decision by Labor in the middle of a poverty crisis to refuse to spend public money—our money—on helping the people who need it the most. As Greens we are not going to stand in the way of the tiny increases being put forward in this bill, but we want to be absolutely clear that this is not enough. For this season, I foreshadow that we will be putting forward an amendment to lift the base rate of JobSeeker and other income support payments to $88 a day, above the poverty line. If Labor decides to vote against this, then it will be clear for everyone to see that it is their decision and their choice to prioritise a surplus over the safety and health of our community. It will be their choice of poverty rather than action. Let's be clear that poverty is a political choice.

We've got a government that is willing to give tax breaks to the wealthy, to give tax breaks to property speculators and developers, to pay billions for submarines that we will never see and to give subsidies to fossil fuel corporations, yet they can't bring themselves to raise the rate of income support above the poverty line. People living on income support payments deserve to live a life of dignity, to put food on the table and to afford to put a roof over their head. No-one deserves poverty. In a wealthy country like ours, it is pure madness that Labor—I repeat that—that Labor are keeping people trapped on payments that don't cover their basic needs. I'll say it again: poverty is a political choice. The Greens have long fought for a strong social safety net and a liveable wage that would raise all Centrelink payments above the Henderson poverty line. We will continue that fight alongside the numerous organisations, advocates and people on income support, who, to this government's shame, are still having to campaign for no-one to be left behind.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024, and I'd like to acknowledge and endorse the words of my colleague Senator Allman-Payne. In doing this, I also acknowledge the work of former Greens senator Janet Rice, who was an extraordinary champion of raising the rate, and the work of another former Greens senator, Rachel Siewert, who I don't think spent a moment in this place without trying to lift people out of poverty. I acknowledge the work of those three extraordinary, powerful women from the Greens team.

This bill makes the most incredibly tiny changes that were outlined by the Albanese Labor government in the 2024-25 budget, a budget that put billions aside for nuclear powered submarines and billions more aside for a bunch of weapons systems like frigates, attack helicopters and missiles. It put billions and billions aside for war, almost all of which goes to offshore international and multinational arms dealers, and then gives people who can't pay the rent, who are struggling on Commonwealth rent assistance, $1.30 a day. I think what was most offensive about that was that the Labor Party pretended that that was meaningful.

Because these people are living in such obscene poverty because of decisions by the Labor Party and the coalition, $1.30 a day might actually be meaningful to some of them. It might mean the loaf of bread that they couldn't otherwise afford from the discount-bread rack that they're able to put in an otherwise empty shopping trolley. To that extent, it may actually be meaningful. But how can a government suggest it's meaningful when they've got a $368 billion nuclear submarine project, when they're giving tens and tens of billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies to stuff up the climate and when they refuse to tax the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of gas exports sucked up by political donors to the Labor Party, like Woodside and other international global fossil fuel companies? A government that's doing that can't pretend it's meaningful.

The bill also proposes to increase the JobSeeker payment rate for recipients who have an assessed partial capacity to work between nought and 14 hours per week. That's going to impact about 4,700 people, the government tells us. I think that's a fraction of one per cent of the people on JobSeeker. Again, they trumpeted that as though that was something meaningful. I'm sure, for those 4,700 people, it may be that tiny little bit of additional income that slightly reduces the obscene poverty they live in, but it's the same government that's giving $368 billion for nuclear submarines. It's the same government that's giving tens and tens of billions of dollars to international arms dealers for crap we don't need to kill people that we've never met. It's the same government, and they pretend it's meaningful.

The other change is a very small change to the carer's payment that means recipients can work for up to 100 hours over a four-week period, rather than 25 hours per week, and still keep their payments. That is letting people actually, in part, work their way out of obscene poverty. It's a rule that has had to reverse more than a decade of cruelty towards carers because of a decision of a former Labor government to toughen the test and make it harder for carers, which has been overturned now by this government. That's hardly a handout; it's just letting people work some of their way out of the worst poverty. That's what that does.

We're not going to oppose any of those changes, but what we're going to highlight is just how appallingly inadequate this is. These changes won't make a dent in poverty. They won't address the cost-of-living crisis; they don't even pretend to. In fact, in many ways the inflation that we've seen since these things were announced has eaten up the rental assistance. The increase in rents since these things were announced has eaten up the increase in rental assistance.

The key point that this all comes back to is what Labor has refused to do. At the centre of this Commonwealth scheme is a basic payment for those people who can't work or can't find work. It is a base rate that is guaranteed to keep people in grinding poverty. Labor could have lifted the base rate of income support to above the Henderson poverty line. They could have done that, but instead they chose nuclear submarines, weapons of war, handouts to the fossil fuel companies and to let their big donors like Woodside get off without being taxed for the sale of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas offshore. That's what Labor chose.

When you look around the country and you see people who can't afford rent, basic groceries or to keep the power on, who get frightened about turning the heater on on a cold night in Canberra or turning the air conditioner on on a blisteringly hot day in Townsville—if they have an air conditioner—and who can't afford to go to the pharmacy to get their medicine, how can you not be offended by a government that sees all that and, in turn, does this? It's an insult to millions and millions of people who are struggling to get by.

Right now JobSeeker is a starvation payment. That's what it is. It's basically a starvation payment, and millions and millions of Australians are living on a basic starvation payment in abject poverty. A bill to move less than one per cent of those jobseekers onto a slightly higher payment is not a solution. There would be a better word for it and that would be 'cruel'. It's actually cruel. Income support is so inadequate that people are making decisions like showering once a week because they can't afford the hot water. Others are not buying essential medication for themselves because otherwise they couldn't afford it for their kids. And we know that about one in three Australian households are struggling to put the food on the table that they want to feed them and their kids. Think about that for a minute.

In a country as wealthy as Australia, where billionaires are swanning about with tax credits and tax favours from the coalition and Labor, where gas corporations like Santos paid, I think, $16,000 in tax last year on billions and billions of dollars of revenue and genuine profit and where the billionaires and the fossil fuel corporations are having the time of their life, the response of the Labor government is to let them go on having the time of their life making billions and billions of dollars from the sale of public assets. We should remember that every cubic metre of gas, every tonne of coal, every tonne of iron ore and every tonne of rare earth that's sold were all public assets until they were granted to a corporation in a mining lease. They're all public assets. So they suck out all these public assets, they get billions of dollars in profits, many of them screwing up the planet at the same time with climate change, we don't tax them and then the government, in response, does this to people living in poverty. They pretend to be a Labor government. What does it even mean to be a Labor government if that's your policy platform?

The inquiry into this had hundreds and hundreds of submissions from prominent women, cultural organisations, unions, the organisations dealing with the poverty that Labor lets happen, food banks and community groups. To a person, except for the business groups, they said the same thing. Do you know what groups like the Youth Affairs Council of Australia, headspace, Foodbank, the Uniting Church, the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, the Western Australia Council of Social Service, the Tenants Union of Tasmania, the Medical Students Association, community interest groups, Wesley Mission, the Sacred Heart Mission, First Peoples Disability Network, Homelessness Australia, the financial council in Victoria, the Settlement Council in Victoria, the Youth Affairs Council of Western Australia, the South Australian Council of Social Service, the NSW Council of Social Service—in fact, every council of social service in the country—and the peak bodies said to Labor? They said, 'Raise the rate.' That's what they said. They said, 'Raise the rate and lift people out of poverty.'

We can afford to raise the rate. It's about choices. An amount of $88 a day is hardly a king's ransom. It's hardly King Charles's ransom. An amount of $88 a day is just enough to live a life of basic dignity where you don't have to be anxious about turning the heater on when it's bloody cold, where you know that your kids are going to have enough to eat and where you can actually pack a school lunch and know that your kids are going to have something decent to eat at lunch. It's when you know if you need to get asthma medication for your partner you can afford it. That's what $88 a day means. It probably means you are going to have a really tiny flat somewhere on the outskirts of a city like Sydney, where I live, but at least you might have some housing security. That's what $88 a day means. That's what the Greens have been asking for, it's what millions of Australians have been asking for and that's what this bill fails to deliver. It comprehensively fails to deliver.

At the end of this debate, this bill will succeed and these changes will happen. The minority of people who are renting who are on Commonwealth rental assistance will get a bit over $1 a day. Some carers will be able to work a little bit longer. Some people on JobSeeker who have partial incapacity, about 4,700 people, will get a slight benefit. What will happen tomorrow after this bill passes? We will still have more than three million people in this country living in poverty. That's what will happen when this bill passes—more than three million will be living in poverty. That's about one in six kids in this country. It's about three-quarters of a million kids. They are in poverty today. They will be in poverty tomorrow after this bill passes. About a quarter of all single parents in this country who are trying to juggle work juggle work, kids, school and all of that, overwhelmingly women, will still be in poverty after this bill passes. The 2.3 million households—that's households, not individuals—living in severe food insecurity will still be in severe food insecurity after this bill passes. Some of the impacts of obscene poverty that we know are related to incredible housing stress—lack of food security, the deep anxiety that you wake up with every day when you are in deep poverty, suicide rates, mental ill health rates and some of the sequelae of that, like domestic violence and being unable to escape domestic violence—will still be here after this bill passes, because Labor seems to be comfortable with that—with being a country that does that. The Greens think Australia is better than this. The Greens think Australia should be a country where nobody lives in poverty, where kids can go to school and have lunch, where people can afford to buy the food that they need and where they have a house that is secure. That's what the bill doesn't deliver.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to make a contribution on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024. I echo the comments of my colleagues Senator Allman-Payne and Senator Shoebridge that this absolutely barely touches the sides when we talk about more support in the safety net. I also want to echo the acknowledgement of the amazing work of former Greens senators Janet Rice and Rachel Siewert, the baton they passed on to Senator Allman-Payne in the community services portfolio in our party, and the work that they did tirelessly—and I know Rachel continues to do that work in Perth—on raising the rate of income support to $88 a day.

Obviously, we on this side of the chamber will never stand in the way of a bill that delivers an increase in support for some people, but at the end of the day I want to reinforce from a Greens perspective that it is woefully inadequate to accept that $1.30 a day is providing more support. That's absolute rubbish, because the people that need that $1.30 a day need much more than that, and we've been campaigning for much more than that. They will barely even notice that $1.30 a day as a difference.

Only an increase in the base rate of income support will deal with Australia's poverty crisis, which is crippling the nation. People want to refer to it as a cost-of-living crisis. Well, it is, but it's also about poverty. It is the gap between the rich and the poor in this country, and it is widening. The people who need support from the lawmakers in this country—in this chamber and the other place—are going under, and they're doing it rapidly. They're not just doing it tough. As Senator Allman Payne already outlined, these are people who are barely surviving, in some of the most horrible, tragic situations—and not just them but their families. We have seen an increase in women sleeping in their cars with their children and in older women who have been subjected to poverty. As my colleagues have already said, JobSeeker is a starvation payment in this country. Millions of people in Australia are living in poverty and continue to live in poverty, and it's simply cruel. That is the only word that I can find to describe what is happening. When this government, which tells people, 'We're not going to leave people behind,' gives people a measly $1.30 a day, it's ridiculous and it is cruel.

As we know, the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on the shoulders of First Nations people in this country. Most of the indicators of poverty and related disadvantage show First Nations people are between two and three times worse off than non-Indigenous people in this country. For a population of less than half a million, it's pretty sad that we are two or three times as likely to be poor in our own country. That means that 30 per cent of Indigenous households across this country are in income poverty, which basically translates to about 120,000 Indigenous people who are living below the poverty line. They're not on it. They're not above it. They're underneath it. In this place we absolutely dismally fail to protect all Australians from poverty, particularly our most vulnerable people. We fail to help them out of the misery that unfortunately was created as part of history. In this place earlier today I sat and listened to people talk about how important it is to pay homage and to listen to history. Well, for us, there is a lot of history that has left us through colonisation which has now deeply entrenched our economic disadvantage in our own country.

I want to share this quote from a previous parliamentary inquiry into poverty. It says:

Not only is Indigenous poverty deeply entrenched, the causes are complex. … despite government policies directed toward achieving economic equality for Indigenous Australians, there has been little improvement to their relative socioeconomic status, according to standard social indicators.

It's the reason that we have what we call Closing the Gap in this country. But the harsh reality—and yesterday I introduced a bill on truth-telling into this place—is that our land was taken from us and our economic base was taken away. The legacy that we inherited as part of poverty remains with us today. In some cases and in some parts of the country, it is dismal and has actually accelerated. If this country has decided that it wants to close the gap, we cannot leave people in the kind of poverty that is destroying communities and exacerbating some of the social problems.

You come in here and talk about the social problems that are happening in black communities across the country—in fact, you love to have a bit of political ping-pong about it—but you're not willing to admit that Indigenous poverty is so deeply entrenched and persistent in our communities. No-one wants to work on that. It's in the too-hard basket. This also implies that improving the economic and social status of Indigenous people would actually require you, through bipartisan agreement, to have a long-term plan that you'll stick to and that you can all decide on. We need long-term government intervention that has innovative social models to ensure there's a higher degree of what we call grassroots engagement that is community controlled but not in the sense of where we are now. It's about making sure that we are truly involved in the development and implementation of the programs that are on the ground, because you're not listening. We're speaking into that void all of the time. We speak to a new government when there's a new government about the same issues we spoke to the last government about. That is why Indigenous communities, when we talk about the issue of poverty and its connection to social problems, are not willing to listen to that.

There's another quote I want to share from the same inquiry:

A future challenge for governments will involve implementing approaches that recognises the heterogeneity of Indigenous life influenced by the decisions made by Indigenous people in terms of how and where they want to live. These factors in turn affect how rapidly any progress might be made in improving the economic outlook for Indigenous people. The multifaceted and complex nature of Indigenous poverty suggests that approaches that merely mirror those for mainstream society, or advocate immediate outcomes, may risk failure.

That is the history of this nation, because, in this place, we still have governments that think it's great that, when it comes to income support—the majority of First Nations people, not all of us, are on income support, whether it be DSP, JobSeeker or youth allowance because we are not an ageing population; we're a youth population. We are still being slammed and getting a measly extra $1.30 a day.

What we know is that tackling poverty is a fundamental issue that should be front and centre in the minds of governments and also of First Nations people and non-Indigenous people. If the nation were meeting its obligation, an obligation to ensure that we have fair and equitable social, economic and cultural living standards for all citizens, we would be progressing and, as others in this block have already talked about—I think it was Senator Shoebridge—we wouldn't have a Treasurer standing up and talking about a surplus. We'd actually be helping Australians, all Australians, including First Nations people, to actually tackle the issue of poverty, but we're not.

We must increase the base level to a level that is above the poverty line. We've heard of people struggling to survive, and that survival becomes a full-time job. It is a full-time job. They can't make it to a job interview when they can't afford a bus fare, when they can't provide an address on a form, when they become homeless. These are the constant barriers. It doesn't matter where they turn, there is a barrier. Senator Allman-Payne, in her speech, has already talked about the knockbacks for housing that people coming into her electorate office get. Just how demoralising and soul-destroying that must be for people is beyond me. This government is not listening. The federal government plays such a pivotal role in this. In my home state of Western Australia I know firsthand that the frontline services are bearing the brunt of the emergency relief needs of our communities. In fact, many of our Greens offices, who are being sought out for emergency relief, are also finding themselves in that situation, and my office is doing that as well.

I just want to mention briefly the amazing comments that Senator Allman-Payne made in her speech. People who are watching out there may not have heard Senator Allman-Payne's personal account of working with the folks in her electorate and in Gladstone, where her office is, and also with the students whom she worked with as a teacher, but it was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking to sit next to her in the chamber and see how emotional she was and it has been heartbreaking to see how much it has distressed people who are dealing with and working alongside our folks in communities. Penny, thank you for sharing the reality of this situation with this chamber today. Over in this block we're familiar with this, and I echo some of those same sentiments.

As a mother and as someone who grew up in poverty—I've worked two or more jobs and I've hustled my arse off to make sure that my kids didn't get into intergenerational poverty—the thing that burned in my brain the whole time Penny was talking about what was happening was that one in six children in this country is still living in poverty. We can never claim to be the lucky country that we are, because, if we do, we are seriously kidding ourselves. We are not the lucky country when one in six of our children is still living in poverty in Australia. I know there are many people across this chamber who have their own children and grandchildren. Think about that when you are in power in this place and you make government policy. What are you going to do to leave a legacy behind? It doesn't matter whether we're talking about rent, energy prices or prices at the till care of the supermarkets, this increase will be barely felt by those people, and it certainly isn't helping to shift the dial for that one in six children.

Below a certain income level, poverty breeds more poverty in a cycle which keeps people down. Income support in this country is below that certain level—and the Greens will keep fighting to make sure that we raise all income support payments in this country to the rate of the Henderson poverty line. If you don't know that, get out of your ivory tower and go and talk to the people sitting on the ground outside your offices and in the parks. Stop looking away from them. They want to tell you of the distress they're in because of poverty. Poverty is a political choice. In this place we should know better in order that we do better. It is incumbent upon us to look at this issue and stop looking away. An extra $1.30 is not enough. It is not enough. It's not going to hit the sides. It's barely going to make a difference. We can come together to do better.

Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This month is Disability Pride Month, and so I want to go straight to what the Social Services Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024 means for disabled people across the country.

First of all, we see in this bill a complete failure to increase the disability support pension above the poverty line, leaving so many disabled people trapped in vicious cycles of poverty, fear and pain. So many of us have said so clearly that there is an urgent need to increase the disability support pension because it is damn expensive to be a disabled person. The additional costs are huge. The barriers are massive. In Australia, we have one of the highest disability unemployment rates. In fact, 50 per cent of us are unemployed or underemployed. So, if we have to then fall back on a disability support pension that's below the poverty line, that places us in extraordinarily stressful and unnecessarily difficult situations.

This bill also fails to remove the discriminatory income partner test that traps disabled people in abusive relationships and prevents us getting married. Let's just let that sink in. The disability support pension and the policies which this bill fails to change mean that, in 2024, a disabled person is not only prevented from getting married—because, if they get married, they will then be placed in a dynamic of financial dependency—but also deeply disincentivised from partnering up at all because, if they partner up at all, they lose access to the DSP or the DSP is substantially reduced. That is absolutely unacceptable. It is one of the key reasons why disabled people are so often the subject of family and domestic violence at wildly higher rates than what we see in the broader community. It is time for marriage equality for disabled people in Australia. These are discriminatory policies that are unacceptable. They are ableist. They must end. This bill was an opportunity to end them, which the government has failed to seize.

The bill also provides a tiny increase to rental assistance. For some people it's $1.30 a day, as has been mentioned in the course of this debate. Let's be really clear: the entire Australian community is struggling with the housing crisis right now, but if you are a disabled person that struggle is so much more difficult. In my home state of WA, the City of Perth has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the world, meaning that anybody there trying to get a place to live is faced with an extraordinary challenge. If you are a disabled person on the DSP, can you guess how many rental places there are in Perth that would be affordable for you? Zero. In response to that, the Labor government said, 'Well, here's $1.30 a day.' It's just an insult. If you are a carer in Australia, performing those vital and often under-recognised roles in our community, when it comes to the carer payment, there is nowhere near the increase that is needed to support carers in this cost-of-living crisis.

We have a bill debated in Disability Pride Month that presented the opportunity for the government to address some of the key discriminatory policies—the key ableist policies that exist within our social security system. This bill was an opportunity to end the discrimination faced by disabled people in relationships—the policies which trap us in financial dependency and open us up to abuse. This bill was an opportunity to bring in marriage equality for disabled people in 2024, and the government has failed to take it. This bill was an opportunity to increase the carer payment to the levels needed to support carers during this cost-of-living crisis, and the government has failed to take it. This bill was an opportunity to increase the disability support pension to a level that would mean that disabled people were able to live free of poverty, and the government failed to take it.

This bill was an opportunity to ensure that disabled people might actually be able to afford somewhere to live—that there might be one property that they might be able to rent. Maybe we could do the 100 per cent increase in metropolitan Perth. Maybe we could leap from zero rental properties in Perth that are affordable for somebody on the DSP up to one? 'No,' says the government, 'we shan't address that in this bill.' They say that in Disability Pride Month, and you wonder why so many disabled people look at this government and feel anger, frustration and betrayal. To have the power to end these issues in your hands and do nothing is a disgrace. To create a dynamic where disabled women, disabled men and members of the queer community are unable to enjoy getting married because to do so would mean that they would be financially trapped with that partner—to have the opportunity to do something about that and simply not act is disgraceful.

I commend Senator Allman-Payne for her work in relation to this bill and her tireless advocacy for those members of our Australian community who are so deeply struggling during this cost-of-living crisis, particularly those members of our community who struggle with financial insecurity while also doing the work of educating the kids of Australian communities. There are so many teachers right now, as Penny has so often shared with me, who go to work, burn themselves into the ground while trying to do right by the kids in their classrooms, come home, look at the balance sheet for the month, look at the bills they've got to pay and are struggling to make the sums add up. That is not okay in Australia right now.

I also make the observation that, in terms of the framing of this bill and the framing of the social services system in Australia, there is a need for a fundamental transformation in the way that politics engages with the social security system. Poverty is not the result of moral failing. Having to go into debt and having to ask your friends for help are not things which people are subjected to because there is something inherently wrong with them. Poverty is a political choice.

The cost of food and housing in this country is a disgrace. The fact that government after government has allowed the situation to get this bad is a disgrace. People are struggling to eat. That is not okay. That demands the most urgent response. We do not see that in this bill. What we see is fiddling around the edges—a dollar here, a dollar there—but no actual engagement with the structural changes needed, let alone the increases needed to mean that people who rely on supports will be able to live free of the fear of where the next meal will come from. No mother, father or family member in this country should have to ask themselves that question.

Until we reach that goal, until we reach that place, our work here is not done. We must be driven by a deep sense of urgency. Every night that somebody goes to sleep hungry and every family that is put under strain because they don't know how they'll pay the power bill or the rent—that is on this place. The Liberal Party and the Labor Party could join the Greens in doing something about that. The power is here to end that experience for people. All that is required is the political will. The Greens are here within this space ready with that political will. Not only is poverty a political choice but the continuation of poverty is a political choice. Any one of you in this place can choose, at any moment, to join with us to end it.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024. I'd like to endorse the comments that have been made by my colleagues and, in particular, that very moving contribution from Senator Steele-John just now.

I wish that we had an actual safety net. It's a bit of a misnomer, really, that this bill is even entitled 'more support in the safety net' because there are more holes in that net than there is net. It doesn't have to be that way, and we could be making a different decision today. We could be choosing to end poverty in what is a very wealthy nation, by comparison globally. That's the sort of government that I thought people voted in, and I think that's the sort of government that people want. So why are we not having that debate today? Why are we once again seeing the bare minimum of an improvement from this government? They talked a really big game, and people signed up for that.

Once again, it's an inadequate response to the scale of the problem. This is becoming like a broken record. We see it with disability funding; we see it with funding for frontline services for domestic, family and sexual violence; and we see with child care. There's not enough being done to address the need in the community. Why? Who said it was okay for a government to let down its citizens? Nobody voted for that.

People can't believe that there's one in six children living in poverty in this country. I can't believe that, and I can't believe that any government, no matter what colour they are, might let that stand and might instead choose to fund property investors with $165 billion over 10 years in capital gains and negative gearing perks—perks for people who don't need the help—to accumulate more and more homes, as if a house was an investment rather than a human right. That's the decision this government has taken, along with $11 billion a year for big coal and gas companies for accelerated depreciation and cheap diesel—tax write-offs for big coal and gas on the public purse. Money is found for big coal and gas, but there's not enough money being found for poverty. Then there are the nuclear submarines. Tens of billions of dollars is being found for weapons of war that we think make everybody less safe, and yet the government can't find the money to increase JobSeeker to above the poverty line.

I'm absolutely astonished that this is the situation we're in, and I'm really deeply disappointed that this government can't find the money to do what's right to help people, yet they're finding the money for those other things that aren't helping anybody, that are making us less safe, that are cooking the planet and that are making the housing crisis worse. What a deeply disappointing insight into the priorities of this government.

The bill increases the maximum rates of Commonwealth rent assistance by 10 per cent—that's $1.30 a day. Every renter I speak to tells me that their rent has gone up by more than the average of $40 a week, and that is the national average that it's gone up. In some places, in my home town, it's far worse. Our national average increase is 8½ per cent. Depending on what suburb of Meanjin—or Brisbane, as it's also known—you're in you might be up for 12 per cent of a rent increase. Yet this government is giving you $1.30 a day. I'm sorry, but that is just an insult. I'm sure it will be welcome because, yes, it will help, but it won't touch the sides of the rental increase that people are facing. It just shows an absolute lack of understanding of the scale of the problem. How can you see those figures, know what the need is, and still choose to not meet that need? I genuinely don't understand.

It's the same thing with the increase in the payment rates for recipients who've got an assessed partial capacity to work up to 14 hours a week. You're helping folk there, but you're helping 0.5 per cent of people on JobSeeker. What about the other 99.5 per cent who deserve to live above the poverty line in what is a very wealthy nation? Likewise, the change to the carer payment that evens out the work you can do. That's great, but you're not increasing the hours that people can work. It's fine to even that out over a month rather than looking at it on a weekly basis, but why not actually increase that amount so that where people are able to work they're not penalised for doing so.

This is a woefully inadequate bill from the government and these changes will not make a dent in the poverty crisis or the cost-of-living crisis we're in. What should be done, and what my colleague Senator Allman-Payne will be moving to do, is to increase the base rate of JobSeeker to above the poverty line. We'll vote on that, and I'm just flagging that my heart will likely be broken by where people will vote on that, but I urge people to really reconsider their party's position and to vote to support lifting JobSeeker payments to above the poverty line.

Why is it only the Greens that are asking for that? We've actually reached a level of insanity and cognitive dissonance in this building when people don't think it's the right thing to do to vote to support the base rate of JobSeeker to above the poverty line. Currently it's at starvation payment levels. Millions of Australians are living in abject poverty, and we have a bill to move less than a per cent—half a per cent, as I mentioned before—onto a slightly higher payment is not a solution; it's actually a cruel insult.

We know income support is so inadequate that people can't cover their basic needs. We know that's compounded by a housing crisis. The cost of living is already impacting everybody in this nation and the cost of groceries is astronomical. We have people who can only shower once a week because they can't afford the hot water bill—and it's a really cold winter because the climate is going crazy because this government keeps giving public money to coal and gas to make the climate crisis worse.

As well as people who can only afford a hot shower once a week, there are others who can't buy essential medication. I've just been at a breast cancer event, and want to give a shout out to Rachelle from So Brave which is supporting young women who suffer from metastatic breast cancer. The medical bods say, 'You're too young to get cancer,' but legions of young women are. I heard from a widower that he and his family couldn't afford the treatment; sadly, his wife is not with us anymore, and they couldn't afford the treatment to help her. I reflected on this bill. So many people are facing that choice. So many people are having to go without medication and medical support that is essential for their wellbeing because this payment is not enough and because this government is not doing enough to fix it.

One-third of Australian households are struggling to put food on the table, and I welcome the recent change of heart by the opposition to get onboard with my colleague Senator McKim's proposal to break up the supermarkets and try to bring the cost of food down in that regard. I hope the government decides to join. Maybe the whole parliament could work together to actually address the cost-of-living crisis and the cost of groceries. It would be a wonderful outcome for the Australian community if the parliament were to actually address the need in the community, rather than offering the lip-service that people seem to get.

I want to also highlight the fact that increasing JobSeeker is a women's safety measure. We know that so many women and their children—sometimes with their pets—are choosing between homelessness and staying in violence. The lack of financial security and the lack of an adequate JobSeeker support payment is further condemning people who are trying to escape from violence, who are already in a very difficult situation with nowhere to go because there's a housing crisis. Frontline family, domestic and sexual violence services are underfunded, and the shelters are full. But those people are being forced to choose between homelessness and violence, and they don't have the financial security they need because they are not getting JobSeeker support that is above the poverty line.

This government says it wants to end family violence within a generation. I applaud that noble aspiration, vague and inadequately funded though it may be. If you really want to end violence against women and their children within a generation, raising JobSeeker is crucial. Women need the ability to escape violence and have a liveable wage and a liveable support while they're unable to be in other paid work, because they're in a situation of life or death and they're doing what's necessary to protect themselves and their families. So JobSeeker is a gendered issue and an issue of women's safety.

I commend the fact that my colleague will be moving to lift the rate of JobSeeker to above the poverty line. If this government and the opposition were serious about acting on the cost of living, this bill would have included the No. 1 recommendation from academics, from experts, from peak bodies, from leading economists, from emergency providers and from Labor's very own hand-picked economic advisory committee. Remember them? You didn't really listen to what they suggested, which was to raise JobSeeker and youth allowance above the poverty line.

We will keep fighting for that strong safety net—and for it to be an actual safety net, not riddled with holes—and we will keep fighting for a liveable wage that would raise all Centrelink payments above the Henderson poverty line, but we don't want to be fighting for that on our own. We want the parliament to unite to actually fix the entrenched and growing levels of poverty in this country that these policy settings are delivering. We know that poverty is a political choice. We know that as a parliament we could be choosing to end it—not just reduce it, but end it. Why is that choice not being made by a majority of people in this chamber and in the other place? I'd love an answer to that; I genuinely don't understand why it's not being made. No-one deserves to live in poverty. In a wealthy country like ours, it is sheer madness that you're keeping people trapped on payments that don't cover their basic needs.

I would like to share with the chamber some of the powerful and persuasive comments that have been made by various support organisations in the sector. The Antipoverty Centre, which does outstanding work, says:

Welfare recipients are tired of being told the pennies we are thrown will somehow hold back the crushing weight of housing and other living cost increases we are dealing with.

ACOSS, another outstanding organisation, whose advocacy has been relentless on this issue, says:

The extension of the higher rate of JobSeeker for people who cannot work more than 0 to 14 hours will support 4,700 people—not even half a percent of the more than one million people receiving JobSeeker and related payments unable to afford food.

And:

Based on median rents, private renters receiving JobSeeker or Youth Allowance will still be in deep housing stress because their base rate of payment is so low. Even with the increase, they will be paying half of their income in rent alone.

Anglicare says:

Boosting rent assistance is only a band-aid solution that won't have the same impact. Just two weeks ago, our Rental Affordability Snapshot found that a person on JobSeeker could only afford three rentals out of 45,000 listings. That was with the highest rate of rent assistance. Tonight's increase—

They're talking about this bill—

adds just three additional rentals across the entire country.

So, six affordable rentals in the country for someone on JobSeeker. How is that statistic not landing? How is this government—and the opposition, who I am expecting will oppose our amendment to increase JobSeeker to above the poverty line—making that active decision to permit only six affordable rentals in the whole nation for someone on JobSeeker? Raise the rate, people!

What is it going to take for you to understand that the scale of the problem is beyond imagining, beyond acceptable, and that you've got the ability to fix it and you're still choosing not to? It's very challenging. It's actually very upsetting. I wish you were better, and I think the country wants you to be better, too. More than three million people in Australia are currently experiencing poverty—one in six children; that's over 760,000 children living in poverty. The current rate is below all poverty lines used in Australia, not just the Henderson one that I referred to earlier. We know that a quarter of single parents are living in poverty. We know that most of those are women and we know that many of them have escaped family and domestic violence, and some of them didn't escape with their lives. Thirty-six per cent of households have experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months. That's a 10 per cent increase on the year before.

So this problem is getting worse, and the increase in JobSeeker that you're proposing today is woefully inadequate. We know that more than 2.3 million households are severely food insecure. We know all of this. So please vote for our amendment to increase JobSeeker and start to turn some of those statistics around. The country really needs it.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As colleagues know, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (More Support in the Safety Net) Bill 2024 proposes to increase the maximum rates of Commonwealth Rent Assistance by 10 per cent, which equates to about $1.30 a day for some renters. Wherever you look in Australia at the moment, people are getting smashed by what's become known as a cost-of-living crisis but is in fact a cost-of-existence crisis. And this is existential for many Australians, whether it's getting price gouged at the supermarket checkouts, whether it's paying your power bills, whether it's paying school levies or whether it's paying transport costs. Everywhere you look, prices are going through the roof.

Unfortunately for many people, their wages or their income support payments are not keeping pace. That means that many people are having to make really difficult and close-to-impossible choices about how to spend their money. Do they pay the power bill or do they put food on the table for their children? In the inquiry into supermarket pricing, which the Greens established and led, we heard horrendous evidence. We heard from a single mum down in Tasmania about how she would skip meals in order to feed her kids. This is the lived reality for many people in our country at the moment.

What we get from Labor is not a response that is commensurate with the scale of the challenge facing millions of Australians. We get a response that is designed to address the political difficulty that Labor finds itself in. So, rather than actually responding in a way that meaningfully helps Australians who are getting smashed by a cost-of-living crisis, we get a response that is designed to help Labor out of a political problem. That's not good enough. As Senator Waters said, we want Labor to be better than this. We want the government to be better than this, and millions of Australians want the government to be better than this. We want them to be better than this marginal assistance they're giving to an extremely small number of people rather than having significant and structural assistance that they could offer to large numbers of people.

What would that look like? Perhaps Labor could start by putting dental health and mental health into Medicare. That would actually be something meaningful that they could do to help people who are getting smashed by a cost-of-living crisis. The other thing they could do is raise income support. The poverty that so many Australians are living in and are being condemned to is because of political choices that establishment parties in this place make every day, every week, every month, every year, every parliament and every electoral cycle. These are choices that the political establishment makes to condemn people to poverty.

It's a woefully inadequate response from a Labor Party that was formed to look after people doing it tough and to look after working people. The inadequacy of Labor's response is one of the reasons that Senator Allman-Payne, on behalf of the Australian Greens, is seeking to amend this legislation to raise the rate of income support to $88 a day, which would bring it above the poverty line. I'll confidently predict what's going to happen here, and that is that the Australian Greens amendment will be voted down. It will be voted down not just by the Labor Party but by the Liberal Party as well—the political establishment again. The political duopoly in this place, the Coles and Woolworths of Australian politics, will again get together and make a deliberate, informed decision to condemn hundreds of thousands of Australians to living in poverty. That's what's going to happen here today, tomorrow or whenever this comes up for a vote.

Labor is going to do this despite the fact that they're very happy to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade on a tax cut overwhelmingly for the top end. This is despite the fact that they're prepared to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building nuclear submarines that will make Australia a less safe place. They have money for war machines. They have money for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the top end. They claim they don't have money to lift people out of poverty. Actually, the reality is they do have money to lift people out of poverty. They're just choosing not to spend it.

You can't eat a budget surplus, and yet we get mutual back-slapping from Labor folks in here and in the House of Representatives. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was slapping himself on the back when he announced the other day that the budget surplus is actually going to be bigger than what Labor predicted in the budget, as if that was a good thing while people are starving in this country, while people are being condemned to live in poverty and while the rate of homelessness is rising in Australia. You can't eat a budget surplus. That budget surplus is clear evidence that the poverty that so many Australians are living in is a political choice. It's a political choice made by the establishment parties.

The Liberal and National parties are going to vote against the Australian Greens amendment that would lift large numbers of Australians out of poverty because they're hoping they'll be in government at some stage soon and they're going to want to pat themselves on the back for a budget surplus, if they can deliver one, which I have to say historically they haven't been that good at. At the moment JobSeeker, one of the income support payments we provide in Australia, is a starvation payment. We've got millions of Australians living in poverty. We've got people who can't find a job—not through any fault of their own, I might add, but because the system is designed to keep a number of people out of work, because that's what helps keep wages down. The reason that the neoliberal parties, the establishment parties, in this place have designed a system to keep wages down and to use an unemployment rate in order to do that is that that's what corporate Australia asks them to do. Why does corporate Australia ask them to do that? It's because it protects the profits of the big corporations.

Colleagues, there has never been a time in Australia's post-colonial history when the share of this country's economy going to profits has been so big and the share of this country's economy that goes to wages—that is, to people—is so small. Think about what that means. This is a mass transfer of wealth from the bottom end to the top end. Everywhere you look along the wealth spectrum, the people who are doing it toughest are being hit, and the people at the top, the wealthiest Australians, are making out like bandits. Then you get bipartisan support from the establishment parties for tax cuts that overwhelmingly favour the top end. Colleagues, if you can't hear the social contract creaking under your feet, you are simply not paying attention. It used to be that we could say to young people in this country: 'If you study hard and if you work hard, you can lead a good life. You can buy a house. You can have the things you need to lead a dignified life.' That part of the social contract no longer applies.

The big class divide in this country is now whether or not you own property. Whether you or your parents own property is now the prime determinant in somebody's economic future. It's all very well for those of us who sit in this place. Most of us own property. If we don't, most of our parents own property, because we're the privileged ones in here. It's all very well for us to ignore the terrible, difficult circumstances that are facing young people at the moment. Most of them don't own property and are renters watching their rents go through the roof. Or, if they do own property, they've bought it recently, and they're watching interest rates go through the roof while they're being price gouged at the supermarket checkouts and transport costs are going up. They have to find money to pay for their kids to go to state schools when public education should be free. It's not an easy time for young folks. They have to watch their climate breaking down around them because neither of the establishment parties in this place can actually divorce themselves from the interests of fossil fuel corporations and logging corporations. They have to watch ecosystems that actually support all life on this planet, including human life, crumble away under them, and in comes Labor with legislation like this that's marginal at best.

We've got people in this country who don't shower every day because they can't afford to pay for hot water. We've got people who are not going to a dentist because they simply can't afford it, and their teeth are rotting out, when dental should be covered under Medicare—because, the last time I had a look, the inside of your mouth was part of your body. But, because of political choices made in the past by establishment parties, dental visits are not covered by Medicare. People can't afford dental care. They can't afford to shower every day. They're eating less healthy food than they used to because they're getting price gouged by Coles and Woolworths at the supermarket checkout. A third of Australian households are struggling to put food on the table. People can't afford to go to a GP; they can't afford essential medication. What do we get from Labor? Next to nothing. Some renters are going to get $1.10 a day out of this legislation, when average rents are going up by about 40 bucks a week. The housing system in this country is broken. It's fine if you own property, as long as you didn't buy it recently. If you've had property for 10 or 20 years, or if your parents have got property—especially if you've managed to pay down a fair bit of any debt associated with that property—things are looking okay for you. What about the people who haven't been able to buy into property? What about the people who are still renting and who are aspirational property owners? The future is not looking so bright for them.

If the Labor Party were serious about acting on the cost of living, this bill would include the No. 1 recommendation from academics, peak bodies, leading economists, experts, emergency support providers and Labor's own hand-picked economic advisory committee. That No. 1 recommendation is raising JobSeeker and the youth allowance above the poverty line. That's what we should be doing. We need a strong social safety net and a livable wage, and we need to raise Centrelink payments above the Henderson poverty line.

We are a wealthy country, colleagues, and we could make a political choice to ensure that no-one lives in poverty in this country. Instead, the choices we make keep large numbers of Australians trapped in poverty and trapped on income support payments that don't even come close to meeting their basic needs. So it's time for the establishment parties to do the right thing. This legislation nowhere near approaches the ballpark of doing the right thing. Labor needs to do better. Millions of Australians want you to do better, and the Greens are demanding that you do better.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've genuinely lost count of how many times my colleagues and I have had to stand up in this chamber—certainly over the 12 years that I've been here, and Senator Waters has been here longer than me and would probably say the same thing—and fight for the disadvantaged in this country who are living below the poverty line. Most of that 12 years has been under the Liberal-National party government.

It's so disappointing to see, in their first term of government, the Labor Party not acting on the evidence that's been so clearly provided that this government needs to do better to look after the most disadvantaged in this country.

You can verbal me as much as you like, Senator Brown, but, like you, I've been here for a long time, and this issue never gets solved. We never come together as a parliament to look after our most vulnerable. I remember the 'age of entitlement': Joe Hockey's first budget—the lifters and leaners—and the presumption that somehow it's your fault if you're doing it tough in this country. I remember, in the lead-up to the 2013 election, standing with my colleagues outside Centrelink offices most days with single parents who'd had their entitlements cut—that was under a Labor government—and the realisation that no two people are the same. I remember hearing the heartbreaking stories from all sorts of individuals. Many of them had lost their way because of circumstances completely out of their control: the death of a partner or the onset of mental illness—a whole range of things. It was hard not to feel deeply compassionate for these people and to wonder why the government doesn't do more. Yet, here we are, 12 years later, still having the same debate.

I want to compliment my colleague Senator Allman-Payne for the work that she's done on this bill. I also want to put on record the legacy work that former senators Janet Rice and Rachel Siewert did. In fact, before I came in here to speak, my staff put up an earlier video of Senator Siewert. Some of you may well remember Senator Siewert's passion for this issue and how often she went to bat for those doing it tough. Senator Siewert did so much work in the committee system on many issues, particularly raising the rate. Rachel Siewert went straight from being a senator to continuing to work with the most disadvantaged in our communities. I hope she's watching today. I hope you're not too frustrated, Rachel. The fight goes on.

I want to say a few words on the substance of this bill. The first issue is partial capacity change. A slightly higher payment is available for JobSeekers with an assessed partial capacity of work under 15 hours per week, indicating a very low or limited capacity. This will affect a tiny portion, at 4,700 recipients, out of a total of 814,765 jobseekers. The higher rate is $833.20, which is still $283.10 under the disability support pension. This is a cohort that should be receiving the disability support pension over time. The decisions of the government to erode the disability support pension over time have put this cohort on JobSeeker in the first place. Currently, 43 per cent of JobSeeker recipients have a partial capacity to work less than 30 hours a week.

The second part of this bill relates to Commonwealth rent assistance. This change amounts to $9.40 per week, or $1.30 per day. The Greens support the cause of advocates to raise the rate of CRA, Commonwealth rent assistance. However, this should be in conjunction with an increase of all payments, to be more effective. In June 2023, 43 per cent of all CRA recipients were still in housing stress, indicating issues with the payment.

I want to go through a couple of key stats for senators. More than three million people in Australia are currently experiencing poverty, including one in six children, or over 760,000 children, in 2019-20; the current rate of the JobSeeker payment is below all poverty lines used in Australia, and always has been since I've been in this place; 25.5 per cent or 549,000 single parents are in poverty; 36 per cent or 3.7 million households have experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months—this is a 10 per cent increase from 2022, or 383,000 more households; more than 2.3 million households are severely food insecure, defined as actively going hungry, skipping meals or going days without eating; data showing suicide rates for people on unemployment payments fell 37.4 per cent when payments increased during the pandemic; and, in 2019, 30 per cent of all suicides in Australia were people receiving the disability support pension and Newstart.

I want to say a couple of things in relation to this. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the work that my colleague Senator McKim is doing on this issue of food security in Australia through the Greens' supermarket inquiry, looking at the power of the duopoly in this country and the price gouging which is making the cost-of-living crisis worse for a lot of Australians—as well as, may I say, making life hell for a lot of farmers across this country. This is also an issue the Greens—and other senators in this place, may I add—have been campaigning on since I've been here, for the last 12 years, but still nothing has changed. Governments refuse to act on corporate profiteering at the expense of the poor in this country. We know we can do a lot better. While increasing the social safety net and looking after people are essential, there are a lot more structural things we also need to be doing.

I also note that yesterday Senator David Pocock—and I'll acknowledge him in the chamber here today—organised a forum, mostly for the blokes in this place to come along and learn more about what men can do about the scourge of violence against women in this country. One of the speakers—a clinical psychologist who has worked on this issue with men, especially younger men, for many years around the country, trying to change behaviours—said there is a very stark and high correlation between men who commit acts of violence against women and their physical and mental health and their economic situation.

What the government has to understand, when we're talking about any health issue, is that things like Newstart and the social safety net are not just an investment in helping people live, pay their bills and put food on the table; they are an investment in our community and in human beings. They are an investment in each and every person who needs assistance. If we make their life easier, we reduce the anxiety in in their life, and 'anxiety' is a very important word when it comes to a whole range of social issues we face today. If we reduce the anxiety and other mental health issues by making people more supported and giving them the ability to live above the poverty line then—while I hate to throw a neoliberal argument into the mix—it will reduce the costs of this country in the long run, across a whole range of indicators. This is an investment in people that the Greens are asking for, and we're very disappointed that, in the last two years, the government have only found it in themselves to introduce this bill, which barely helps even a fraction of the people in need, into this place.

I want to finish by talking about the messaging of this. It's very simple and it's very, very important. This bill won't even touch the sides of the cost-of-living crisis being felt most acutely by people on income support payments. Many of those people that I've talked to would like a job. They desperately don't want to be in their current predicament, and we need to do everything we can to help them get out of that. JobSeeker is a starvation payment, and millions of Australians are currently living in abject poverty. Those statistics I went through are just some of the relevant statistics, and they are black and white and stark. A bill to move less than one per cent of jobseekers onto a slightly higher payment is not a solution; it's actually cruel. Income support is so inadequate that people can't cover their most basic needs. Some are showering only once a week because they can't afford hot water, others can't buy essential medication, and a third of Australian households are struggling to put food on the table. I was doorknocking not that long ago in my home town of Launceston, and I met a lady who had no teeth. I was talking to her, and she told me that she's been waiting for over 3½ years to see a dentist. She literally has not been able to get on a public health list to see a dentist in 3½ years.

They're the kinds of reminders that we need as senators, leaders and decision-makers in this country. When you meet people who are in such a situation and so clearly disadvantaged and down on their luck in life, you ask yourself: 'What could I do to help? Why haven't I done more?' I certainly ask myself that. So $1.30 a day will do nothing for some renters, when, as Senator McKim just pointed out, average rents are climbing more than $40 a week.

Andrew McLachlan (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Whish-Wilson. We've reached the hard marker of 12.15. We will now proceed to senators' statements.