Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Banks, in the last sentences of his speech, made part of a very good point—one of the things that government does in order to build the economy in a country is build infrastructure. That is certainly true. But you also build people. You reach down for people who cannot find a way through the problems they have and who need to be lifted, and you become a government of lifters that reaches down and helps those who are most in need. Unfortunately this government that wants everybody else to be lifters is not one itself.

I remember when John Howard was first elected in 1996. For me it was a very sad day because I saw in John Howard, in the first years, a person who I thought quite cynically reached down inside people and brought out in them some of the least generous characteristics—characteristics of envy and of fear of the rest of the world and things that were different. I remember watching John Howard in those first years, from 1996 to about 2000, and thinking what a dreadful characteristic that was in a person. Towards the end of the John Howard years, though, I became more forgiving of him because I realised that he was not deliberately doing that—that was just what he saw in people; he saw fear and he saw envy and he responded to what he thought people were. This government are perhaps an extraordinary extension of this—when they see an unemployed person they do not see a person who perhaps cannot find a way through, who has perhaps lost hope or who perhaps does not have the skills needed. They may have mental health problems; they may have social inabilities to hold down relationships of all kinds. They may have issues that have prevented them finding a path to a better life. Rather than seeing someone who we need to reach down and help, those opposite see people who are deliberately rorting the system. The response is not to help but to punish. They are not a government of lifters—they are a government of punishers of people who quite often need help.

At first glance you might think the changes in the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Stronger Penalties for Serious Failures) Bill are minor, but they are incredibly significant changes. The current Social Security (Administration) Act already contains job seeker compliance provisions. If you are receiving assistance from the taxpayer because you are unemployed, there are requirements that you have to meet. If you do not meet those requirements, there are penalties for serious noncompliance which may include an eight-week nonpayment period for serious failures, which consist of either refusal of suitable work or persistent noncompliance with participation obligations. The current act provides that a nonpayment penalty may be waived if the job seeker begins to comply with the serious failure requirement. In other words, if a person who has not been applying for jobs—who has not been participating in training or has not been doing the things that the taxpayer requires of them in order for them to receive this payment—starts to meet those requirements the nonpayment period can be waived.

The purpose of that system is to allow Centrelink to identify people who are not meeting the requirements and encourage them to reply by removing the payment and then reinstating it when they begin to comply. There is no question that a person who does not comply does not receive a payment, but under the current system once they start to comply the payment is re-established. That has been working quite well. According to the second reading speech, in 2012-13 the Department of Human Services waived 68 per cent of the refusing a job cases and 73 per cent of cases of repeated noncompliance, because job seekers undertook the intensive activities that were required. In other words, 68 per cent of people who refused a job and 73 per cent of serious noncompliance cases improved activity and met the requirements to receive Newstart.

The rules as they currently stand have been working. The reason you need to give people the opportunity to improve their circumstances is that many of the people who do not meet those obligations have reasons in their life for that. I am not making excuses for these people, but often there are reasons why a person is not able to meet their obligations. For example, last year Centrelink applied 13,296 smaller daily no-show pay penalties to job seekers with known vulnerability indicators. This included 4,019 with psychiatric problems or mental illness, 2,443 with a homelessness flag on their file, 393 who had been released from prison, 286 who had experienced a recent traumatic relationship breakdown and 276 job seekers with a cognitive or neurological impairment. There were 5263 eight-week non-payment penalties incurred by unemployed people with a Centrelink vulnerability indicator, including 1483 with psychiatric problems or mental illness, 1149 with a homelessness flag, 131 released from prison, 107 who had experienced a recent traumatic relationship breakdown and 102 with a cognitive or neurological impairment. Many of the people who were failing to meet those obligations without the incentive of having their payment re-instated are people who have issues in their life or in their health that make it very difficult for them to meet the obligations.

It may surprise you, Deputy Speaker, and it certainly surprised me that I received a noncompliance notice once. I received a letter at my home telling me that I was in serious breach of my obligations to Centrelink as a job seeker and that, if I did not report to Centrelink the next day, my dole would be suspended for an eight-week period. The difficulty was that I was not on the dole; I was actually a member of parliament at the time. I obviously shared a name with someone else who had failed to meet the obligations. I received the penalty notice, I contacted Centrelink and said it was not me. I assume that the Julie Owens they were seeking continued to be non-compliant. That Julie Owens may have been one of those homeless people; this person may have been a person living in a home where the mail did not reach them for some reason; this may have been a person who was illiterate. There were all sorts of reasons why this person might not have met their obligations, but on that day she did not meet her obligations, because they sent the letter to me. If this person, this other Julie Owens, lives a life of great instability—she moves from home to home or she has no home—how easy would it be for her to fail to meet the obligations more than once? Yet the changes that the Liberal Party are making here would mean that even if that Julie Owens managed to explain that in this case it was because she did not live there, the next time it happened she would not have her payment reinstated because the changes only allow for the reinstatement of a payment once—once only.

The other thing we need to consider is that the vast majority of people who are given noncompliance penalties are under the age of 30. In fact, over 70 per cent of people who receive noncompliance notices are under the age of 30. Combine this new punitive measure with the other changes that the government is making for unemployed people under the age of 30 and you have a recipe for an absolute disaster. We have a situation where people under the age of 30 will have to wait six months before receiving Newstart or youth allowance and the moving of people from Newstart onto youth allowance when they are under the age of 24—which means a reduction in their payments. We already have a circumstance where people who find themselves out of work under the age of 30 are going to be put under the incredible pressure of having to live effectively for up to six months without any income at all. Some of those will be able to rely on their parents; many will not be able to rely on this their parents and they will find themselves without any funding at all for up to 6 months.

Add that to the cuts that this government has made to the programs that help people under 30 to get jobs. In my electorate we have Youth Connections, an extraordinary organisation which helps thousands of young people who have lost their way back into work or training. Youth Connections cannot force anybody to participate in their program; young people find their way there through referrals or through contact with Youth Connections staff out in the community. They join programs—sometimes for one year, sometimes for two years—that assist them to find their way through whatever issues that have caused them to lose their way. By that stage, they may be into drugs, or they may be hanging around with gangs, or they may be into petty crime, or they may just be people who have completely lost hope and are living a life of despair, or they may be fleeing family violence.

Youth Connections is incredibly effective. In fact of the people who participate in their program, 80 per cent are still in work or training two years after they leave the program. That is a success story, yet this is one of the many programs which support young people finding their way into work that this government has cut. When this government looks at them, they do not see people who are struggling to build a better life; they see people who are deliberately and maliciously rorting the taxpayer and having a bit of a break. That is not who these people are; that is not the people I know; and that is not what the evidence says these young people are.

The evidence says that these young people will do well if the government of the day is a lifter and reaches down to provide the assistance they need to find a path to a better life. We have also seen the axing of AUSSIP, the industry partnerships program in my electorate. It will finish up at the end of this year along with Newstart. Again, it is an incredibly successful program that builds relationships with schools in some of the most disadvantaged areas of my community and local business, so that, when young people leave school, the pathway to employment is already there. It is an incredibly effective program, particularly for small to medium businesses that can find it incredibly difficult to work their way through the job network to find low-skilled or semi-skilled workers.

The government has also abolished the employment coordinator position in Parramatta, which is an area of high youth unemployment. Narelle Nelson finished up on 30 June, and, in the last days of Narelle's work, I was able to use her services and I became aware that in two days time that service would cease. One of my very good local manufacturers came to me, almost in despair. It is an incredibly good manufacturer of a very high quality product. It uses all-Australian inputs. You name it, Australian steel—all of its components are Australian. It needed a machinist but had not been able to find one. It was starting to consider using a 457 visa. This is a company with an absolute commitment to Australian products that was in despair at being unable to find a machinist, was having regular difficulty in doing that and was considering going offshore. I phoned the employment coordinator, who told me of a company that had made 300 machinists redundant in the last few months. She told me which Job Network provider they were working with. Fortunately, the company found a person who it believed it could work with and train. That person is now gone. Again, in that circumstance, there is a young person who probably would not have had that connection with a firm, who had a job and who lost it through no fault of their own. They had been doing good work. They had been working for a company that they thought was secure. They had a full-time job. They were under the age of 30. A company retrenched 300 of them and so they found themselves with a rather long wait for unemployment benefits and with all of the programs that would help them find their way back into work cut by this government.

The government is absolutely on the wrong track. You cannot punish into finding work a person who is in despair or without hope or who has a mental illness or a cognitive disability. If, when they fail to meet the obligations, you remove their payment and refuse to reinstate it even if they re-engage you provide no incentive for such a person in that situation to do what is required of them to meet their obligations. (Time expired)

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