Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is surely no more important mission for a government than to provide opportunity. If you could distil the job of everyone of us in this chamber down to a single word, that word 'opportunity' is the task that we devote our energies to. It is a disappointment to this side of the chamber that most of the debate focuses on punishment and punitive measures, because that is not what the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Stronger Penalties for Serious Failures) Bill 2014 is about at all.

Let us look at the broader picture. We are a leading economy and our job is to maximise workforce participation in a nation that has a small population, with a relatively large capital to labour ratio. It is extremely hard to fill the high-skill jobs with our own population, but that presents us with a challenge—a lack of low-skill jobs for many of those who are entering the workforce for the first time. It is that skills mishmash that we as a wealthy economy with a high minimum wage and excellent working conditions grapple with. We are in the company of great economies around the world that are grappling with the same question: how do we make sure that everyone can have a chance of better future? Our job is not to take money from people; our job is not to pick winners. But our job as a government surely is to give every citizen opportunity. If we can do that we are doing our job well.

In the Job Network framework we rely on highly skilled, professional people who work on the task of matching need with expertise, finding opportunity and giving it to those who are best capable of filling it. In the merit based employment arrangement that we have—I cannot ask a boss to take the second-best employee, nor can I ask any job seeker to take a job for which they are not suitable—we are in a race to identify and guide people to the best possible professional path. All of this is underpinned by a debate going back centuries, which has identified that being in work is far better for one's health, far better for one's social circumstances and far better for families. We know that families without an individual engaged in real work genuinely struggle, that the odds are stacked against them. Unfortunately, when you rank countries identifying those that have the highest proportion of households without a single person working you see that Australia keeps popping up on the top. It is Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Malta. The light flashes; they hit the screen. These are the economies that continue to cultivate and support large proportions of our working population having no work at all. Families that have no-one working and creating generations of future families where nobody works. We cannot rest until this problem is sorted. We cannot rest until we have done our very best to make sure that every person in these particular households has had a crack at a job. I cannot put it much more simply them that.

We identified that of the hundreds of thousands of matches made by professionals in our RTOs and our Job Service providers every year in most cases these are bilaterally beneficial and welcomed arrangements, where both the boss and job seeker are fulfilling mutually satisfying and encouraging arrangements. In many cases they have had a tough period to find a job but once they have it they are set for life. Government's only task should be in that period of highest need. Government should not be getting involved in an arrangement between employees and employers, because that should be the domain for those to make the rules and make sure that there are productive arrangements without interference from unions or government.

Let us focus on the difficult time that is unemployment. I have had a time when I did not have a job and life looked pretty precarious. I cannot even pretend to know what it is like to be a long-term unemployed person. But I know that, short of losing your family home, short of losing a first-degree-family member, not having a job is probably one of the most precarious phases in one's life. I think that the job of government is to make sure that that period is as short as possible. The opposition makes a fair point when it says that the government should be doing all it can to make that a supported period rather than one where a person feels picked on, rather than one where someone feels that there is futile activity that is not actually leading to employment at all.

We as publicly funded officials might feel that we know what the job environment is like. But let me tell you that young people on the ground know a very different picture—a picture where it is incredibly hard to find suitable work. It does not matter what part of Australia you are in. I could cherry pick some areas where there is very, very high youth unemployment, but even in my fairly average outer metropolitan area that very much represents middle Australia it is extremely hard for young people to find a job at the right time. Next week they might well find the opportunity that sets them on a trajectory for life, but nothing can really help them in that one period where they are looking for work except the best possible and most responsive government services. That is what we are debating today.

Today we are focusing really on what we call the hard end of the spectrum, where it is proving most difficult to get people a suitable job. The system can do only so much. It can only put a prospective job seeker in front of an employer. There is nothing we can really do to make that relationship work. We cannot really ensure that both parties are acting in good faith, although I hope they do. Ultimately, all we can do is match that range of opportunities with the job seekers that are chasing them.

We want to hope that if someone goes as far as turning up for a job interview they will take it seriously. If someone does not even turn up for those meetings then there has to be a very good reason why. As a former GP, I know that often health issues undermine attendance at those meetings. That is why both sides of politics recognise that over a six-month period you should have a couple of shots at it. We give you three chances to meet your obligation to attend those meetings and seek a job. If there is suitable work identified, you get one shot to take it. If there is an utterly suitable job for you then there really are no excuses not to take it. Government should not spend its time intensively case-managing people that have given up on a perfectly suitable job.

It is worth responding to the previous speaker, the member for Parramatta, who almost exclusively devoted her 15 minutes of parliamentary time on this debate to what I would call stories of grief and inability to meet basic requirements. I say to the member of Parramatta: I am not sure you have actually gone to your local Centrelink office, as I have, sat with the workers, talked to them about case management and watched what is required of someone attending intensive case management with a job-seeking provider working for them and on their behalf. She provided a list of exceptional circumstances faced by job seekers, all of which I accept, such as recently having left prison, having an extremely traumatic family event in the time you are looking for work, having a major medical condition and—one that we all tend to forget—having major mental health issues that make it difficult to make a sustained commitment to seeking work. I concede that this is one of the greatest challenges that Centrelink and our job service providers face, but we have a disability support pension arrangement specifically for people who cannot do four hours of work a fortnight. That is what the DSP is for.

If I am going to take up parliamentary time today, I want to confine my comments to areas where I can add some benefit to the debate in this chamber—and those are the health reasons and parenting reasons why someone cannot hold down a long-term job. Before going to those issues, I want to note that we are, at the moment, working in the context of what other major economies are doing. The UK is making significant advances in this area of maximising everyone's attempt to find a job. New Zealand has brought in extraordinary reforms; information on them is available on their Beehive website. They operate in a single-government environment where they can share job-seeking payment information more easily than we can. Their extraordinary reforms mean they can pick up the people who are persistently evading opportunity, and evading work is clearly contrary to our basic expectations of a citizen.

The intellectual corollary of this debate comes from ACOSS, whose view is that government should not in engage in any form of social engineering—that is, using a welfare payment to in some way change someone's behaviour. There is a simple response to ACOSS, isn't there? The paying of welfare is in and of itself social engineering. Paying welfare is trying to obtain a different social outcome using a payment. It is utterly reasonable to strike an agreement with recipients that there are certain social norms that we expect of people in receipt of a payment. I tell those on the other side of the chamber: that is the way it is going. Get used to it, because all other OECD economies are moving that way. We having now a conversation that we could not have 20 years ago—that is, if you are in receipt of a public payment, it is not acceptable to beat up your wife; if you are destroying your tenancy, it is not acceptable to just keep taking your public payment; and, if you are not sending your kids to school, I do not see why any level of government should continue paying you welfare payments. These are basic rules that operate right around the world. It is utterly reasonable that they are enforced here, and I am glad to see that they are. They were not always enforced, but they are now.

There are still more challenges ahead. These are not policies of any one major party but, ultimately, we need to look at parenting orders that are flagrantly and persistently abused. If you are not adhering to court ordered sharing of your children with another partner, I do not see why you should then be receiving public payments unfettered. I do not see why you should then capture all of the parenting payments because you are refusing to share custody of the child with the other parent, who loses their payments. But that is how it works at the moment. It is just not right. If you thumb your nose at state authorities and are on the run with an arrest warrant out for you, I do not see why on earth you should keep getting public payments. In New Zealand when they changed this law they had people turning up to the police station saying, 'I have just had my payments stopped.' The police asked, 'Why are you here?' and they responded, 'It's an arrest warrant. I'm on the run. Can I sort it out?' Why on earth in this country do we pay people on the run to stay on the run? Why wasn't this ever picked up in six years of Labor government? They were quite happy to keep paying people who were on the run with an outstanding arrest warrant. I concede that we should give people on the run 14 days to get to Centrelink, but why should we pay those people who are on the run for months and months?

Lastly, I want to pick up the issue of not looking after vulnerable children. At some point the state has to take the fearful step into a home and say, 'If you cannot support your children in a safe environment, we have to ask you for some mutual activity in return.' That may well be ensuring that kids are immunised. That is noncontroversial and we do it already. But what about the other health care measures that I think a completely dependent child should be able to trust the state will deliver? I do not see that children's health should be compromised or that welfare should be paid without some concern to the fact that at a child at the age of five should be able to turn up at school healthy enough to cope, able to hold a pencil, knowing which side of a book to open and able to sit in the class with 20 other kids and not throw chairs through a window. Basic emotional self-regulation is something we should be picking up with our Medicare system, making sure that every child has a chance. Education is a train. If you cannot make that back carriage when you are five, it is bloody hard to get back on again. These will be challenges for future governments. They are challenges for all governments.

It is time in the context of stronger penalties for persistent evaders of what we regard as reasonable behaviour—caring for a child, preventing all forms of domestic violence, not damaging a public tenancy and not running up massive debts to a state government while having the federal government still paying you—that we looked at these areas. I am glad that we now have a government that will do that.

Most of the state entities are not recognised under the act and cannot activate a mandatory deduction from Centrelink payments. At the moment, it is optional through Centrepay. I concede that that works in a number of cases and fails in others. That is a debate for the future, but it is not very far off.

I return to persistent evaders of work. I say to these people: if there are genuine reasons, they will be picked up in compulsory conferencing. This trigger is activated the minute three activity requirements have been breached in a six-month period. Anyone on that side of the chamber who says that our highly expert Centrelink staff and their associated specialists—and I am talking about social service specialists—cannot identify when someone has a genuine illness, when someone genuinely needs to be streamed out of this kind of activity, completely underestimates the capacity of our officials to do that.

I have a slightly different concern: just how many people can Centrelink be expected to intensively case manage? We have a number of people in the gallery today listening to this debate. I ask: realistically, how many people can we conference for hours on end at taxpayers' expense? In the end, we need a system that finds those who can be easily directed back to work and gets them there. There is nothing more effective than saying: 'You face a significant penalty if you don't show up. If you've got a problem, you have to let us know.' It is not that hard to get a Centrelink office in the country and to make it clear that you cannot make it. It is a basic tenet to say to someone: if you cannot meet an obligation, let them know in advance. We can make excuses about people's social inability to do that sort of thing, but that is taken care of by doctors. Doctors are quite able to diagnose that kind of inability: where someone is continually unable to look for or turn up to work. If you have got a problem, go and see a doctor. If your family doctor cannot do that then Centrelink doctors should also be able to make the decision in a case where a person persistently uses medical certificates to evade work.

If someone has a medical condition that only flares up on the day they are meant to show up to work, let it be determined by a Centrelink doctor. I anticipate that there will be a tightening up in this area, too. We have the obvious improvement where you can no longer use a family doctor to get your DSP—'thank you' to the opposition for introducing that piece of legislation. Why shouldn't it apply in this situation as well? I do not expect to see a Labor Party opposing the important measure of independent medical advice where there is frequent use of medical certificates by a person to avoid finding work. All of this happens on a platform of trying to get young people back into work using the Job Commitment Bonus, a platform of trying to get people to move for work— (Time expired)

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