Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government is so embarrassed and so on the nose over its harsh, cruel budget that it wants to try and stifle discussion and cut down comment. I am trying to put these harsh social security penalties into context, because they do not sit out there in isolation. The government would like us to believe that, somehow, those who have been unable to participate in employment have to be punished. Somehow, the whole of the Australian public, unless you are wealthy, unless you are a mining company or a big business, have to be punished. Job seekers are the last in a very long list of ordinary, everyday Australians—fighting to make ends meet, working hard, looking for jobs—to be attacked by this government.

Let us look at this last group, the job seekers, the most vulnerable in our community, that the government wants to impose a harsh regime on. There is no doubt that we should have a carrot-and-stick approach, and that is what Labor had. That is what Labor had. But, no, the Abbott government has to take it one step further, because its whole job seeker program is about punishment. It is about punishment. Somehow, jobs are going to magically appear through the government's trickle-down economic program. Well, let us see what happens in the future; let us see if these wonderful jobs materialise.

In the Kwinana strip in Western Australia, there is very high youth unemployment. These young people are some of the people that this government is seeking to attack—not help or support through appropriate training programs or by having a penalty regime that rewards people when they get back on track, that helps people to get back on track. No, this government has a single step: put one foot wrong and that's it; you will be without any money at all.

Let us have a look at what happens to these people who fall foul of the government's penalty regime. Taking money from people who are disadvantaged in the job market: how does that help? How do we get people into employment when they are no longer receiving a benefit? How do we get them into an appropriate training program? Because work for the dole is a joke. It does not work anywhere in the world. Let us have a look at that. Cleaning windows at the community centre: how does that skill people up for a job into the future? Taking just any job is not going to help either. If I live on the Kwinana strip in Western Australia, is the government really suggesting that I up sticks and take a fruit-picking job in Tasmania? How do I get there? Where is the money for that? I am already being penalised by these harsh penalty measures, so how on earth will that happen? I know: like every other failed program of the government's, it just happens magically! It happens by magic! It is somebody else's problem.

So what happens when a person is penalised and is without any income? What happens about the rent or the mortgage that they might have to pay? How do they get food into their cupboards? How can they even afford to comply with this regime if the local Centrelink office is a bus or train trip away? Does the government just expect them to be picked up by yet another government department—or the non-government sector, which is already overloaded?

I can tell you that, in the southern suburbs of Perth, community services are pretty thin on the ground. The Salvation Army operate out of Rockingham, which is close to Kwinana, but I am not sure how someone on an income of nil, someone getting no money at all because they are being penalised, would actually get to Rockingham. How do they get the bus fare? How do they manage to get from the place they are living to the Salvation Army to get the assistance they need? Or is that just going to fall to yet another department?

This regime being proposed by the Abbott government is completely out of order. To punish the most vulnerable in our society by denying them a benefit is not going to work, and there should be the sort of regime that Labor had in place where, once people complied, the benefit started to flow. But, no, this government is saying, 'No, you've done the wrong thing. You'll serve your time.' Where is the carrot in that to attack those who are most in need of our help and just say, 'That's it'?

Being harsh to people will not lead to them getting jobs when youth unemployment and other areas in our community have already got very high levels of unemployment. I just do not understand how that will work. These measures, don't forget, go along with the six-month waiting period so we are creating this whole new harsh regime which says to those seeking work, 'Guess what? If you're out of work, it's your own fault.' That is what we are saying—'It's your own fault you're out of work.' And not only that: 'If you don't take a job or comply and go and scrub the windows in the local community centre, imposing a regime on an NGO that is already struggling, then we 'll punish you further because we'll apply penalties and you'll miss out on your benefit.'

If that is not blaming the job seeker, then I don't know what is—I really don't. How do you put in place Work for the Dole in a place like Kwinana that has got such high youth unemployment? How does that happen? I will not hold my breath, because it is not going to happen. That is for sure.

The non-compliance measures the government is trying to tighten are Labor's initiatives from when we were in government. Our purpose was to allow job seekers the opportunity to re-engage in the participation process. So what has happened to that? How does the job seeker re-engage from a position where they have got absolutely no money? Talk about knocking a person down when they are already down—this just takes it one step further.

The provisions that we put in place were successful in helping job seekers re-engage with their job service providers and assisting with participation while they looked for work. Our provision encouraged job seekers to find suitable offers of employment—and there is a raft of academic research that says that, if you take a job seeker and force them to take a fruit-picking job or some other kind of job that they are not well suited to, it just does not last.

What we know about some of the jobs that Senator Abetz talks about is that they are casual jobs. So are we seriously asking a job seeker to move to wherever in the country to avoid a penalty and pick up any job at a great cost for six or four months, and then what?

This is a government that has no plan. It is not able to develop good policy that is fair and, yes, has some sort of penalty in it. Labor is not saying, 'Let's throw it all away,' but we had a regime in place that was working because we believed that job seekers need to be supported to be able to participate and get a decent job, a job they can hold into the future.

The Abbott government's ideology is well and truly showing in this proposal: we have to punish people, because that is what is needed here. This will fail and fail dismally and, not only that: this bill has the potential to do real harm to individuals. I bet the Abbott government hasn't taken a second to think about that. At the end of this harsh penalty regime are real people with lives and complicated situations who need to be supported. They need to be well supported so that they are in a fit state to be able to get a job, a job that will last them for quite a few years—not a seasonal job, not a casual job, not a Work for the Dole job but a decent job. And we are certainly not going to see jobs magically appear as a result of the Abbott government's market based, trickle-down, 'it's someone else's problem to find these jobs' approach. The jobs will not magically appear, and I would urge the government to re-look at what Labor had in place—to have a penalty regime but to have a regime whereby there can be some kind of reassessment, some kind of re-evaluation, so that people are not harmed by this harsh, cruel measure.