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representatives vote 2014-06-24#13
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2014-06-26 10:14:29
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Title
Bills — Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 1) Bill 2014, Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2014; Consideration in Detail- Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 1) Bill 2014 and Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2014 - Consideration in Detail - Remove certain measures
Description
<p class="speaker">Jenny Macklin</p><p>by leave—I move opposition amendments (1) to (12) in relation to the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No.1) Bill 2014, and amendments (1) to (17) in relation to the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No.2) Bill 2014 as circulated in my name together:</p><p class="italic">Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No.1) Bill 2014</p><p class="italic">(1) Clause 2, page 2 (table item 2), omit the table item.</p><p class="italic">(2) Clause 2, page 2 (cell at table item 10, column 1), omit "Schedules 5 and 6", substitute "Schedule 5".</p><p class="italic">(3) Clause 2, page 2 (cell at table item 11, column 1) omit "Schedules 7 and 8", substitute "Schedule 8".</p><p class="italic">(4) Schedule 1, page 4 (line 1) to page 14 (line 5), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(5) Schedule 3, page 69 (line 3), omit the heading.</p><p class="italic">(6) Schedule 3, item 1, page 69 (lines 4 to 9), omit the item.</p><p class="italic">(7) Schedule 3, items 3 and 4, page 69 (lines 14 to 19), omit the items.</p><p class="italic">(8) Schedule 3, item 6, page 69 (lines 22 and 23), omit the item.</p><p class="italic">(9) Schedule 3, item 7, page 70 (lines 1 to 5), omit subsection 1192(5AA).</p><p class="italic">(10) Schedule 3, items 8 and 9, page 70 (lines 9 to 16), omit the items.</p><p class="italic">(11) Schedule 6, page 78 (line 1) to page 88 (line 4), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(12) Schedule 7, page 89 (lines 1 to 15), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2014</p><p class="italic">(1) Clause 2, page 2 (table items 3 and 4), omit the table items.</p><p class="italic">(2) Clause 2, page 2 (cell at table item 5, column 1), omit "to 8", substitute "to 5".</p><p class="italic">(3) Clause 2, page 2 (table items 6, 7 and 8), omit the table items.</p><p class="italic">(4) Clause 2, page 2 (table items 10 and 11), omit the table items.</p><p class="italic">(5) Schedule 1, item 1, page 4 (lines 7 to 14), omit subsections 1192(5AC) and (5AD).</p><p class="italic">(6) Schedule 1, item 1, page 4 (line 15), omit ", 20, 35 and 36", substitute "and 20".</p><p class="italic">(7) Schedule 1, item 2, page 4 (line 21), omit "4, 6, 7, 8, 11 and 12", substitute "6, 7 and 8".</p><p class="italic">(8) Schedule 1, Parts 2 and 3, page 5 (line 1) to page 8 (line 23), omit the Parts.</p><p class="italic">(9) Schedule 6, page 28 (line 1) to page 34 (line 22), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(10) Schedule 7, page 35 (line 1) to page 41 (line 9), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(11) Schedule 8, page 42 (line 1) to page 49 (line 30), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(12) Schedule 9, page 50 (line 1) to page 66 (line 18), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(13) Schedule 10, items 1 to 6, page 67 (lines 4 to 20), omit the items.</p><p class="italic">(14) Schedule 10, items 9 to 22, page 68 (line 4) to page 70 (line 13), omit the items.</p><p class="italic">(15) Schedule 10, item 23, page 70 (line 14) to page 72 (line 9), omit the item, substitute:</p><p class="italic">23 Application provision</p><p class="italic">  The amendments made by items 7 and 8 apply in relation to working out the rate of family tax benefit for days on or after the commencement of those items.</p><p class="italic">(16) Schedule 11, page 73 (line 1) to page 74 (line 3), omit the Schedule.</p><p class="italic">(17) Schedule 12, page 75 (line 1) to page 78 (line 16), omit the Schedule.</p><p>As I have already given substantial indication of the reasons for these amendments in my speech in the second reading debate, I will not take the time of the house. Because of the gag motion that has been imposed on the House by the government, I will give the opportunity to my colleagues to contribute.</p> <p class="speaker">Tim Watts</p><p>I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this part of the debate, given that I was next on the list to speak before the government gagged those on this side of the House from contributing on this bill. I have a question for the government in this part of the debate. We have heard a lot of talk about the supposed welfare crisis that is the justification for this bill and an unsustainable welfare system in Australia. We have heard the talk about ending the age of entitlement. My question for those opposite is: where is this crisis?</p><p>We can see clearly, when you consider the entire OECD, that Australia spends less on welfare as a proportion of GDP than any other country except Iceland. That is less even than the notoriously parsimonious United States. In fact, we could spend up to $60 billion more on our welfare system and still not meet the US spend as a proportion of GDP. When welfare expenditure in Australia accounted for just 8.6 per cent of GDP in 2013, significantly less than the OECD average of 13 per cent, those on the side of the House ask: where is the welfare crisis?</p><p>The Melbourne Institute recently released a report demonstrating that reliance on welfare amongst Australians has been decreasing over the last decade and that the percentage of people of working age receiving a welfare payment each week declined from 23 per cent in 2001 to 18 per cent in 2011. Further, it demonstrated that the number of households that are almost entirely dependent on welfare payments has decreased by almost 30 per cent since 2001. Again I ask: where is the welfare crisis?</p><p>These figures deal with the total quantum of welfare. But, if we look at where welfare payments go in Australia, we see a healthy, effective and targeted welfare system in this country. To quote from my good friend Matthew Cowgill at the Australian Council of Trade Unions, ABS figures from 2009-10 show that the poorest 20 per cent of Australian households received an average of $323 a week in cash benefits while the richest received just $22 per week—a ratio of $14.7 to a poor household for every dollar that goes to the richest.</p><p>Peter Whitford from the Australian National University has shown that a far larger proportion of our cash benefits go to the poorest households than in any other advanced economy. Not only do rich Australians receive a tiny share of welfare spending but their share is smaller than it used to be in the 1980s and early 1990s. The idea that Australia is a land of rampant middle- and upper-class welfare is a myth.</p><p>The next question I have those opposite is: how are the vulnerable in our society supposed to survive if they are unable to find a job in the cruel world created by this bill? The learn or earn policy detailed in this bill is, perhaps, one of the cruellest cuts outlined by the Abbott government in the budget. It is no secret that youth unemployment in segments of Australia is reaching a crisis point. Figures released by the Brotherhood of St Laurence earlier this year indicate that around Australia around 12.4 four per cent of our young people are unable to find work—a figure that is rising. In Melbourne's west, in my electorate, the figure is even higher—13.6 per cent of young people in Melbourne's west are not able to find employment to support themselves. These youth need all the help they can get to get back into the workforce. They should not be punished for not finding jobs that simply do not exist. The changes in Newstart and Youth Allowance in the bills under consideration will do this. If after six months of income support a young person has not yet found a job they will be required to take part in the Work for the Dole scheme. If after this period of time they are still unable to find work, they will lose all welfare payments for a further period of six months. That is six months without any form of income support at all. It is not so much ripping a hole in the social safety net as throwing it away altogether.</p><p>I further ask the minister: is it not true that they know what the impacts of these cruel budget cuts will be on people in electorates like my own? The fact that the budget includes money to cover the, quote, 'additional emergency services' required due to this learn-or-earn budget is a dead giveaway. The government is allocating additional money in the budget for the poverty that they are, in fact, creating. It would be funny if it was not so horrific for thousands of young Australians in Australia. There will be thousands of people affected by these cruel changes. The Department of Social Services admitted that they were expecting 500,000 new claims for emergency assistance as a result of these measures—half a million Australians abandoned by the Abbott government all for the sake of an extreme, factless ideological attack on Australia's effective and efficient welfare system. These are measures that will fall hard upon unemployed youth in our country.</p><p>The next question I have for those opposite is: how can they look Australian families in the eye after going to last election promising to ease cost-of-living pressures on Australian families and then, after the federal budget, ripping $7.5 billion from family payments? These bills contain freezes on the rates and thresholds of family tax benefits A and B. They also include a freeze on the low-income area for tax benefit A. According to the Department of Social Services, this will see more 370,000 Australian families around $750 a year worse off. So I ask those opposite, who promised to ease cost-of-living pressures on Australian families, how they look Australian parents in the eye.</p> <p class="speaker">Clare O'Neil</p><p>The bills that we are considering in detail today have been the cause of incredible fear in my community in Hotham, and it is with an incredibly heavy heart that I rise to speak against these bills that will really, sadly, see the worst fears of those people in my community realised. If there is one question I have for the minister today it is: how could you do this to people who trusted you so much during the election?</p><p>These bills let Australians know how cruel this government is. For those of us who are looking this evening for a silver lining, if there is one out there it is that it exposes the values that sit in the hearts of the decision makers that we sit opposite. What I am coming to realise after a few months in this parliament is that the Australia that the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and Minister for Social Services live in is a very different Australia to that which I see my neighbours living in around East Bentleigh, right in the heart of Hotham.</p><p>The Australia that the Treasurer and the Prime Minister live in is a place where poor people go to the doctor too frequently just because they do not have anything better to do. It is where unemployed young people are getting plenty of great job offers but are just too fussy to accept any of them. It is a nation where $800 that many pensioners used to pay their electricity bills is seen as a cash splash. It is a nation where young Australians are simply not paying enough for their university education.</p><p>But this is not the Australia that I live in, and I do not believe that these values reflect the values of the Australian people. I believe that as a country we rise together. As our economy grows we should all benefit from it, and that sits at the heart of the welfare system that we have.</p><p>There are so many truly devastating changes in the bills that are before us today that I do not have time to talk about all of them. But there are three big areas that I want to touch on, which will particularly affect the people that I represent in Hotham. The first is the change to pensions. I looked, for a while, in the <i>Real Solutions</i> document before I came to the chamber this afternoon, desperately looking for the sentence which talked about the changes that would be made to seniors' supplements and the changes that would be made to pensions. But, alas, all that I found was empty rhetoric about how concerned this coalition was about the living costs of seniors.</p><p>The Prime Minister misled and betrayed millions of Australians who rely on government for part or all of their incomes: 2.3 million people are already trying to make ends meet on the age pension. I want to remind the House that when Labor was in government we legislated for the biggest increase to pensions in 100 years, and tonight that increase is being lost.</p><p>I want to talk a little about changes to family tax benefits A and B, which will affect many families in my seat of Hotham. I was contacted, quite soon after the budget, by a mother in my electorate—Stephanie. She was recently widowed and is trying to raise two daughters by herself on a part-time public service income. She is a very smart, very motivated woman, and she is trying to plan for her daughters' futures. She contacted me because she genuinely could not understand what the government was trying to do to her family with the changes to the family tax benefits and what this would mean for her and for her girls.</p><p>As a result of the budget, including the measures in the bills that are before us, a single-income couple on $65,000 with two school-aged children will be about $6,000 worse off, every year, by 2016. So I ask the minister, in this consideration in detail: how could you do this to families who trusted you during the election? How could you possibly justify these changes?</p><p>It is difficult, amongst a bevvy of absolute nasties in these bills, to single out the cruellest measure but I believe that it is the change that is being made to New Start. What Australia are these people living in that would made them think that they can take unemployment benefits from young people for six months? I do not understand what the plan is here. What do they want these young people to do? Perhaps in the world of the Treasurer and the Prime Minister young people who are in these positions live in family homes with families that can support them, but in my electorate and in many parts of the country that is simply not the case. We are facing crises of youth unemployment around the country. At the same time the government has cut training and apprenticeships it tells young people to earn or learn. I just cannot believe the gall.</p><p>The context for this has been fabricated from the very beginning. I do not have time to go into it. We are not in a budget emergency. The Australian budget is in ship shape. Labor took us through a financial crisis and left our economy in great condition. These bills are totally unjustified.</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>- The majority voted against [http://www.openaustralia.org/debates/?id=2014-06-24.133.1 amendments] introduced by Labor MP [http://publicwhip-test.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/mp.php?mpn=Jenny_Macklin&mpc=Jagajaga&house=representatives Jenny Macklin].
- Ms Macklin explained during the second reading debate that these amendment would "remove the following from the legislation:
- * cuts to pensions through the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexation indexation] changes;
- * increasing the pension age to 70;
- * abolishing the seniors supplement;
- * the resetting of the social security and veterans' entitlements income deeming thresholds, effectively another cut;
- * cessation of the pensioner education supplement;
- * the removal of the three-month backdating of the disability pension under the [http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/vea1986261/ Veterans' Entitlements Act 1986]; and
- * the pause to indexation in the income-free test areas for all pensioners."[1]
- Because the majority voted against these amendments, they were unsuccessful.
- ''Background to the bills''
- The [http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r5273 Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 1) Bill 2014] and the [http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r5274 Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2014] were introduced to implement a number of budget measures. These measures include pausing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexation indexation] on certain government payments, ceasing certain payments and changing the requirements for certain payments.[2]
- Although several of these welfare measure were to become effective from 1 July 2014, Social Services Minister [http://publicwhip-test.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/mp.php?mpn=Kevin_Andrews&mpc=Menzies&house=representatives Kevin Andrews] has said that it is unlikely that they will pass through Parliament by then.[3] In the meantime, the government payments will continue unchanged.
- ''References''
- * [1] Read Ms Macklin's speech during the second reading debate [http://www.openaustralia.org/debate/?id=2014-06-24.116.2 here].
- * [2] Read about these changes in more detail in the explanatory memorandum for the former bill (2014 Budget Measures No. 1) [http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr5273_ems_458be65a-34f6-4881-b13b-cc8fd6bf1d3e%22 here] and latter bill (2014 Budget Measures No. 2) [http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fems%2Fr5274_ems_c038c930-76a9-460b-a67e-ea158764d47d%22 here].
- * [3] See [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-23/welfare-cuts-unlikely-before-new-senate-sits-kevin-andrews/5542406 ABC News] for more information.
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