Ms PLIBERSEK (11:40 AM) —I rise again today to speak about an issue that I have addressed in this place before—that is, the failure of this budget to provide for an increase to workers who are covered by the social and community sector award in New South Wales. Before the budget we had very high expectations that perhaps Minister Vanstone would announce during this budget that the federal government had found its share of the increased cost of paying wages for these workers. In November last year the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission granted an increase to workers who work in services such as women's refuges, drug and alcohol counselling, disability services, meals on wheels, home and community care, and the sorts of services that take elderly or infirm people shopping or to do their banking. All of these services are facing grave financial difficulty because their workers have won a very well-deserved pay increase after over two years of negotiations in the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission. This small, well-deserved increase is very difficult for services to find because they are already running on the smell of an oily rag.

Within a week of the pay increase being awarded to social and community sector workers, the New South Wales government agreed to find $112 million over three years to pay for the increase in those services that receive or rely on state government funding. Its reasonable expectation was that the federal government would find its share of the increase, which is something less than $70 million over three years—indeed, it was only projected to be $24 million in the first year. This, of course, is a very small amount in a budget of $150 billion. I think that all of the workers in this sector, including in disability services, drug and alcohol counselling services and women's refuges, had a very reasonable expectation that that money would be found in this federal budget. I am incredibly disappointed that the money was not found, as I know they are.

I know that today there will be a number of people protesting at the front of Parliament House to draw attention once again to this problem. It is a tragedy that we have to have people with quite severe physical disabilities catching buses to Canberra to try and convince members of parliament that this tiny amount of money should be provided to keep their services open. What we are facing in New South Wales is services actually closing their doors. Already in a number of instances the New South Wales government has stepped in to provide funding to keep services open that would otherwise have to close their doors, but this is not a sustainable long-term option. Where the federal government has made a commitment to fund services, it has to fund the whole cost of that service. With something like a wage increase it is completely unreasonable to expect another level of government to pick up the Commonwealth's responsibilities in that area.

The type of work that these workers do is amongst the most difficult, underpaid and undervalued in our community. I really would have liked to see in the federal budget some recognition of the type of work that they do. We are talking about people who perhaps work with disabled clients needing 24-hour care. There is heavy lifting, bathing and dressing involved; there are clients who have behavioural problems. It really is some of the most important and undervalued work in our community. It seems to me that the message the government is sending by not providing this increase in the federal budget is that this sort of work is not valued. More importantly still, that is the message being sent to the clients of these services and to the families of those people, who are being told that their family members do not matter. I have had any number of letters, not only from constituents in my area but also from people around the state who have children in services—often adult children in disability services—who fear that their adult children will no longer receive the help that they have been given up to now.

I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to some of the correspondence I have received. One letter was from Margaret and Keith Withers, who talked about their son who has for nine years been involved in a program in Wagga called Community Access Support Services. They say:

I think that is the point we need to emphasise: these people are not asking for special treatment; they are asking for some care that enables them to lead a life, and that is something that most people would take for granted. I have had another letter from the parents of Jason—the signatures are a little hard to read. Jason is 25 years old. He also attends this Community Access Support Service in Wagga. His parents believe:

Maryann Wakem is another parent whose son Lyndon attends this service. She believes that either she or her husband will have to give up work to care for Lyndon if this service closes down. I have had another letter from Lorraine Tye, who says that if CASS were to close her son would be in her care 24 hours a day. That is very difficult for her because she has post-polio syndrome and wears a caliper. Her son, at the age of 27, is of course too heavy for her to lift and would be required to stay in bed for most of the day—for a 27-year-old man that is not a very good future for him to look forward to.

I have had a number of letters from that service. I have had letters from the Windgap service, which provides services to people in my electorate. There is the case study of a woman they call Jenny—of course `Jenny' is a pseudonym. She has lived in her group home, with four other people, for 15 years and is happy there. They do lots of things on their own but they need the assistance of a staff member. Jenny requires a high level of personal care to live in that home and she needs one-on-one support from staff or family to be able to go out into the community. She also needs a staff member to help her to visit her own family. The sort of support that we are talking about is personal care and mobility—two of the four people are in wheelchairs. They need someone with them when they go out into the community. Sometimes they exhibit challenging behaviours. Many of the four need special care with medical assistance and they need assistance with feeding as well.

This is the sort of independence for people with disabilities that we have strived for, as a community, over so many years. We have passed on the responsibility to the community sector, and they have accepted it graciously. They work incredibly hard to provide these services and they do an enormous amount of fundraising; they are asking for the government to pay its share of their wages bill. It really disappoints me to be part of a parliament that is not taking up this burden.

Some of the public comments that have been made in public in response to this issue have also alarmed me. The Prime Minister said in response to the social and community sector award increases that Bob Carr should keep a tighter rein on the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission, and that they should not go around granting these enormous increases to community sector workers. I think that is an affront when we consider the sort of work that these people do. You are talking about people who work full time in a very emotionally and physically demanding area, and who are paid in the mid-$20,000; $24,000 is not a lot of money for someone who is working full time in this incredibly important area. To say that these workers are overpaid is phenomenal. No-one who has ever gone out and seen the sort of work that is occurring in disability services, in home and community care, in drug and alcohol counselling, and in women's and youth refuges could say that these workers are overpaid. How much do you have to be paid to deal with a client in a women's refuge when her husband is out the front banging on the door and saying, `I'm going to get in and kill you all'? What sort of work are we asking these people to undertake for $25,000 or $30,000 a year? It is phenomenal.

Senator Vanstone has claimed, as has Minister Anthony, that the federal government has already indexed these payments. It is true that there has been some small indexation, but we are talking about indexation in the order of one or two per cent, which has been very quickly swallowed up by increased costs such as insurance premiums. We know that the insurance crisis is affecting all sorts of areas; it certainly has affected people providing services to vulnerable people in the community. There have been safety net wage increases over a number of years that have affected the lowest paid workers in this sector. They were spent long before the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission ordered the improvements to the award that they ordered in November last year. To say that these organisations should have somehow been saving or stockpiling money is an absurdity when we know how much unmet demand there already is in the community for these services. It is not enough to say that there has been indexation, because that indexation has been very properly spent in the past on the sorts of expenses I have just mentioned.

The most alarming comment I heard came, however, from the member for Wentworth, who apparently said to a delegation of people from his electorate who had come in to see him about this issue that workers in this sector were overpaid and what they did not realise was that he had to take a pay cut to go into parliament from his previous career and that really they should get some perspective and not complain about the pay they are receiving. I certainly do not want to get into an argument about whether parliamentarians are under or overpaid—that is an endless argument and there are no winners there—but for someone who is paid at the level we are to tell workers who are paid $25,000 or $30,000 a year that they are overpaid for working with people and children with disabilities, people who are struggling to give up heroin, women who are escaping domestic violence and children who are escaping violent homes is stunning. These are people who are taking elderly people shopping or to do their banking, people who are working in community legal centres. There is an absolutely stunning inability on the part of the government to see the value of these workers in our community.

Instead of this government making excuses for finding the $70 million over three years that is required to fund this wage increase properly, I would like to see some movement from them. I hope that movement will occur shortly. I know Senator Vanstone, as the Prime Minister said yesterday in question time, has prepared an options paper. I hope that option A is `fully pay the social and community sector award pay increases to those workers in New South Wales'. We are talking about $24 million in the first year. This is one month's government advertising from the pre-election period. If the government can spend $20 million a month on advertising programs, they can spend $24 a year on protecting the most vulnerable members of our community.