Ms LIVERMORE (5:59 PM) —Before the break I was speaking about the disincentives that the government has introduced in this year’s budget for sole parents and people with disabilities who want to enter the work force after 1 July 2006, as they will be required to by the government’s harsh new measures which will cut their income support and put new requirements on them to work. One of the disincentives stems from the cutting out of income support benefits for those people earlier than currently occurs under their existing payment arrangements. The parents’ dole has different conditions to the existing parenting payment, which means that the income support those people receive from Centrelink will cut out much sooner when they enter the work force and earn an income. I quote from the media release of Senator Chris Evans of 23 May in which he cites one example of how this will affect families in this situation after 1 July. It states:

It is a similar story for people with disabilities. The higher withdrawal rate means that sole parents and people with disabilities who move on to Newstart will face effective marginal tax rates that are 10 to 20 percentage points higher than is currently the case. How is that an incentive for people to go out and look for work? The other disincentive for sole parents and people with disabilities who try to do what the government is asking—or expecting them to do as of July next year—and go out and try to find work is the lack of child-care places in Australia.

The same budget that introduced these new measures, these new obligations for sole parents, provided no new funding for long day care and nothing to ease the shortage of child-care places for under-fives that exists in many parts of Australia. There is also no new money for JET child care, which is the program set up to fund child-care costs for unemployed people and single parents while they undertake training and seek employment. Admittedly, the government did announce 84,300 new outside school hours care places over four years to provide before and after school care for kids while their parents are working or seeking work, but most of the new places will not become available until after 2008. Just remember that the new obligations on sole parents and people with disabilities come into force in July 2006.

The government knows that there is a current shortage of approximately 35,000 outside school hours places, so even the proportion of places that do come into existence immediately will not necessarily make it any easier for sole parents and disabled parents to get access to the child care they need while they meet these new obligations the government will impose on them from July next year. The government will not guarantee any of the new places for the sole parents and people with disabilities who will be required to find part-time work under its new measures. We also had it confirmed in Senate estimates this week that the government does not consider the lack of availability of child care to be an acceptable reason for a sole parent or person with a disability to fail to meet the job search and work requirements they will face after 1 July 2006.

In question time today the member for Sydney again asked the Prime Minister about what happens after 1 July 2006 in the circumstance where a sole parent has to forgo an employment opportunity because they cannot find child care for their children. The Prime Minister very arrogantly dismissed the question and said, ‘It is just the same as for someone on Newstart.’ That is not good enough, Prime Minister. You are introducing this  very harsh measure in just over a year’s time, and there needs to be serious consideration of what this means for people. The Prime Minister and the government are cutting their income and making it hard for them to find employment, because they know that there are not adequate child-care or training places to accommodate this very harsh new policy measure that they have introduced in this year’s budget.

As I have been saying, the disincentives include the lack of child care, the lack of training and the cutting out of benefits as people start to earn an income. You would have to say that that is not a barrier to getting people into the work force—it is a 400-metre hurdles race; one hurdle after another, one disincentive after another. It makes you wonder who could have designed this as a Welfare to Work policy until you realise that it is nothing of the sort. It is just a nasty way of punishing people who do not fit into the government’s nice little white picket fence world. The government is targeting some of the poorest people in Australia: single parents and the disabled. It is punishing them financially and exploiting them politically. The Labor Party will continue to point this out every step of the way and will be in there advocating for those people as the government seeks to punish them.

The government says the measures in the Family and Community Services Legislation Amendment (Family Assistance and Related Measures) Bill 2005 are about removing disincentives for people who want to get back into the work force and help their family get ahead, so the government has recognised that it is important to make the changes to the way that family tax benefit B is calculated and to remove debt traps and disincentives for two-income families. How can the government do that when it has just passed a whole stack of bills that do just the opposite for a whole lot of people—sole parents and people with disabilities—who want to do just the same thing for their families as those families with two incomes do? They just want to get into the work force, do their best for their families and earn some extra income if they possibly can. But the government is penalising them by cutting their income support and by making the rules different for them, making it harder for them to accumulate that extra income. You have to ask yourself, ‘Why is the government deliberately making it harder for them?’

The other part of the family assistance measures that this bill makes amendments to is the maternity payment. The maternity payment is the $3,000 payment introduced in July 2004, and it is paid to parents of newborn children. The amendment in this bill makes provision for that payment also to be available to parents who adopt a child. However, there is still a restriction on adoptive parents: they are only eligible for the payment if the child is adopted or comes into their family within the first two years of the child’s life. Labor has moved a second reading amendment dealing with this particular provision. We would like the amendment to go further and to see that restriction on adoptive parents taken away altogether.

We have heard some excellent arguments put forward by a number of members, in particular by the member for Sydney—our shadow spokesperson in this area—who raised a lot of the detailed concerns of adoptive parents. The lobbying of her office has highlighted the circumstances of these families. Oftentimes families take the option of adopting children after having gone through assisted reproduction techniques, which are very costly—and the process of adoption is also a very costly exercise for families. It seems arbitrary and unnecessarily mean of this government not to recognise that, however old an adopted child is when they come into their new family, there are going to be significant costs placed on that family in preparing for that child, whether it is activities for the child to undertake or basics such as a bed or clothes. It just makes sense to make this money available to parents of adopted children no matter what age that child happens to be.

The other point that has been raised in the debate and which again underscores the necessity to remove this restriction is that adoptive parents have very little control over when the child actually comes into their family. There are paperwork, procedures and protocols to go through in the child’s original country; there are travel arrangements to be made. Given the expenses associated with adoption, the expenses associated with any new child coming into a family, and the fact that it is quite discriminatory to make this distinction between natural parents and adoptive parents, we think that the government should go all the way and remove the restriction altogether.

Labor supports this bill. We think that the changes to family tax benefit part B are very necessary but very late in coming. For years we have been raising the issue of overpayment debts. I also think there needs to be recognition by the government that they are removing this disincentive for second-income earners in families to go back to work—and expressly putting that forward as the rationale for this bill—at the same time as they are putting huge barriers in front of sole parents and people with disabilities, who are expected to return to the work force in July next year. I also give my full support to the second reading amendment moved by the member for Sydney which sets out our concerns and hopes that the government will remove the restriction on adoptive parents and give them access to the $3,000 maternity payment.