Mr RIPOLL (10:30 AM) —I rise today to speak on the government’s rather ambitiously named Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Other Measures) Bill 2005. Labor supports welfare reform that goes far beyond moving people simply from one welfare queue to the dole queue. Labor believes people who can work should work and that we have a responsibility to care for those who cannot work. Everyone benefits when more people participate in the social and economic mainstream. That is why Labor advocates real welfare reform that tackles the reasons someone is not working and delivers practical solutions. But Labor does not support this extreme, harsh, radical nonsense that the government keeps trying to dress up as Welfare to Work.

The Howard government’s changes to welfare are extreme and they are also incompetent. The changes are extreme because they cut the household budget for families who can least afford it for no good reason at all. The changes are incompetent because they will not help people find jobs. It is as simple as that. They make work less financially worth while because the Howard government will now take more money out of every dollar these people earn than it does now. We know that no-one benefits from unemployment. Labor believes that, wherever possible, people who can work should work. But at the cold heart of these changes is a cut to family budgets that will leave the most vulnerable people in our community worse off. If you have a look at some of the detail of the bills, you will see that some people—people who earn very little money in the first place—will be up to $46 a week worse off.

Instead of moving people from welfare to work, all the Howard government is doing is dumping people from one welfare payment to a lower welfare payment. That is at the core of what these changes are about. Instead of reducing the number of people who depend on welfare, the Howard government is just dumping people from one Centrelink database to another. The government has not even provided any evidence to show that putting people on a lower welfare payment will help them get a job. Many people who are on the disability support pension or the parenting payment will instead be put onto what the government calls Newstart—or what most people refer to as the dole. The government has admitted that well over 200,000 people will be financially worse off under these changes, but perhaps only 109,000 will gain work. But there is a catch in this: while the government says that perhaps 100,000 people will find work, it does not actually detail how this is going to take place.

Those who find work may actually end up poorer than before. The Howard government may take more off them under these incompetent changes than it does now through the current tax arrangements, so it will penalise people for going out and getting a job. Under these changes, when single parents and people with a disability go to work, they will give most of what they earn back to the government, so they will get punished for doing the right thing. They will also have little, if any, bargaining power under the Howard government’s extreme industrial relations changes. Employers will know that a person with a disability must accept any job that they are offered—no matter how unreasonable, how unfair or how disadvantaged they are by accepting that job offer—or they will lose their income support. This is a catch-22 situation for the most vulnerable people in our community.

Labor believe that, with over one million Australians on welfare and the nation facing a skills crisis and an ageing population, we should be investing in the skills of welfare recipients. After all, a person will not get a job unless they have the skills that an employer needs, particularly in the environment that we are now living in where there is a demand for high skills, and simply forcing people by lowering their welfare payments to seek low-end jobs does not do anything for either employers or welfare recipients. Instead, the government is leaving these people unprepared for work by providing only a tiny fraction of the training opportunities that are needed. The money would be much better spent on providing the training skills and the opportunities these people need.

The government should be addressing the appalling disincentives to move from welfare to work by considering ideas like the welfare to work tax bonus which Labor proposed at the last budget. It would have improved the financial reward for those moving from welfare to work by increasing the tax-free threshold to $10,000 for people earning under $20,000. This would be a real bonus for people and a real incentive for them to find work. If you know you are going to be better off not only in the work that you do but in how much income you bring home to the family you will work that much harder to get that job.

The Howard government has admitted that hundreds of thousands of Australians will be worse off—there is no doubt about that. They will be dumped onto the dole under these extreme changes. That is completely unfair. They include 60,000 people with a disability, 77,000 single parents and, as well, at least 77,000 children of these parents. This is just another veiled attack by this government on families and ordinary working Australians—people who cannot afford to lose any income support or any income at all. These people live on sustenance and barely have enough money or any disposable income left at the end of the week or fortnight after they pay for housing, food, children’s education and a few basics. There is no money left; there is no way out in their situation.

If you look at the government and their motives and what they are all about, you will see that they attack the weak. They are very strong on people who are weak, but they are very weak on people who are very strong. Have a look at the case of Mr Gerard that parliament has been discussing over the last few days and which has been on the front page of the newspapers. Here is a man who has a tax liability of $150 million to the Australian Taxation Office and who has tax havens on faraway islands. He is somebody who is very wealthy and very strong but, because he is a huge political donor to the Liberal Party, he can do anything he likes. Not only can he do anything he likes and get away with it but he can then be appointed to the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia—an esteemed posting for a man who has done some pretty bad things.

If you look at that a little closer and look at what this government does in its pursuit of people who get overpayments or, through no fault of their own, have been paid a little extra in their Centrelink or other welfare payments, you will see the government chases them down every hole, every burrow, right down to the last cent and makes their life a living hell. It chases them down not because they have done something wrong—and not because in any way they even knew they had done something wrong—but because the government has a flawed system, and people pay the penalty for that flawed system. It is a very unfair and unjust piece of legislation and, if we take into account just how many people will lose out, it is quite extraordinary.

The recently announced exemptions to this bill will barely make a dent in the figures that I mentioned before and some of those exemptions from work obligations still face a cut to payments. That is the real tragedy. People trying to do the right thing are still facing a cut to payments, no matter what they try to do. The Howard government has estimated that about 100,000 people should be able to gain work out of these changes, but there is no evidence that they actually will. Where are these jobs going to be found? Which employers are going to put these people on? Which employers are going to put on people with a disability who are in their 50s? These are people who want to work but cannot because there are no incentives—no incentives for the employers and no incentives for them.

This is a blunt, rude instrument to force people from one welfare queue onto another. It is going to have an enormous impact in my electorate of Oxley. These changes will impact on my constituency probably more than just about any other electorate in the country. Studies undertaken by ACOSS show that more than 2,700 Ipswich families in the south-west of Brisbane will have their entitlements drastically reduced when the Howard government’s extreme Welfare to Work changes become law. Dumping 2,700 people onto the dole does not help them in any way. It does not do anything for their households, anything for their families or anything for their prospects of bettering their own lives. These extreme changes mean people with a disability and children in low-income families will have less food on the table. That is the bottom line: less food on the table or they cannot afford the house they are living in or they will have to cut back in other areas. And then there is the cost of fuel. This legislation does not even take into account the extra costs of having a job. This bill simply reduces the rewards from moving from welfare to work and leaves vulnerable Australians worse off.

Many people with a disability want to work, as I said before; they genuinely want to work. I have met many of my constituents, people with disabilities, who would desperately love a job but there just are not too many people lining up to give them one. They would love to work, if they could earn more money. They would love to work, if there were more opportunities for them. They would love to get more skills, but they cannot afford to gain these skills. They cannot afford to take time off from looking after people in their own families who might also have a disability. This legislation does not take that into account.

The problem with this government is that it just does not understand ordinary people. It does not understand how people live today. People with disabilities do struggle. They struggle maybe with periodic or cyclical disabilities; they might be okay to do a little bit of work—and often they volunteer and help out in the community—but they cannot sustain that on a five-day a week nine to five basis. That they cannot do. They might be able to work six hours a day for three days a week. They have complex lives, lives which they struggle to maintain. The government should try and assist people in these situations, not make life more difficult for them. The government’s extreme welfare changes—just like its extreme industrial relations changes—show how out of touch it is with ordinary, middle Australians, people with disabilities, with children and with difficult circumstances at home. This government has no sympathy for, no empathy with and no understanding of how people live.

The Howard government should lead by example. The first thing I would say the government ought to do would be to legislate right now, move an amendment right now, to employ more people with a disability. It is one thing to preach to other employers that they should employ people with a disability, but why does the government not do so itself? Its real record on employing people with a disability has dropped by a massive amount. It has gone from 5.6 per cent in 1996 to just 3.8 per cent and it is getting lower. There is no commitment from the government. It makes no commitment to people with a disability, but it will harm them. It will force them onto less money. From July 2006, all people who apply for the disability support pension will be assessed under the extreme new capacity test. In addition, everyone who applies for the DSP between 10 May 2005 and 1 July 2006 will soon be reassessed under this extreme new test—a test which will disadvantage them. If they are judged as being able to work a minimum of 15 hours a week, they will be put on what the Howard government calls Newstart—most people call it the dole.

Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, which is an organisation that the Prime Minister has described as ‘respected’, ‘objective’ and ‘independent’, has shown just how much people with a disability will lose under these changes. According to NATSEM, if a person with a disability works 15 hours a week at the minimum wage, they will keep only 25c of every dollar they earn. What can be fair about that? Where is the incentive for people to seek and keep a job if they know up-front that for every dollar they earn they will only keep 25c? This is something that needs to be redressed. That makes people $122 per week worse off by moving into work under these changes than if they moved into work under the current arrangements. The Howard government is effectively asking people with a disability to work for a return of merely $2.27 an hour. That is something which any reasonable person would not want to do.

Once the Howard government’s industrial relations changes are introduced, it could be even worse. People with a disability will have very little bargaining power in the workplace. They will lose their social security payments if they refuse to work. This is the double whammy for people. You have two pieces of legislation that work in unison to harm people. One says that if you are offered a job, even if you are worse off because they get rid of the no disadvantage test, you are forced to take up that job. If you do not take that job, they will cut your payments. They are going to force you into that job. I do not know how this is going to work for employers but I know that, if I were an employer forcing somebody to do something like that, I would be a little worried about two things: firstly, productivity and, secondly, safety in the workplace. I would be concerned about their commitment to the job and effective productivity.

As well as cutting household budgets, these changes force many people with disabilities to look for work. But the Howard government leaves them unprepared by not offering enough opportunities for training and skill development. That is the first place that we should start. It is about offering more opportunities, more skills and more development. Only 7,600 new vocational training places have been allocated. If you consider the 200,000 people and the so-called 100,000 who are going to be placed into work, that is not a lot of opportunity for training. Many opportunities will not even be open to people who currently receive the DSP. What this really means is that the government again has got its priorities all wrong. It should be looking at skills first, providing opportunities, fixing the tax system and giving these people a break; then the job opportunities will present themselves. The job opportunities are there now but we need people with the skills to fill them.

Many sole parents want to work, but they really struggle to balance paid work with their parenting responsibilities. Talk to a mother or a young man looking after a couple of kids at home about what their real opportunities are—not only to get a job and stay in work but that continual process of trying to manage the family, keep food on the table and really do the job that we, as a parliament, want these people to do. We should be advocating for these people to look after their kids, to give them support and to do all the things that we want parents to do with their children. We often hear in this place that we should be better parents and that we should have more incentives for people to do more for their own children—yet every bit of legislation that comes through this House is antifamily legislation. It makes it harder for families, it makes it harder for single parent families and it actually makes it harder for children as well.

It is no wonder we have so many social problems in today’s society, like obesity and literacy problems. There are just no longer any opportunities. People are struggling day to day, hand to mouth, and this legislation makes it even more acute. This legislation will make it harder for people who do not have the life opportunities that many privileged people have and who do not have the access, the resources, the knowledge or the networks. For them there is no way out. When you see how people with disabilities, in particular, live and how they struggle on a day-to-day basis, it makes me sick to see the government attack these people. It makes me sick to the stomach to think that we are going to get these changes in here. There is nothing we can do but wait two years and hope that people can make the big change that is needed so we can redress some of these very unfair, very unjust laws that make people’s lives much worse.

What the government is effectively asking sole parents to work for in return, if we look at how much money they actually keep, is about $3.88 an hour. For their 15 hours of work a week, if you look at all the minimums—just the bare bones—they are only $58 ahead of somebody in the same situation who is not working. That is great—at least it is nearly $60 extra in the kitty at the end of the week to try and keep the family household running—but it does not take into account the extra costs associated with actually being employed, such as buying the extra clothes and shoes that you need and getting to and from work, whether on public transport or by car, using petrol, the price of which is through the roof. Then your $58 starts to not look like too much. With $58 extra a week, when you take in all the real costs of having that job, you suddenly find yourself going backwards and bringing less money home. You are more tired, you have spent less time with your kids, you are actually more stressed—and you have less money at the end of the week. It just does not add up. Just like everything this government does in terms of industrial relations, whether it is Welfare to Work or anything else, it just does not add up.

The government are going to be leaving single parent families really struggling. I just cannot understand why they are going down this path. The Prime Minister promised also that single parents would not have to accept a job that resulted in low or negative financial gain once the costs of child care had been taken into account. We will see how that works out. But there is nothing in this legislation that delivers on the Prime Minister’s promise—nothing at all, nothing in writing, just an idle non-core promise from the Prime Minister. Instead, he is going to leave it up to the bureaucrats in Canberra to see what they can do. Single parents also stand to lose—would you believe it?—by reconciling with their partners under these new extreme welfare changes. What the government promised to parents who currently receive the single parenting payment is that they will not face a loss of income when their youngest child turns eight. But if a single parent leaves the payment when they attempt to reconcile with a former partner, they will not be able to regain that payment if they need it later. Instead, they will be confined to the dole once their youngest child turns eight—another punitive measure, another attack, another disincentive for families. Government members carry on about ‘family friendly’ and ‘family this’ and ‘family that’, but it is all here in black and white. It is actually in their legislation: it is antifamily.

To compound the impact of these laws, we will of course have the government’s very extreme changes to industrial relations. That means that people with a disability and sole parents—who already have very little bargaining power, if any at all, in the workplace—will have even less protection from exploitation at work, about the days and the hours they work and the amount of income they receive. The government is removing any reference to awards from the test of ‘suitable employment’, which determines what work a welfare recipient must accept. My biggest concern is, with all these new rules and the pressure that Centrelink and other agencies are already under, who is going to be monitoring all this? When an employer says, ‘I offered a job and there wasn’t an acceptance,’ and when a person is taken off all payments, breached and their life is spun into living hell, who monitors this? Who reconciles this? Who actually deals with it? Where is the transparency and the accountability? There will be more angry, disillusioned people coming into the offices of local members of parliament to try to find some redress when they just cannot comprehend the complexity of the changes that this government makes. I think employers are also going to be at a bit of a loss in this. While there might be the odd unscrupulous employer who thinks he might get a win, as I said earlier, I would be really concerned about productivity and safety in the workplace. These changes are bad, and they should be opposed. Labor has a better plan for this country. (Time expired)