The SPEAKER (09:34): I present the following reports of the Standing Committee on Appropriations and Administration:

Report No. 19: Budget estimates 2020-2021—Report, October 2020.

Report No. 20: Annual report 2019-2020—Report, October 2020.

Mr WYATT (Hasluck—Minister for Indigenous Australians) (09:35): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Improving the livelihoods of Indigenous Australians by unlocking job-creating infrastructure projects and the positive impact of critical public facilities for remote communities is needed over the coming years to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To realise social and economic security, Indigenous Australians require the provision of housing and essential infrastructure. Timely access to safe and suitable public housing and education and health facilities on Indigenous land is fundamental to the goal.

In recognition of the work the Attorney-General and I are progressing on native title reform, I introduce the Native Title Amendment (Infrastructure and Public Facilities) Bill 2020 to extend the operation of section 24JAA for a further 10 years. This will help secure approvals for public housing and infrastructure on Indigenous held lands where alternative approval processes have stalled. This will deliver public health, housing, education, policing and emergency services infrastructure to meet the current and emerging needs of Indigenous Australians.

The bill ensures that section 24JAA will continue to operate as originally passed by the Parliament of Australia in 2010. To date, due to different land tenure and legislation requirements across jurisdictions, section 24JAA has only been used in Queensland and Western Australia.

In Western Australia and Queensland, the provision's extension is particularly important. It will afford state and local governments, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander councils of North Queensland, access to Indigenous held land to build critical infrastructure for the benefit of local Indigenous communities when expediency is needed and when alternative pathways are not available. Without section 24JAA, provision of infrastructure may not be possible in some situations.

The provision is a streamlined mechanism to facilitate Indigenous land access by state and local governments in the limited circumstances. Section 24JAA is part of the Native Title Act's future acts regime, which specifies how acts that affect native title can be validly done on land where native title exists. Section 24JAA requires native title holders and claimants to be notified about the proposed public works and provides them with the opportunity to be consulted about the impact of the proposed future act on their native title rights and interests.

In accordance with the established non-extinguishment principle in the Native Title Act, the bill continues to ensure that native title is not extinguished by the production of public housing and infrastructure, and the provision provides for compensation.

Section 24JAA operates as an important mechanism between an ILUA, or indigenous land use agreement, and compulsory acquisition, to enable future acts to be validly done to progress critical Indigenous housing and infrastructure in a timely and effective manner, while safeguarding native title rights and the interests for the future. This reflects the reality that land dealings may be complex and sometimes involve lengthy negotiations and time frames given the different parties, processes, regulations and interests involved.

All other state and local government planning and building requirements will still need to be followed. This includes protection such as cultural and heritage legislation. Through the consultation process, section 24JAA provides an additional opportunity for native title holders to advise the state authority about planning needs and cultural heritage sites.

Forty-two per cent of Indigenous Australians living in remote communities reside in overcrowded or severely overcrowded housing.

Although states and territories are responsible for public housing, the Australian government has invested over $5.4 billion since 2008 to support the states and territories to address remote overcrowding. This investment reduced overcrowding from 52.1 per cent in 2008 to 41.3 per cent in 2014-15 and was projected to fall to 37.4 per cent in 2018.

Since 2018 the government has paid $121 million to Western Australia and $37.5 million to South Australia and this year is investing $105 million in Queensland through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Councils to assist the states to continue to meet their obligations to provide remote housing for Indigenous Australians. This funding, coupled with each state's own remote housing commitments, represents a pipeline of capital works to continue to address remote overcrowding and unlock land and economic opportunities for the benefit of Indigenous Australians into the future.

As recently agreed by all Australian governments and the Coalition of Peaks, the new National Agreement on Closing the Gap sets ambitious targets, including housing, for states to meet by 2031. Section 24JAA will help to facilitate the timely delivery of public housing infrastructure to meet these targets, particularly in Queensland and Western Australia, given their land tenure arrangements and unmet Indigenous housing need. High-need communities on Indigenous land stand to benefit the most from the timely delivery of assets and infrastructure to help reduce overcrowding.

ILUAs are the standard and preferred mechanism for negotiating acts on land subject to native title rights and interests. However, there is no time frame for completing negotiations and entering into an ILUA. The Queensland and Western Australia governments have advised that negotiating an ILUA for the type of infrastructure covered by 24JAA can take between 18 months and three years to complete. However, where there are intractable blockages, section 24JAA facilitates investment in Indigenous communities that can be made, including compensation for communities.

This is why since 2011 section 24JAA has been used sparingly, approximately 126 times on 961—almost 1,000—residential lots. The provision has been used in Queensland 52 times and in Western Australia 74 times. This includes 778 public houses and other facilities in Queensland, 312 public houses and 73 other facilities in Western Australia.

While section 24JAA has been used mainly for public housing, the provision has also been used for emergency facilities, such as women's shelters, fire brigades, police stations and child safety housing; public education and health facilities; and staff housing for public school teachers and public health employees.

The Australian government and the native title sector recognise that ILUAs are the preferred mechanism for all parties negotiating acts on land that is subject to native title. This is why I am only proposing a temporary extension. Section 24JAA is a pragmatic tool to be used when an ILUA is facing intractable negotiations or cannot be reached. Retaining section 24JAA provides an alternative that facilitates the critical infrastructure and safeguards the native title rights and interests for the long term.

Section 24JAA has allowed infrastructure to be delivered that would otherwise not be possible. For example, Queensland Health entered into an ILUA to construct a wellbeing centre and staff accommodation in a remote community in Queensland. The ILUA was unresolved after 18 months of negotiation due to contested claims to country on other native title matters. Queensland Health used section 24JAA for the grant of the lease to deliver new health facilities. As a result, the whole community continues to benefit from health services instead of being disadvantaged by a broader dispute between groups.

Throughout the targeted consultations on the operation of section 24JAA in 2017, 2019 and this year that were undertaken by the Attorney-General's Department and the National Indigenous Australians Agency, views were expressed for and against the extension of the provision.

These views, and the stakeholder experiences that were shared, reinforced the importance that, when dealing with Indigenous land and native title holders, the needs of the community, whether it be housing, health or education are paramount, and safeguarding native title rights and interests over the long term are essential.

I am conscious of the need to balance the rights and interests of native title holders and meet the needs of Indigenous Australians. For these reasons, the bill retains the temporary status of the provision. This serves to appropriately address unmet remote housing and critical infrastructure needs while maintaining a long-term commitment to safeguarding the rights and interests of native title holders. Extending the provision for a further 10 years provides the opportunity to reassess the need for the provision at a later time.

The bill provides for native title holders and claimants to retain a mechanism for raising concerns about land use while ensuring government investment in Indigenous communities can be made in a timely and effective manner.The extension of section 24JAA will ensure relevant state governments can continue to invest in Indigenous and remote communities, respond to emerging needs and ensure better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Investment in housing and infrastructure construction will support economic recovery and stimulate industry and employment, particularly as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleague, the Attorney-General, for our joint work on native title reform in recognition of our mutual interest in advancing the interests of Indigenous Australians.

Debate adjourned.

Mr EVANS (Brisbane—Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management) (09:47): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This bill continues our commitment to improve our welfare system and deliver a real difference to the lives of all Australians.

This bill, the Social Security (Administration) Amendments (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020, establishes the cashless debit card as an ongoing program in existing sites and provides for the transition of income management participants across the Northern Territory and Cape York region to the cashless debit card.

The cashless debit card program is delivering significant benefits for the communities where it currently operates. The program has the objective of reducing immediate hardship and deprivation, helping welfare recipients with their budgeting strategies and reducing the likelihood that they will remain on welfare and out of the workforce for extended periods.

The program is showing positive results.

Card participants were spending more of their welfare payments on essential items for themselves and their families, such as food, bills, clothes, household goods and fuel. This is confirmed by our card usage data that shows that spending at supermarkets is up almost 35 per cent and spending on household goods is up over 160 per cent. Over the life of the program, over $125 million has been spent at businesses that sell groceries and food, that could not be spent on restricted items like alcohol, drugs and gambling products.

Evaluations of the cashless debit card show the program is working. The first independent evaluation released in late 2017 states that the card has shown 'considerable positive impact' in the initial trial sites, including:

41 per cent of participants surveyed who drank alcohol reported drinking less frequently;

48 per cent of participants surveyed who used drugs reported using drugs less frequently; and

48 per cent of those who gambled before the trial reported gambling less often.

The bill will provide certainty for welfare recipients currently on the cashless debit card, and see over 25,000 additional welfare recipients in the Northern Territory and Cape York region transition from income management to the cashless debit card. Currently, these participants hold a BasicsCard, a card which directs welfare expenditure towards priority needs.

The government recognises that the BasicsCard, while effective, can restrict an individual's ability of choice. Currently, the BasicsCard only works in stores that have signed a merchant agreement with Services Australia.

By comparison, the cashless debit card works everywhere except when individuals try to purchase alcohol, gambling products and some gift cards and to withdraw cash. The cashless debit card provides income management participants with greater consumer choice and autonomy, while reducing red tape for businesses. For example, it provides interest on participants' funds, gives access to new technologies such as contactless payments, provides greater choice as to where participants can shop and enables participants to know when and how their money is being used, just like we all do every day with our bank cards.

Debate adjourned.

Mr EVANS (Brisbane—Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management) (09:51): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This bill will amend the primary legislation for the National Redress Scheme for institutional child sexual abuse (the scheme), with the aim of making ongoing improvements to the operation of this important scheme.

The scheme commenced on 1 July 2018 and will run for 10 years, in response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The scheme was established by the National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Act 2018 (the act).

The implementation of the scheme was an acknowledgement by the Australian government and state and territory governments that sexual abuse suffered by children in institutional settings was wrong, a betrayal of trust, and it should never have happened.

Over the past two years, the scheme has secured the participation of all states and territories, and, as of 18 September this year, 272 non-government institutions are participating in the scheme. This means that the scheme now covers over 52,000 sites across Australia. In addition, over 3,600 payments, totalling approximately $298 million dollars, have been paid to survivors to date.

Improvements have been made to the scheme, during the initial two years of operation operationally. But more can and should be done to make sure the scheme is operating as well as it can be. Implementing further improvements requires updating of the act.

This bill will increase the efficiency of the scheme for its remaining eight years of operation and assist in finalising outstanding applications. The amendments address minor and technical issues with the current operation of the act and will address unintended consequences or oversights in the initial drafting of the primary legislation that underpins the scheme. In line with the scheme's governance arrangements, all states and territories have agreed to the amendments in the bill.

In short the beneficial, minor technical amendments will provide clarity and improve scheme operations but will not have any financial impacts on scheme participants and will not change an institution's liabilities or obligations under the scheme.

A legislated second anniversary review of the scheme is also currently underway, and it is intended that the review will help drive further improvements to the scheme.

This bill will achieve its intended outcomes through progressing the following amendments to the act.

Li sting of associate institutions

Firstly, under the scheme, an associate is an institution that is a member of a participating group. Individually listing associates of institutions who are found responsible for abuse in the letter of offer to the applicant is not practical or trauma informed, especially for groups with thousands of participating institutions. This measure will clarify that associate institutions are able to be determined and listed in a letter of offer by way of a class description. Importantly, this measure will not affect the release from civil liability of the associate institutions.

Two or more f unders of l ast r esort in one application

Being the funder of last resort in relation to an institution is where a government funds redress costs in very specific and limited circumstances for non-government institutions that have ceased to exist, known as defunct institutions.

Currently, the act only specifies a single government institution being the funder of last resort for a defunct institution, including when calculating the funding contribution payable by the funder of last resort. However, more than one Commonwealth, state or territory government institution may have equal responsibility for abuse by a defunct non-government institution, meaning each could be a funder of last resort.

The amendment will clarify that where there is more than one funder of last resort the defunct institution's share of the redress cost is to be divided equally between the government institutions.

Engaging persons to be i ndependent d ecision m akers

Under the act, the Minister for Families and Social Services must approve each appointment of independent decision makers and consult the appropriate ministers from participating states and territories. This process has made it difficult to efficiently respond to the demands of the scheme.

In order to engage independent decision makers more efficiently, this measure will remove the need for ministerial-level approval before engaging an independent decision maker and will replace the need for consultation with the state and territory ministers with a requirement that the scheme operator consult with the jurisdictions via their respective responsible departments.

Protecting the name of the s cheme

This measure will include a statutory protection for the use of the scheme name and logo and impose pecuniary penalties for breach of the provisions. This measure will ensure that other parties do not misuse the scheme name and logo to the potential detriment of an already vulnerable cohort. Importantly, this measure will not affect state and territory governments and non-government institutions when referring to the scheme's name or logo in the course of their natural dealings with the scheme.

Bank account for payment of redress payment

Currently, if a person accepts a redress payment or a counselling and psychological care payment, the scheme operator must pay this to an account that the person holds with a financial institution and that the person has nominated in writing.

In not allowing payment to be made to third parties, unintended consequences have been observed, especially where an applicant has limited capacity to manage their financial affairs or where relevant court or tribunal orders exist.

This measure will enable the scheme to pay an applicant's redress payment to a public trustee, or similar body, with financial management powers made under relevant jurisdictional laws. This will provide a beneficial mechanism to ensure that the scheme can make a redress payment for an applicant whilst also ensuring that their interests remain protected in a way that is consistent with any legal arrangements in place.

When funding contribution is due for payment

Currently, the Commonwealth makes a redress payment to an applicant, and a responsible institution's funding contribution for the payment is then to be made by a date specified in a notice given by the scheme operator. There is currently no flexibility under the scheme to alter the payment date where funds are due to be paid to the Commonwealth. This measure will enable the due date for payment of a funding contribution to be extended and provide that no late payment penalties will be incurred.

Importantly, allowing a due date extension for institutions will not delay the redress payment to the applicant, which is made by the scheme and then later invoiced to the responsible institution.

Protected information

The act includes provisions for how the scheme deals with protected information. Information about a person or an institution that was provided to or obtained by an officer of the scheme, for the purposes of administering the scheme, constitutes protected information.

The limitations that apply in relation to disclosure of protected information about institutions can make it difficult to efficiently and meaningfully consult with organisations for the purposes of encouraging institutions to join the scheme.

Maximising the participation of institutions is critical to the success of the scheme and survivor access to redress, and sharing information to enable governments to collectively target and encourage institutions to join is essential for this purpose. This measure will allow for a more practical process to disclose protected information about institutions and will enable the scheme to quickly and efficiently disclose the names of non-participating institutions that have been named in applications, to support coordinated efforts to encourage that institution to make amends for past wrongdoings and join the scheme.

In summary, this bill addresses minor and technical issues with the current operation of the act and will address unintended consequences or oversights in the initial drafting of the legislation. The amendments will increase the efficiency of the scheme, assist in finalising outstanding applications, strengthen legislative assurance and help militate against issues or confusion arising over the remaining eight years of the scheme.

This will ensure survivor experience is improved, scheme integrity is maintained, and the public is assured that all governments—Commonwealth, state and territory—are committed to continuous improvement for this important scheme.

Debate adjourned.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Gillespie ) (10:00): Mr Speaker has received advice from the Chief Opposition Whip that he has nominated Ms Murphy to be a member of the Standing Committee on Economics in the place of Dr Aly.

Mr EVANS (Brisbane—Assistant Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management) (10:01): by leave—I move:

That Dr Aly be discharged from the Standing Committee on Economics and that, in her place, Ms Murphy be appointed a member of the committee.

Question agreed to.

Mrs ELLIOT (Richmond) (10:02): I am in continuation in speaking on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. I was speaking about the cuts to JobKeeper. From Monday 28 September the cuts and changes to the JobKeeper scheme meant that many local businesses and workers in my area lost all financial support while others had their payments slashed by between $300 and $750 per fortnight. We've also seen a massive increase in the number of locals receiving income support through JobSeeker and youth allowance. Currently more than 14,000 North Coast locals are on JobSeeker. That's an increase of more than 7,000 people on the North Coast who are out of work or suffering from reduced working hours and are now accessing income support payments to get by.

The COVID-19 crisis has also impacted younger people in my region, with a massive increase in youth allowance recipients in a six-month period. An additional 1,000 young people in Richmond have applied for and received youth allowance in the six-month period from December 2019 to May 2020. There are now more than 1,600 young people on youth allowance. That's 169 per cent more local young people between the ages of 16 and 21 who are accessing income support due to the COVID-19 economic crisis.

The significant job losses mean that more families across the North Coast are experiencing a real and devastating hit to their household budgets. That's why we need a concrete plan from this government about rebuilding and focusing on the recovery. Workers, businesses and communities need and deserve a very comprehensive and detailed plan to get them through this crisis, yet we did not see that in the budget. What we saw was a budget that racks up $1 trillion of debt but still doesn't do enough to create jobs or build for the future. It just leaves too many locals behind. These job losses are devastating for our local communities and our local economies, and, indeed, some of the hardest hit industries are those that've been disproportionally excluded from JobKeeper.

On our New South Wales North Coast some of the biggest job losses have been concentrated in the hospitality, the retail and the arts and entertainment sectors, with young Australians, elderly Australians and women impacted the most. The COVID-19 crisis has also been devastating to our local small businesses, with so many having to close, and, of course, now here we are in the Morrison recession. The government now presides over the first recession in decades, with record debt and hundreds of thousands more Australians unemployed. The fact is the Morrison recession will be deeper and the unemployment queues will be longer.

As those of us on this side of the chamber have said many times, we need to see the rate of Newstart, now JobSeeker, permanently raised. This is a call that's echoed by many community organisations. Whilst acknowledging that the JobSeeker coronavirus supplement was in place and did increase earlier in the year, many people are now worried about how they will afford the essentials now that the supplement decreased in September and is again decreasing in December. So we're back to the very original concern: the very low rate of Newstart or JobSeeker. But in the budget we saw no plan to lift the permanent rate of JobSeeker from that $40 a day rate.

The base rate of JobSeeker is so low that it presents a real barrier to people finding employment. Many on the payment are unable to afford internet bills or transport costs—things that are really essential when you're looking for work or attending job interviews. The fact is having JobSeeker, or Newstart, at such a low rate forces people to make some really impossible choices between paying for food or paying for rent, between buying clothes for their children or paying the electricity bill. An increase in the JobSeeker base rate would deliver to the members of our communities that need it the most, so we continue to call on the government to look at that.

In terms of the staffing at Services Australia, we did welcome the government's announcement earlier in the year for an additional 5,000 new workers to help them through this increased demand, yet that figure is almost exactly the number that they'd cut from the frontline services over the past six years. In my electorate of Richmond this government had cut 114 public sector jobs over this period and we've seen those numbers decline so much because of the government's cuts.

It's also of grave concern that the Morrison government's been closing down Centrelink offices around the country. In my electorate we are facing the closure of three Centrelink service centres in the Tweed area. The government intends to close the Centrelink service at Blundell Boulevard, Tweed Heads South; the call centre at Enterprise Avenue, Tweed Heads South; and the Centrelink administrative office at Wharf Street, Tweed Heads. They're all set to relocate to a yet to be determined new location on one premises. I have been inundated with concerns from locals about this. I've written to the minister outlining those concerns and asking for his urgent commitment to the fact there will be no redundancies or cuts to current staff when that happens, no adverse impacts for frontline customer contact, no adverse impacts to payment or payment-processing times and no further decline in the delivery of services to our local community. I believe the major Centrelink office should remain at its current location at Blundell Boulevard, Tweed Heads South, and I've said that on many occasions. It's important that locals can access the services that they need, that they're easily accessible and close to public transport. It is very important that it remain in that location.

When it comes to this government's cuts and incompetence we have also seen their robodebt scheme, and that's been an absolute debacle and caused a huge amount of distress. We saw hundreds of thousands of people issued with computer generated, false debt notices. And now more than $700 million is having to be refunded. It is just unbelievable that this has occurred. The government should immediately commit to repaying all of those people who've been impacted by it—some really severely impacted by it and the harm that it's caused. The government must allow an independent inquiry into the robodebt scandal as well.

We've seen, in terms of Services Australia or Centrelink, the threatened Centrelink closures across the country. We've seen an ongoing lack of resources, particularly when it comes to staffing. We've seen the robodebt debacle. We've seen major delays in accessing age pension payments as well. I know in my electorate this is an issue that many people raise with me—having to wait months and months and months to access that. We know the staff at Centrelink do an amazing job and are very committed people who are severely understaffed and underresourced by this government, so we need to see more resources there urgently to make sure those services can be provided.

Most Australians, at some point in their life, do receive support from Centrelink. Whether they're young, studying, doing it tough between jobs, raising a family or sick or whether they have a disability or receive an age pension, many people do use Centrelink services. Centrelink provides essential payments that are often a safety net or extra support that people need. It's been really disappointing that the Morrison government has taken a very harsh approach when it comes to resourcing Centrelink and the services people need. It really is a sign that the system is broken, and it's time that the government took a different approach to income support and a different approach to supporting people when they require it, at the most vulnerable time in their lives.

Whilst we agree with some regulatory changes in this bill, in terms of modernising certain aspects, we do have amendments in terms of staffing caps. We know how difficult they have made it to provide those services, particularly now as we continue through the Morrison recession and we continue to have people that absolutely desperately need those Centrelink services. So I'm calling on the government to resource Centrelink properly, to get those processing times down and to put the support where it's needed.

It's clear to see that the choices made by the Liberal and National parties continue to hurt regions like mine on the New South Wales North Coast. Their cuts to frontline services in our community mean that many locals are rightly feeling very betrayed. Whether that's at a federal or state level—or, indeed, sometimes at a local government level as well—when you look across the region, you see the disastrous impacts that the Liberal and National parties continue to make and how they hurt our community. There is widespread anger out there about all these cuts, and it's time for the lies, cuts and chaos to stop. It's so vitally important that they do stop, because we need to have more resources and more services right throughout our community. Particularly when it comes to Centrelink, we need more resources.

As I said earlier, the devastating impacts, particularly from the cuts to JobKeeper—with over 33,000 people having their JobKeeper payments cut—are affecting over 8,000 businesses. Those cuts are predicted to result in about $30 million a fortnight less in my local community, in my local economy. It is regions like mine that have been hit the hardest because of the nature of our industries—tourism, retail, hospitality, arts and entertainment. We have so many people on JobKeeper, on JobSeeker and on youth allowance, so we need to see more concrete plans from this government.

What we got from the budget was a $1 trillion debt and no real plan, particularly for older workers and women—nothing for them. We also saw nothing for child care and nothing for social housing. Regions like mine need the government to focus on those industries and the support that they need throughout the Morrison recession. It is a very difficult and devastating time right throughout the country, but it is regions like mine, in northern New South Wales, that are really feeling it at the moment.

We also need to see a greater investment in TAFE and our universities, and we didn't see that in the budget. What our young people need is proper training and skills so that they can get the permanent, secure, long-term jobs in the future that are so desperately required—again, especially for regional areas that were doing it tough and that will do it particularly tough right throughout this crisis. So I call upon the government to look at these regional areas and provide support for those industries and support right across the area as well, particularly for all those sections that missed out in the budget, the sections that the government decided not to fund. There are so many people that need support at this time.

Mr THOMPSON (Herbert) (10:14): Today, I want to take the opportunity to pay tribute to the people who are Services Australia. Services Australia incorporates Medicare, child support and, of course, Centrelink. Where was it that people flocked the day after the Prime Minister announced the necessary shutdown and the restrictions that we've never seen before? It was their local Centrelink office. The queues were like nothing we have ever seen before. In Townsville we have three Services Australia centres, and you could see the line-up from about a kilometre away. When people had lost their jobs, their income and their livelihoods, when they had nowhere else to turn, it was their local Centrelink office which became their lifeline. No-one wants to be standing in that line. No-one in this place wants to see the people of Australia lining up for hours in the Centrelink queue. But the global COVID-19 pandemic left them, understandably, with no choice in those early days.

Who was it that was on the other side of the service desks in those centres or on the other end of the telephone? Who were on the end of those lines? It was the people in Services Australia at Centrelink. The people of Services Australia were the ones doing their absolute best to meet the needs of our communities in distress as best they could. Were those community members friendly and polite? Hopefully, most of the time. But, of course, in these times tensions were high and wait times were long, so sometimes people lost their patience and things boiled over. Our people at Services Australia were the ones who had no choice but to cop it on the chin, resolve the situation calmly and move on as best they could. None of us endorse this kind of behaviour. There is no excuse for abuse, but, in the reality of the challenges of this year, and particularly the months of March and April, the risk was there.

I want to take a moment to thank each and every one of the people of Services Australia who worked, and continue to work, on the front lines in our Centrelink service centres during this incredibly difficult time. Thank you for your dedication. Thank you for continuing to come into work, despite the potential of health risks. Thank you for putting up with the abuse. Thank you for your incredible hard work in a very difficult time, which, hopefully, won't be repeated during the course of your careers.

During the first few weeks of the shutdowns I went to visit the Aitkenvale service centre to meet with the manager. I was keen to check in, make sure everything was going as well as it could and find out whether there was anything that they needed or that I could help with. I was very impressed with the way everyone was dealing with the situation they found themselves in. Everyone was acting incredibly professionally and making sure they were helping those who turned up asking for help. I want to give a shout-out to the staff at service centres in my electorate of Herbert—that is, Aitkenvale, Willows and Palm Island. Thank you for the amazing job you've done for our community of Townsville. You have stood with your fellow community and you have been the helping hand they so desperately needed. I encourage you to stick with it and continue to do our city proud.

What does this have to do with the legislation before us today? Behind the people who are on the front line of service delivery are many others behind the scenes—those who make up the agency we know as Services Australia. It was the systems that Services Australia already had in place before the pandemic that allowed us to get literally billions of dollars out of the door within weeks. We're talking about the investments we've made over the years in myGov, in the electronic payment systems, in the backend computer and in the phone networks. They all came into their own. Yes, we know there were some issues and delays due to the global pandemic, the likes of which we've never seen before, but, if a lot of that work hadn't already been done with the consolidations that have been made with Centrelink and Medicare over the years, we would have been in an incredibly different and much more difficult situation. We may have been forced to do things the old-fashioned way, which would have added even more unacceptable delays to payments and left people out on the streets and left families without food on the table.

The bill before us has come about as a result of the work that's been done to create Services Australia as an executive agency, removing some of the disused names from the former legislation and making some governance changes. This move has been important to make some of those changes that I have been speaking about to ensure effective and efficient service delivery to the Australian people. Firstly, I turn to the schedule 1 changes. These are very simple administrative changes and will enable the legislation to reflect the new set-up. Importantly, it won't affect delivery of services or be otherwise noticeable to the community. Also, it's important that we protect the name 'Services Australia', as we are doing by amending the Human Services (Centrelink) Act 1997. The last thing we want, for example, is for businesses to imply, by using the name inappropriately, that they have a connection with the Australian government.

Secondly, I refer to the schedule 2 changes. Currently, the Chief Executive of Centrelink, the Chief Executive of Medicare and the Child Support Registrar are required to be different employees in Services Australia. We are changing that so that the responsibilities of those three positions can be exercised by the CEO of Services Australia. Rolling these three positions into the one makes sense, as the CEO already has responsibility for the operations of the executive agency. This is simply a result of the hard work that has been going into consolidating everything and increasing the efficiency of the agency so that people in the community can get the help they need in the least amount of time possible.

As I've said, these are largely administrative changes. They need to occur as we improve government services for the communities that we all serve. And that's what we need to remember. This shouldn't be about government, this shouldn't be about agencies, this shouldn't be about red tape making life more difficult; this should be about the people of Australia, the people each of us represent in this House, and ensuring that they have the support they need through Centrelink, through Medicare and through child support. I commend this bill to the House.

Dr ALY (Cowan) (10:22): I'm really pleased to stand here and speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. I've been waiting quite a while and it seems that every time it's time to speak about the bill something else happens, so I'm finally here. At one level this seems to be a fairly benign bill, with just some changes in terminology. References to 'Department of Human Services', DHS, are to be replaced with 'Services Australia' or 'the agency', and references to 'secretary' are to be changed to 'chief executive officer'. It ensures that information that was held by DHS before it became an executive agency continues to be protected. It protects the name 'Services Australia' from misuse and makes some consequential amendments, removing redundant definitions in line with those points. But there are some significant changes to the machinery of government.

Labor, of course, support this bill. But, at the same time, we're calling on the government to lift the APS staffing cap for Services Australia because of the consequences that that has had. I'm sure that all of us have stories to relate about the difficulties that our constituents have had in accessing Centrelink payments, particularly in recent times. I'll get to that in a minute.

I do want to acknowledge the contribution by the member for Herbert, because I think it's very fitting that he started by acknowledging Services Australia staff and the enormity of the challenges they have had, particularly with record unemployment in this very, very unusual year—I'm tempted to use the word 'unprecedented', but I think that word has been slightly overused. He is absolutely right to acknowledge the people who work at Services Australia and the very, very important work that they do.

While this bill does offer some really significant changes around governance and, as I mentioned earlier, some rather benign changes around terminology, it fails to address some of the core issues around Services Australia. I know that my Labor colleagues who spoke before I did have raised these issues, and those who speak after me will also do so. At the very centre of those issues is the arbitrary staffing cap which has been imposed across the public sector and which has led to an overreliance on labour hire to keep up with demand, as well as an exorbitant overspend on outsourcing and on consultants.

I think we're all rather haunted by those images of the lines at Centrelink that were splashed across our TV screens in March this year. And we're not just haunted by it. I think it really deeply affected every single Australian to see our nation and our country in such a situation. It brought back memories of wartime, the Depression and some of the darkest days in our history as a nation. And right there at the front line were the Services Australia staff. Like many of my colleagues on both sides of the House, we were inundated in my office with queries from people who were so desperate and so emotional. It was really hard not to get emotional when you spoke to people who, for the first time in their lives, had to go and stand in those lines and rely on social welfare, people who had to go onto a JobKeeper or a JobSeeker allowance and deal with a government agency or a social welfare agency for the first time in their lives.

Many of us, though, were very grateful that we live in Australia, where we do have such a social safety net, and we should absolutely be very proud of that in Australia. But if we're going to have a safety net, as we do, as the member has just said, we need it to be properly staffed. Over that initial period of the pandemic, when people were desperate and exasperated and were standing in queues or waiting on the telephone for hours on end, many people spoke to me about their experiences of the inadequate level of staffing at Services Australia. Of course, that's not anything new. Anybody who has had to deal with Services Australia or Centrelink before the COVID crisis hit knows that they could spend half their day on the phone being put on hold and—let's be honest—having to listen to some pretty horrible music, most of the time. But that's not the worst part of it.

The worst part of it is that, when people have to walk through those doors or get on that phone, they are at one of the lowest moments in their lives. I speak to this from the personal experience of having been one of those people. I remember the point in my life when I had to walk through those doors. At the very least, we should allow people to do that with dignity and grace. Keeping people on hold for hours at a time and keeping them waiting in lines for hours at a time does nothing to alleviate the stress, the pain and the mental health issues that are associated with people having to go on welfare. But, as the member for Herbert acknowledged, we are very, very fortunate in this country that we have frontline staff at Services Australia who do their best and who did their utmost during the crisis to provide a level of service to people that made them feel as well as they could in their times of crisis.

The staff at Services Australia managed a remarkable workload during that time—not only during COVID but even before that, dealing with the bushfire response in January and of course the surge of new applicants. These jobs are undoubtedly tough but rewarding for the people who take them on. They are what we might call the frontline jobs during the pandemic, and the pandemic has shown us that those people are our front line of defence against these security challenges that aren't your conventional types of challenges.

Labor welcomed the government's announcement on 22 March about engaging 5,000 additional new workers for Services Australia, to help with demand. But we do note that that number, 5,000, is exactly the number of workers the government have cut from the front line over the past six years. Imagine if they hadn't cut those 5,000 workers. Imagine the different experience that people who had to present at Services Australia and at Centrelink would have had, had this government not cut 5,000 workers from Services Australia over the past six years. I think it would be a very different image and a very different experience for those people.

Initially, Services Australia brought in an additional 5,000 staff through the agreements with their service delivery partners and other labour hire agencies, as well as 7,000 others redeployed from across the Australian Public Service. The fact is that there have been approximately 800,000 to a million new claims processed for JobSeeker, the same number of applications that would generally be processed by the agency across two years. So you've got two years of claims being condensed into a number of months, with many people claiming for the very first time—one in eight applicants needing to apply for a CRN for the very first time. I remember being on the phone at midnight to people who were struggling to find out how they could apply for a CRN, who had never had to apply for one before and who were totally lost. So there were 10,000 new jobs to deal with almost a million new claims. It hardly seems workable, does it? It hardly seems at all workable. So I think it is right that we acknowledge the incredible workload that the staff at Services Australia had to undertake.

We would like to see a lifting or a complete removal of the arbitrary staffing cap placed on Services Australia, as well as on the rest of the Public Service. We have a very good public service in Australia, and I speak as someone who was once, albeit many years ago, a public servant. Lifting that cap would allow the newly established agency to recruit an appropriate number of staff, determined by demand, and enable them to deliver the services that are required and to meet the increased demand brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

If workers are directly employed by Services Australia, it will allow for an engaged, a stable and an experienced workforce with less turnover. I've heard from people who have been employed by Services Australia through labour hire agencies, as well as from staff who have been employed directly by Services Australia, and their experiences speak very strongly to the benefits where staff are employed directly by Services Australia, and the productivity benefits that that brings to the Public Service. Those who are employed directly by the APS speak to me of their wealth of experience, but they also talk about the time and effort that's put into training people who come in through labour hire agencies and who are only there for a short term, and the wastage that happens in that situation.

In the time I have left I think it needs to be said, while I have the attention of the House or whoever is in the House, that the withdrawal of JobKeeper and JobSeeker, and the failure of this government to spend any of the money in the budget to plug the gaps in JobSeeker and JobKeeper, has seen people slip through the net. Every single member of the House here knows that there are people in their electorate who have slipped through the net—who are ineligible for JobSeeker or JobKeeper because of the status of the work they had or because of other conditions.

In this situation, there will continue to be added demand and added need for services and added pressure on Services Australia staff. So, while we support this bill—as I mentioned earlier, it is a rather benign bill—the real issue here is that we have and continue to have an Australian Public Service that meets the demands and needs of our population. We should be proud of our Public Service, and we want to be able to continue to be proud of our Public Service. But we cannot continue to rely on a Public Service model that veers towards privatisation, that outsources much of the work and that has lower productivity and lower efficiency because of that.

Mr DICK (Oxley) (10:37): I rise to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020 and commend the member for Cowan for her contribution to today's debate. I would have liked to have seen a few more members of the government actually enter the debate and talk about Services Australia—particularly in this climate of an economic recession, the Morrison recession, and the crisis that we're seeing with employment services and access to Australia's services in this country. I know the member for Cowan has been a long-term champion for access to income support. She's a lived-experience person, and I commend her for her courage in speaking out for the most marginalised and disadvantaged not only in her community but right across this country.

We know that the member, and every member on this side of the House, has horrific stories of people who have had terrible experiences with Services Australia. I was listening to the member for Herbert when I was in my office. I get quite angry, to be honest, when members of the government, and particularly the LNP in Queensland, parade themselves around as concerned and caring and commend the member for visiting Services Australia, and his office. He somehow wants to be congratulated for that. But I bet what he didn't do when he went to visit them was to say: 'I'm part of a government that cut the services by cutting employment in this organisation.' I'll bet he didn't go to them and say: 'Well, I was part of a government that cheered on when 5,000 employees were sacked, which made stress and strain unbearable for many of these workers.' I've met a number of people through the Community and Public Sector Union, and I pay tribute to the advocacy work that they have done, and it is horrific hearing some of the stories from frontline workers of the abuse, the violence and the intimidation from frustrated clients. These are people who don't have enough resources. Yet the government comes in here and says: 'Look at us! Look what we've done. We should be congratulated because we restored the 5,000 people that we sacked in the first place'! I mean, come off it!

Today's bill is an opportunity to raise my voice about concerns about the way Services Australia has been mishandled by this government—particularly in a pandemic where we've seen unprecedented economic turmoil, and now with the Morrison recession and what that means for the future of work in this country. I'm delighted that the member for Dobell moved this second reading amendment, because it allows us a voice on this piece of non-controversial legislation. It allows us to raise issues about the staffing cap, about the excessive use of consultancy firms and contractors and about—as the member for Cowan said: let's be honest—the privatisation of Services Australia and abolishing the ASL offset rule, which has the effect of capping average staffing levels within Services Australia.

This is a debate that should be had in this parliament, because of the impact of what Services Australia has gone through, through policy changes and through incompetence from this government and in particular the minister—I could be here all day talking about the incompetence of that minister—and what that means for millions of Australians who are now, through no fault of their own, forced to deal with Services Australia as they desperately look for income support.

So I just want to highlight the great work of Services Australia, the unbelievable commitment they've given to customer service—all those workers. I know in my own community, in the offices in Inala, in Goodna and right across the regional district that I represent through the Ipswich and south-west corridors of Brisbane, that in the 27 days from 25 March 1.9 million intention-to-claim forms were lodged online and 1.3 million JobSeeker claims were processed in the 55 days following the launch of JobKeeper. This claim volume would normally take 2½ years to process. Why? Because there wasn't the staff and there has never been the staff to deal with this kind of climate of economic uncertainty. At the peak, more than 53,000 claims were completed in a single day. Many of these new applicants had never accessed Centrelink support before in their life, as the member for Cowan illustrated, with one in eight new applicants needing to apply for a CRN.

In my electorate of Oxley around 19,000 people have been receiving JobKeeper payments via local businesses alone. That's approximately one in five businesses relying on some sort of income support, with another 5,000 people now receiving JobKeeper—25,000 people new, on the books of Services Australia. With many of these payments set to be rolled back in the next few months, I can tell you, the feedback from the workers I've sat down with and the businesses I've sat down with is that they are concerned about what that support will mean as they head towards the cliff in March. In the budget we saw a whole group of Australians being left out of the economy, which is a terrible thing, with the government more interested in the wrong priorities, I believe, and not providing long-term employment and support for those who particularly need it.

I want to touch briefly on the staffing cap that was placed across the public sector in 2013 without weighing up the capabilities or requirements of each agency department, neither at the time it was placed or looking towards the future. This has left agencies with no other choice but to outsource and spend an exorbitant amount on consultants. It's completely unfair and unnecessary to have two workers doing identical work but receiving different pay and conditions simply because one is lucky enough to have direct APS employment while the other is contracted to work through a labour hire agency. This becomes inequity in the workplace—

An honourable member interjecting—

Mr DICK: I'll take that interjection. Agencies have been forced to outsource and contract out time and time again, and we have heard firsthand of experiences, from talking to the Community and Public Sector Union, which does a fantastic job. I want to give a special shout-out to a local resident from my home state of Queensland, Bill Marklew OAM, who has been a great friend to many on this side of the chamber and I know the member for Griffith. Bill has had a long association with and was an advocate for the CPSU and was awarded an Order of Australia medal for his commitment and service, for advocacy for workers rights and also for the disadvantaged and marginalised in relation to forced adoptions. So, he's a wonderful advocate for many people, and he happens to live in the mighty suburb of Durack, just down the road from me.

In my office at Forest Lake we received numerous phone calls week in, week out from constituents—this was pre-COVID, pre the pandemic—from people who were unable to talk to someone, unable to get an answer back to them, unable to get the answers that they need to provide income support for their families. When we saw the long lines at Centrelink, wrapped around Wirraway Parade in Inala, I was not surprised because we saw that in the lead-up to the pandemic and we saw that long before this economic crisis unfolded.

The deputy national president of the CPSU has identified, since 2013, over 21,000 public service jobs that have been cut under successive Liberal governments, causing enormous damage to the capacity of the Commonwealth. The average staffing level cut has cut jobs and driven them to outsourcing labour hire companies and contractors. A Liberal government and job cuts—these same two terms have been in many sentences and it doesn't come as a surprise to many on this side of the chamber. Labor leader Anthony Albanese put it well when he said, 'At a time when we need muscle, the government has only left us a bone'. I thought that really summed up exactly the government's commitment to the Australian Public Service

For the last five minutes of my speech I want to turn to the impact that cuts to Human Services has had on the delivery of their services. I think it is important to raise in the parliament yet again the issue of the robodebt scandal. This is all linked into what this government's commitment to the Australian public sector, and particularly Services Australia, has meant. Robodebt is what happens when humans are taken out of Human Services. I can't say it any clearer than that. I was sitting in this place and heard the minister—from the Prime Minister down—simply dismissing it and saying, 'We have done nothing wrong. We have nothing to answer for.' They did have something to answer for. They were found to be acting illegally. I'm yet to hear a heartfelt apology from anyone inside the government, saying, 'We deeply regret what's happened. We apologise. We're upset about the 20,000 people a week we were trying to get money from.' I have one example of a retiree, a pensioner, living in Durack—it's all happening in Durack—at Aveo retirement village. I had spoken to her before. She rang me and I returned her call. She is a lovely retired schoolteacher who had a robodebt, because she had claimed too much when she was working. This woman was 92 and she had not worked for 23 years. She had a $1,680 debt and started paying off $60 a fortnight out of her pension, because she believed what the government said. She felt bad and she didn't want anyone knowing about it. She felt embarrassed talking to me about it. She said, 'I've never done anything wrong, Mr Dick. I just want to do the right thing. I wasn't sure and my daughter said I should check.' She didn't owe a cent—not one cent, nothing, zero. She had done nothing wrong. But she was doing the right thing. To my parents' generation, if the government says something you believe them. You have faith in the institutions. We obviously fixed that up—cleaned the government's mess up, if you will, in terms of this Services Australia bill today. I just thought to myself that this was just one tiny, microscopic example of what happened. Replicate that through every suburb, through every electorate right across the country and what do you get? You get tens of thousands of people who did nothing wrong. This government put in a scheme and, somehow, eight years ago it was Labor's fault that this woman got a debt under this government—insert 'ridiculous claims' by this government.

But that just demonstrates that when you take the humans out of Human Services and look at it through an ideological prism there is a human consequence. That was a really eye-opening matter for me, a real life experience, and I thought it was worthwhile putting it on the public record. I won't give the lady's name, because she would be mortified and embarrassed. But it goes to show the huge consequences for people when the government is so out of touch with what's happening in the community and doesn't look after those people.

A government member interjecting—

Mr DICK: I'll take that interjection. They used robodebt, an unchecked, out of control algorithm, with all the safeguards and human oversights removed—once again, the humans removed from Human Services. As I said, under the Labor government around 20,000 debts were raised per year; under this government, it was 20,000 debts per week. Just let that sink in for a moment.

Robodebt was predicated on harassing, bullying and frightening Australians into paying back money that in many cases they did not even owe in the first place. As yet, there's been no apology. I'd take an apology from the minister. I probably wouldn't get it from the Prime Minister. I'll take it from anyone from the government side who wants to jump up now. I'll sit down and they can offer a heartfelt apology.

Mr Robert interjecting—

Mr DICK: Well, if the minister is offering an apology to the people of Australia for robodebt, I will sit down. He's not taking me up on that offer, which is not surprising. It's time for the government to wake up and realise that Australians rely on Services Australia. It's time that they properly funded and staffed it and ensured that the services that Australians need and rely on are delivered to them.

Mr GORMAN (Perth) (10:52): This government has let down the people who work for Services Australia and it has let down the people who rely on Services Australia. I agree with my good friend the member for Oxley, who says we need an apology for robodebt. I think I'm going to go for about 10 minutes; I'm happy to be interrupted at any point for that apology for robodebt. People have been treated incredibly poorly by this government when it comes to the debts they didn't owe but were hounded for for months.

We debate this bill, the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020, in the context of the budget handed down on Tuesday night, which showed that people who are relying on Services Australia still get no certainty when it comes to their JobSeeker payments after December of this year. On Tuesday we saw students who rely on Austudy payments being whacked with a 113 per cent fee increase for their university studies. We saw pensioners get some one-off cash-splash payments but no permanent increases. We saw nothing for child care, which of course is administered through the Services Australia architecture, and we saw nothing for social housing, which is often paid for out of people's Centrelink payments. I do find it very odd to have a piece of legislation called a 'governance amendment' from this government. When I hear 'governance' and think about this government, I don't think of improvements to Services Australia; I think of sports rorts, robodebt, Jam Land, Helloworld, Ruby Princessand $30 million for Western Sydney Airport land. That's what I think of when I think of governance and this government. All of those governance failures by this government don't give people much faith in the governance of Services Australia.

We know that Services Australia has been merged into another beloved megadepartment by this government. Even this government knows that mergers don't always work out that well. You just have to ask the Liberal-National Party of Queensland how well mergers work out to know that they don't always end in a happy merger. It's a very unhappy merger, a very unhappy thing, and even with that merger they have to rely on Pauline Hanson's preferences to get anywhere. I'm sure that their dirty preference deals with Pauline Hanson will work out just as well as they did in Western Australia, where Colin Barnett did a comprehensive preference deal with One Nation and it blew up in his face.

My test for this piece of legislation is: does it result in more efficient services, better outcomes for staff and better outcomes for those Australians that rely on these services? When it comes to this government, though, we've seen so many cuts to our Public Service it has meant we've had to add 5,000 staff back into Services Australia to enable them to respond to the coronavirus crisis. We know this government refused to implement any serious support for those who work in the arts, resulting in huge queues of people who would have been happy to continue their work in the arts but, instead, were forced to go and knock on the door of Centrelink and go onto JobSeeker.

We also have the huge problem of the arbitrary staffing cap, leading to outsourcing and incredible overreliance on labour hire in our public sector. What we end up with is two workers doing exactly the same job, serving exactly the same clients and being paid incredibly different rates of pay. That doesn't sit right with me, and it shouldn't sit right with anyone in this place. We also know that, because of this government's inability to actually resource Services Australia properly, in the fortnight from 23 March, there were 6.5 million busy signals of people trying to get through. I accept it was an extraordinary time in our nation's history, but 6.5 million busy signals—that's a lot of people who, when they needed help from this government, did not have their phone calls answered.

I'm a huge supporter of the work that the team at Centrelink do. I visited Centrelink Morley in January of this year. Centrelink Morley is one of the largest Centrelinks in Western Australia. I said hello to Cheryl, Helyn and their team, and I want to say a huge thank you to the team at Centrelink Morley for all the work they did. At that point in time, I was there to thank them because a number of their staff had actually come over to the eastern states to help with local service delivery in response to the bushfires. Less than two months later, they were finding themselves in another crisis—on the front line, helping people in their darkest hour. So again, in May of this year, I went to say thank you, to keep their spirits up. They had worked incredibly hard, done lots of overtime and were dealing with people in incredibly stressful situations.

Data shows that, in March, 8,554 people accessed services at Morley Centrelink. There were 4,331 in April and 4,336 in May. And, despite the fact that this Centrelink is relied on by thousands of Western Australians every month, when I wrote to the minister and said, 'Can you guarantee that it will stay open?' he said, 'We've got a lot of online services.' All I wanted to know was whether my local Centrelink would stay open during this crisis, and the response I got was: 'Go online.' It is unbelievable that we can't even get a guarantee from this government about Morley Centrelink—one of the busiest Centrelinks in Western Australia.

I want to share a story about my constituent Rita, who went to apply for her age pension. For many older Australians, applying for the age pension is an exciting point in your life. It's the conclusion of your working life. You are embarking on that next step to enjoy a well-earned retirement. Rita did all the right things. She went into Centrelink and got all her documents together. They gave her an envelope. That envelope had on it the address in Canberra to send the documents to so that she could receive her pension. The only problem was that Centrelink had forgotten to renew the PO Box with Australia Post. And she wasn't the only constituent. For all of these people sending their documents in, the documents were going in the shredder because Centrelink hadn't even renewed their Australia Post PO Box. I know this because I contacted Australia Post and said: 'What's going on? Why are these documents that my constituents are sending not going anywhere?' And Australia Post dumped Centrelink in it. They said: 'The delay is a result of the item being posted to a reply paid PO Box service which had not been renewed. Attempts were made to alert Centrelink of the items on hand and the lapsed renewal, and the delivery centre held the items to allow opportunity for renewal of the service and collection of items by Centrelink representatives. Neither occurred, following a few delivery attempts that were unsuccessful.' That is how this government runs our Centrelink service. It's disgraceful.

I'm aware the Deputy Prime Minister is about to make a ministerial statement. I will end by saying something about the City of Perth. In March of this year I was contacted by CPSU members working for Services Australia in the Perth CBD saying that they were uncomfortable catching public transport at that point in time. They needed cheaper parking. The City of Perth responded to that and brought parking fees down to $10 a day. I want to congratulate the City of Perth for doing that and also take this opportunity, in closing, to thank the commissioners of the City of Perth who are about to step down as we go to council elections. I want to say thank you to Andrew Hammond, Gaye McMath and Len Kosova for running the Perth city council in an incredibly difficult time and in incredibly difficult circumstances. They have done a great job for the people of Perth and I thank them.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Gillespie ): The debate is adjourned and made an order of the day for a later hour.

Dr CHALMERS (Rankin) (11:47): I rise to speak about the omnibus tax bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (A Tax Plan for the COVID-19 Economic Recovery) Bill 2020—the tax announcements that were made in Tuesday night's budget. The announcements in the bill do five things. First, they bring forward the stage 2 tax cuts and the associated changes to the low- and middle-income tax offset, the LMITO. They increase the small business turnover threshold for certain concessions to $50 million. They make amendments to the research and development tax incentive. They implement the temporary loss carry-back against previous profits measure. Finally, they introduce the temporary full expensing of depreciating assets—the instant asset write-off.

There are five parts to this omnibus bill, some of which we've known about for a little while, some of which we found out about for the first time less than 48 hours ago. We should note from the outset that it is unusual to be considering and passing spending of this magnitude and changes of this magnitude with very little notice. We should note at the start of the debate that it should have been possible to pass, for example, the income tax cuts that both sides of the parliament have supported for some time. Indeed, we've been calling for them since August of last year. We could have done that to give the ATO some certainty to implement the income tax cuts. Instead, I wrote to the tax commissioner yesterday to give him a formal assurance that we would be supporting those income tax cuts. We need to get those into the pockets of Australians and into the small businesses, shops and local economies of this country as soon as possible, and there is no reason that cannot be the case.

In terms of the specifics of the measures, I will go through them in turn. The first is the bringing forward of the income tax cuts. Obviously Labor supports those. They are not a panacea. They will not do everything that we need to do in the economy in terms of boosting spending power, which was already weak, before coronavirus. But they will help. They will make a difference to the Australian workers receiving those tax cuts. We are obviously prepared to support them, including the changes for low- and middle-income earners in the LMITO. Similarly, with the increase of the threshold for small businesses, we support that going to $50 million. We don't expect that to be especially controversial. The temporary loss carry-back against previous profits provision is something that we are supportive of and we have been calling for. It's not hard to imagine the good that this measure can do. You perhaps think particularly of small businesses in Victoria, but other parts of Australia are doing it tough. I spent the first part of last week in Cairns. Far North Queensland—as the member for Moreton knows, as does the member for Griffith, having been from there, is doing it really tough. Some of those businesses will benefit from having the capacity to carry back their losses so that they can smooth out the tax liabilities over a couple of good years—and the year 2020, which none of us could possibly describe as good. So we support that, too.

There are two that we will support, but ideally we would have had a bit more time to go through them. The first is the research and development tax incentive. In this measure there's $2 billion going back into the system that those opposite were proposing to cut $1.8 billion from. At that level, we are pleased to see that some of the campaigning and some of the pressure that the sectors have put on and that Labor, in our consultation, has been part of as well, is seeing that money restored. I acknowledge the minister and the assistant minister at the table. There's a lot of complexity in those R&D measures. They have a chequered history, I think we can probably agree. Changes to the research and development tax incentive have been on the table for some time now, and there hasn't been a lot of agreement around those changes, not even, if I may say so, amongst the governing parties. There hasn't been unanimous agreement about the best way to go about it. Hopefully, what the government is proposing here is an improvement on the original system and also on the proposed changes, which have sat on the table for so long and not been supported by the Senate. We should acknowledge that it has had a chequered, controversial history.

As my colleague the member for Hotham, and the shadow minister for industry, Brendan O'Connor, have talked about repeatedly, we won't have the kind of economy that we want in the future unless we do better in terms of how we get bang for buck for our investment in research and development. We hope that what the government proposes here can be part of that effort. If that's not the case, if it turns out that there are unintended consequences or that there are difficulties that were unforeseen in the 48 hours or so since we got word that this would be in the budget, then obviously the government takes responsibility for any errors that have been made or changes that need to be made. It's a very complex area and it's very difficult to satisfy all of the players. On this side of the House we have a proud history of implementing some of these R&D measures. We are worried about some of the missteps in more recent times. We say that as we support this measure, but with those reservations expressed, and are now on the record.

The final one is the big one: $27 billion for one measure, spread out over a couple of financial years, but effectively a 12-month measure—$27 billion is a lot of money. Again, we've had only a couple of days to consider it. We acknowledge that there is an investment problem in our economy. That's been turbocharged by COVID-19, but it was there before, as well. We had incredibly weak business investment leading into the crisis, very flat business investment, which was partly a function of having 22 different energy policies in the last seven years—not a lot of energy policy certainty. In almost every boardroom that I go to, and there are a few of those, businesses tell me that energy policy uncertainty is a big part of that puzzle. This doesn't substantially get to that.

We've had a problem with business investment. We've said before, on this side of the House, that we took to the last election a policy to address this issue. It was a little bit like what the government's proposing, but the government has gone to 100 per cent write-off. We want that to succeed. We want that to be a measure which kick starts investment in the private economy, that's absolutely crucial. We won't get the right kind of recovery without business investment, without the private sector purring again, and ideally this will be part of it.

We don't want to hold up the progress of some of these measures and their capacity to do some good in the economy. We've said from the outset today that we will be supporting these measures. But we should note on the way through, in terms of this big measure, it's a temporary measure. Its intention is to bring forward some of that investment. We see where the government is coming from in some respects, but for such a big spend it is quite remarkable that they're not paying for a permanent change in the way that we incentivise business in this country. It would be remarkable if having spent $27 billion that what we're left with then is a big cliff when the incentive drops away. I'm worried about what happens then. I'm worried about the lack of vision for business investment beyond a 12- or 18-month period, particularly when the government is committing so much money to this.

Obviously there are a range of other potential issues with the way the government is going about that part of this package. Having had this for a couple of days, a bit like the R&D tax incentive, I think it's only fair that if issues emerge the government needs to own them and it needs to fix them, because we're committing an enormous amount of money in this package and the opposition's only had a couple of days to consider it. There are other issues as well around that part of bill but I won't detain the House with those.

Where do these tax measures fit into the broader picture of the budget? We've said that we support all five of them, including the loss carry-back provision. We are prepared to vote to get these through the House today and into the Senate as soon as possible. We do acknowledge that these are serious times. We're in the deepest, most damaging recession for almost 100 years. We've got a full-blown jobs crisis on our hands. Already almost a million Australians are unemployed and another 160,000 are expected to join the unemployment queues by the end of the year. That means we need to do what we can together to try and deal with that jobs crisis and with that recession. Incentivising business is part of that. We do need to get the private sector growing again. We do need to get them hiring again. We've been saying for some time that using the tax system is an important way to go about that.

It needs to be said that in a budget that racks up a trillion dollars in debt and has $100 billion in new spending—just eye-watering amounts of money, as the Treasurer has said before—it's remarkable that the government has found room to do some of these things but no room to do things like child care, social housing or local jobs programs for some of the hardest hit communities, including some of those represented by our side of the House. It's remarkable.

This bill is about what's in the budget, but Tuesday night was as much about what wasn't in the budget as anything else. Tonight, from this dispatch box, our leader, the member for Grayndler, will have more to say about that. But for now, I indicate Labor's support for these bills. I indicate, in part, our reservations on two of those: R&D and the early expensing. But there is the capacity for the government, who don't have a good record, frankly—they're good at announcing the big numbers, getting the front of The Daily Telegraph. They're good at that. They're not so good on the follow through. We saw that with JobKeeper and other measures. So we support this bill, but with the caveat and the recognition that, if they've got it wrong in one way or another, it wouldn't be the first time and probably won't be the last time. We need to acknowledge that, if errors have been made and not been able to be found in the two days that we've had these measures, that's on the government, and it's on the government to fix them as well. But we support the bill. I'll leave it at that.

Mr BANDT (Melbourne—Leader of the Australian Greens) (12:00): [by video link] This budget is a trickle-down con, and these bills, which are being rushed through the House right now with, it seems, the support of everyone else in the House, are going to lock in the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars, being taken away from the public purse and going to line the pockets of big corporations and the super wealthy. Let's be crystal clear about what these bills that are being rushed through by Liberal and Labor will do. They will take hundreds of billions of dollars that could be going to fund schools, hospitals, renewable energy and free education in this country and use it to give tax cuts to millionaires and the super wealthy and to deliver tens of billions of dollars a year to big corporations, which currently already pay no tax, to go and spend as they wish, without any constraint at all.

Let's go through these measures one by one. It's important to understand just how egregious this spending is. I want to place on record that it is extraordinary that, with only a couple of days notice, we are being asked to vote on bills that lock in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of spending. Yes, we are in a crisis, and, yes, we have a million people looking for work, but this government came in here and cut JobKeeper and JobSeeker and now turns around and says, 'We want to give millionaires even more money and we want you to rush it through parliament.' Well, no. The Australian people are looking to this place for leadership on how we are going to bring down unemployment—not to six per cent, as the Treasurer wants, but to full employment, where we have two per cent unemployment. We need to ensure that we are spending our money not only quickly but wisely. We need to spend it in a way that is going to generate full employment, tackle the climate crisis and tackle the inequality crisis in this country. Instead the government, with Labor's backing, is rushing through bills that are going to make inequality in this country worse, that are going to fast-track the climate crisis and that are going to help line the pockets of millionaires.

Why do we say that this is a budget that is going to help millionaires but not the million unemployed? It is very, very clear. These tax cuts are a trickle-down con. Under these tax cuts, what many people don't know is that, for middle- to low-income earners, you might get a boost this year of $1,000, but it runs out next year. Someone who is on $60,000 gets zero next year from this so-called tax cuts package, but a millionaire gets 2½ grand, and it stays forever and keeps on rising. Under this bill, millionaires get $2,500, the working poor get $250 and the unemployed get a kick in the teeth. This is a budget for the millionaires, not for the million unemployed, and Liberal and Labor are waving it through. These tax cuts go overwhelmingly to the top. There's a short-term cover for people who are on middle to low incomes, but that runs out after a year, whereas the higher income earners, including millionaires, keep getting it forever. What does that mean? It means that this multibillion dollar package, which is going to take away from money that could have been going to schools and hospitals, is going to be handed out in away that makes the millionaires and billionaires even richer. Next year, under this bill, 96 per cent of the tax cut package goes to the top 30 per cent of income earners, so the bottom 70 per cent of the population gets four per cent of the money. That is why this budget and these tax cuts are a trickle-down con and why Labor should not be waving them through.

The inequality gets even worse. Next year we know that 69 per cent of the benefits of the tax cuts go to men and only 31 per cent go to women. In a budget that leaves women behind, this bill and these tax cuts make the situation worse. We know the recession has hit women the hardest and women have lost jobs at a higher rate. Women have had to not only bear that high rate of job loss but carry the can in many instances for the increased caring responsibilities that come from people being in lockdown. Plus, many of the industries in which women work and will be looking to get back into as the recovery picks up are the ones that have been the hardest hit and might take longer to get back up. Plus, the government's further attack on education, universities and child care will make it harder for women to find their way back to jobs in those sectors.

And here we have a bill that makes the situation worse. Here we have a bill that's part of a budget that enshrines cuts to JobKeeper and JobSeeker. It will deliver tax cuts to men at more than twice the rate than to women. It gives 96 per cent to the top income earners and four per cent to the bottom 70 per cent. It is being waved through. The cost of this will be enormous because there is less money there for schools, hospitals, free education and public housing.

The Parliamentary Budget Office costed bringing forward by two years these tax cuts, which aren't, as I said, aimed at low- and middle-income earners but deliver the overwhelming majority of the benefit to the top income earners, including millionaires. What did the Parliamentary Budget Office say this would cost? They said that bringing forward the tax cuts in this package by two years would cost $28 billion. If the government used that money to help fund some public investment and borrowed to invest in some infrastructure for Australia, we could build high-speed rail down the east coast and over 300,000 new public housing units. With the amount of money being dished out at the moment we could be giving tens of thousands of people jobs. Instead, Liberal and Labor want to give tax cuts, including to millionaires. This is money that is coming out of the pockets of everyday people and going to the top.

In a recession, when one million people are unemployed, there is no justification for giving tax cuts to millionaires. There can be no justification for giving Clive Palmer and other millionaires a tax cut while there are one million people looking for work. It will not create work. It's not only unfair but bad economic stimulus. People like Clive Palmer and millionaires who have kept their jobs and their wealth throughout this recession will just pocket the extra $2,000 a year they get out of the public purse. If we lifted JobSeeker and invested to give people decent jobs on nation-building, planet-saving projects then people on lower incomes would take the money and spend it.

We have got now more than one million kids in families who have been pushed into poverty as a result of the government's cuts to JobSeeker. How can it be that in this budget there is money for a tax cut for millionaires and Clive Palmer but not enough money to lift JobSeeker and lift children out of poverty? That is what this bill represents. That is this bill that Liberal and Labor are fast-tracking through.

The cost of these tax cuts is going to be felt for generations. In the future years the cost of the tax cuts alone is going to be in the order of $50 billion a year when all of the stages of the tax cuts are baked in, according to the budget papers and according to estimates. That's $50 billion a year! For about half of that increase in debt we could fund 100 cent renewable energy, we could have free child care, we could have free education, we could build half a million new public housing homes and we could lift people out of poverty by giving everyone in this country an income that they could live on. That's what we could do for about half of the $50 billion that these tax cuts are going to start costing the budget every year. Instead of the government saying, 'We've got the money in the public purse. Let's use it to invest and to create jobs,' like they did after World War II and like the United States did after the Depression to get back to full employment, what is the government doing? It's not lifting public investment and it's not creating jobs; it is just giving it straight to the wealthy, and it's doing it with Labor's support.

This creates a very bad precedent. If we now have a situation where tens of billions of dollars can be funnelled out the door without even the most basic of scrutiny then this parliament is in a very distressing place, because what we are doing here today is going to tie the hands of what future generations are going to be able to do. As they deal with the climate crisis and as they deal with an inequality crisis, they going to be stripped of the ability for government to intervene and lead.

With this money—with these tens of billions of dollars that have been shovelled upwards through this budget—we could fund a green recovery. If you don't believe us, have a look at Boris Johnson over in the United Kingdom, who says that instead of subsidising coal-fired power stations and gas plants—as the government wants to do in this budget—let's have every house in the country powered by wind energy through a great big new build of offshore wind. It is possible to follow the lead of the Europeans, who've got their own green deal, or the South Koreans and to say that the way out of the economic crisis that we're in, the way out of the inequality crisis that we're in and the way out of the climate crisis that we're in is through a government-led plan of investment and action that will tackle all of these crises by investing in the industries that will make our climate safer and make our society more equal.

We should not be giving billions of dollars in a 'tax cuts to millionaires' package that's going to disproportionately discriminate against women and that's going to go to the top rather than to everyone else. Instead we should be asking these billionaires and the big corporations to pay their fair share of tax, and we should use that to create jobs through a recovery plan that grows work in our health and our care sectors, that expands our education sector rather than cuts it, that builds 100 per cent renewable energy in this country and that fast-tracks high-speed rail right down the east coast.

What is crystal clear from this budget and this bill is that, from now on, neither Liberal nor Labor can ever say to us, 'Where are you going to get the money from to fund things like 100 per cent renewable energy, free child care or free education?' because the money is clearly there. Right now—today—the government and Labor are funnelling tens of billions of dollars out the door, which is going to go to the pockets of big corporations and millionaires. That money would be better spent on a recovery plan that makes our society more equal, that grows our education and care sectors and that gets us to 100 per cent renewable energy while kicking off a manufacturing renaissance in this country by investing in the likes of green steel. That's what we could be doing with these tens of billions of dollars. Instead, the government's plan is basically to outsource the whole of the recovery.

The government is outsourcing the recovery plan to billionaires and big corporations. The investment and the asset write-off that's proposed in this budget is basically premised on a hope and a prayer that, if we allow big corporations to write off everything that they purchase, they will hopefully invest it in things that create jobs. That kind of trickle-down thinking hasn't worked in the past, and there's no reason to think it's going to work again this time, because there's every chance that big corporations will just see the tax write-off coming from the government and go and use it to buy cheap computers from China. There's nothing in this proposal that requires an increase in expenditure that will lead to more jobs or an investment in Australian-made products—no, the government is not doing that. It's just letting big corporations write the rules.

At the moment, one in three of our biggest companies in this country pays no tax, and this government's plan is to increase that to two in three. This bill will allow two in three of our biggest corporations to basically have no tax liability. At a time when the gas industry brings in around $50 billion a year in income but pays zero tax, we should be looking at ways of making the big corporations that have survived this corona crisis in rude financial health—and that have, in fact, increased their wealth through this—pay their fair share of tax to fund our schools, our hospitals and our health care. Instead, the government, with Labor's support, is saying, 'Let's raid the public purse so that we can give millionaires and big corporations a chop-out and hope that some of it finds its way back down.'

This is not the green recovery that we needed. We needed a green recovery, but this budget is all brown and trickle down. We should be standing up to this government. We should be scrutinising this multibillion dollar spend. We should be saying, 'Let's make this money go to the people instead of the billionaires and the big corporations.' The Greens will fight for the millions, not the millionaires. But the government and Labor, with this bill, are shovelling money upwards at an unprecedented rate, and it will damage us for generations. (Time expired)

Mr SUKKAR (Deakin—Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Housing) (12:15): I thank those who have contributed to this debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (A Tax Plan for the COVID-19 Economic Recovery) Bill 2020.

In summing up on this very important bill, schedule 1 of the bill brings forward tax cuts in stage 2 of the Personal Income Tax Plan from 1 July 2022 to 1 July 2020 and retains the low- and middle-income tax offset through 2020-21. As has been said, this measure will provide tax relief of around $17.8 billion over the forward estimates, which ultimately means more money in the hands of Australians. This will provide around 11.6 million individuals with a tax cut, compared with the 2017-18 settings. These tax cuts support low- and middle-income Australians with the majority of the benefit in 2020-21 being received by those on incomes below $90,000. Low- and middle-income earners will receive tax relief in 2020-21 of $2,745 for singles and up to $5,490 for dual-income families when compared with 2017-18 settings. Ultimately, this gives families the certainty that they can pay their bills and the freedom to spend that money. Greater consumption will also support businesses, which will flow through to increased hiring and business investment. This will support jobs and growth and help the economic recovery effort. The government's Personal Income Tax Plan contributes to a stronger and more resilient economy. This bill therefore accelerates the government's commitment to deliver lower taxes and a simpler tax system that benefits all Australians.

Schedule 2 to the bill provides temporary loss carry back, which allows companies with turnover of up to $5 billion to offset current tax losses against prior profits to provide a much-needed cash boost for firms that have been negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and to support the use of temporary full expensing. Schedule 3 to the bill expands access to a range of small business tax concessions by increasing the aggregated annual turnover threshold for these concessions from $10 million to $50 million. The changes will cut red tape and give eligible businesses access to these additional 10 concessions for the first time. Schedules 4 to 6 of the bill implement our much-needed reforms to the research and development tax incentive. And, importantly, schedule 7 to the bill will support business investment and economic recovery by allowing businesses with turnover of less than $5 billion to deduct the full cost of eligible depreciable assets of any value acquired and first used or installed between 7.30 pm Australian eastern daylight time on 6 October 2020 and 30 June 2022.

This bill delivers tax relief at a time when it is needed most. I therefore commend this bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

Mr SUKKAR (Deakin—Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Housing) (12:19): by leave—I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL (Lyons) (12:20): I rise today to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. This bill sets out the proposed framework for the newly established executive agency, Services Australia, to replace the now abolished department of human services. I don't think anybody on this side of the House is surprised that this government is stripping humanity out of government services.

Labor supports modifications to public sector governance structures that lead to good outcomes for employees and the Australians who rely on those services. However, this bill fails to address the core issue at the centre of Services Australia's problems, and that is the arbitrary staffing cap imposed across the Australian Public Service by the Liberal government. The staffing cap is both nonsensical and counterproductive. Supposedly introduced to drive efficiencies on the delivery of services, it has instead resulted in a dramatic deterioration of service delivery and a massive cost blowout in the use of consultancies. Consultancies are scooping up hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money and creaming off their lucrative fees along the way as backdoor starting operations.

Services Australia staff help Australians in their moments of greatest need. These hardworking, and indeed overworked, staff provide financial relief to those unable to work, to older Australians, to carers and to people with disability. They assist people in finding counselling and social work services. They help jobseekers find meaningful occupations or prepare them to re-enter the workplace. More than 70,000 Tasmanians receive the age pension, 1,000 are carers and almost 4,000 students receive some form of income support. All require interaction with Services Australia to varying degrees, not to mention the tens of thousands receiving JobSeeker.

The important work done by Services Australia has never been more obvious than in the first six months of this year, with staff managing a remarkable workload from dealing with the bushfire response in January to managing the surge in new applicants for JobSeeker that arose in March as a result of COVID-19. From March to June, the staff at Services Australia processed around 800,000 new claims for JobSeeker. That's the number they would normally process in two years. It was an incredible feat. They went above and beyond to help their fellow Australians, and I never again want to hear derision from those opposite about the value and importance of public sector workers. These people turn up to work every day and slog their guts out to ensure their fellow Australians can receive the assistance they require in their hour of need.

Labor did welcome the government's announcement on 22 March to engage 5,000 additional new workers to help manage the extra demand. But 5,000 happens to coincide almost exactly with the number of people the Liberal government have cut from the front line since 2013. There are currently 1.45 million Australians on JobSeeker and another 160,000 are expected to join them by Christmas. The job for Services Australia is not getting easier any time soon.

The only way to ensure that Services Australia, and indeed the public sector as a whole, can meet the demands placed upon them is to remove the arbitrary staffing cap. Since coming to power, the Liberals have cut nearly 19,000 jobs from the Australian Public Service and capped staffing levels at around or below 2006-07 levels, but it's not like it has led to any savings. Government jobs have become outsourced agency jobs that cost taxpayers more but pay staff less. It's a false economy for everyone except the consultancies that are creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from the taxpayer. It is mind-bogglingly stupid from both a hard-headed economic point of view and a bleeding heart point of view.

In Tasmania, more than 600 federal Public Service jobs have been lost since 2013. In the 2018-19 financial year alone, Tasmania lost 158 Centrelink and Medicare jobs. The Department of Health workforce shrank by 30 per cent, the Department of Veterans' Affairs workforce by 23 per cent and the Bureau of Meteorology workforce by nine per cent. We've lost AFP officers and agents, and Tuesday's budget made it clear that there's no plan to bring them back. As an aside: if the Prime Minister is serious about creating jobs in the regions—and we've heard from the Deputy Prime Minister today about regions—then how about re-creating Australian Public Service agencies in regional cities and regional towns, reopening the offices and staffing the counters? How many older Australians who live in the regions have to go online and try to navigate nearly nonsensical websites? They just can't make sense of them, and, when they phone up trying to get advice, they're on hold for hours.

Imagine what it would be like in regional cities and regional towns if you could go into a Centrelink office, a Medicare office or a department of ageing office and actually have human beings at the counter who are trained and ready, willing and able to help people in regional cities and regional towns to get the services they deserve. Right there are some job ideas for the government. With these cuts that we've experienced in Tasmania, it's not as though demand for these services was dropping off. These were busy people. They had work to do. Now that they're gone, those who have been left behind have even more to do. Is it any wonder that it takes so much time for a call to be answered?

In August 2019 the Senate referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee an inquiry into the impact of changes to service delivery models on the administration and running of government programs. In its report the committee called for the average staffing level cap to be abolished, calling it an 'inflexible and arbitrary imposition' and noting that outsourcing government services is an activity 'fraught with risk'. The committee also argued that privatisation leads to 'a loss of capability in the Public Service, potentially throwing away decades of knowledge and expertise'. The report also reflected industry and union concerns about how outsourcing affects staff, as those working for private entities are often casualised or on contracts, are paid less and have worse conditions than permanent employees. I might also mention here that the committee recommended that the Morrison government scrap its plan to privatise Australia's visa system and instead look for an in-house solution within the Department of Home Affairs.

I support the calls from the Community and Public Sector Union to scrap the cap. Staffing cuts and caps mean that, regardless of how much work needs to be done, agencies have been forced to arbitrarily limit their permanent staff. They can either squeeze their remaining staff as hard as they can in order to drive productivity beyond human capability or they can find a backdoor way to put more people on. Most senior managers and executives try option A. They try to squeeze their staff before surrendering to the reality that staff can only do so much and that they need option B: more people. But the staffing caps mean they need to hire consultancies, who then provide the staff to do the same jobs that public sector staff used to do. The private staff are paid less. For instance, they get 9½ per cent superannuation, not the 15.4 per cent that Commonwealth public servants get. And the consultancy owners—and this is the real rub—become millionaires from the fees they earn, and that is no exaggeration.

So staff are paid less, the public gets a worse service, it's more expensive to the taxpayer and the consultancy owners are millionaires. It's no wonder that under this government labour hire and the contracting out of public sector work has ballooned. If it were less expensive and led to better service then you might think: 'Okay; what's wrong with that? Maybe they've got a good idea. Maybe we need to rethink the model.' But it's more expensive, and service is worse. Nobody wins except the consultants, who become millionaires.

New analysis by the Australian National Audit Office has found that the big four consultancy firms—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC—now collectively reap $800 million a year in government contracts. Around $160 million of that is on genuine consultancy; the rest is simply on providing outsourced staff to do jobs. It would be cheaper to employ permanent staff in the APS, but that's against the government's staffing cap. It is a farcical way to run a government. A review by former Telstra CEO David Thodey recently found the use of external contractors and consultants to deliver work previously done in house was a key factor behind the decline in the capability of the APS. Well, blow me down with a feather!

Too many phone calls to Services Australia go unanswered every year, and Australians waste far too much time on hold trying to access Centrelink services, causing great unnecessary distress. In the fortnight from 23 March, for example, instead of speaking to a person who could help them, callers to Services Australia were met with 6.5 million busy signals, two million congestion messages and 1.5 million unanswered calls, with an average call wait time of more than 40 minutes. It's a disgrace. The CPSU tells us that 1.5 million calls unanswered is business as usual. This is not about the pandemic. This is not, 'Gee, we didn't see the pandemic coming; everything's gone to rubbish.' This is business as usual under this government. It is symptomatic of the Liberals' incompetence in government at every level. Far and away the majority of constituent inquiries to my electorate office are in regard to the delays in the processing of Centrelink claims, and I'm sure the same could be said for many of my colleagues. We are, in effect, an outsourced office of Centrelink. This government has denuded staffing at Centrelink to such an extent that people are coming to their federal MPs seeking assistance from us.

A few months ago I had a call from Jo, who lives in the town of Broadmarsh in my electorate. Jo had lodged a claim for JobSeeker in January. Illness had prevented her from working since the end of last year and she was fast using up her savings on day-to-day living expenses. Despite many calls and visits to the local Centrelink service centre, Jo's claim had not been processed by the time she contacted my office in May. Our wonderful Centrelink liaison contact was able to get Jo's claim processed within a day or two of us contacting them. But it should not take intervention from a federal MP for a claim to be seen to. Five months for a claim to be processed is just outrageous. This is a woman who was out of work, using up all her savings over five months. She was worried. How was she going to pay her bills? How was she going to put food on the table? Five months without income—it's an absolute disgrace. I know it's no fault of the staff within Centrelink. They are exhausted. They are working beyond human measure. Jo's story is by no means a one-off. It is commonplace for my office to assist constituents who are owed thousands of dollars in back pay because of the long delays in processing their claims.

Robodebt—I don't even know where to start. I've only got two minutes; I need another 20 minutes. This government and this minister wrongfully, illegally raised more than 470,000 debts against Australians, primarily against low-income earners. That's the legacy of this government—robodebt. I can't even begin to imagine a government wilfully, as the evidence is now emerging, and knowingly raising debts against Australians that the government knew they didn't owe. The government actually knew these people did not owe the government money and yet told them to pay up anyway. I know what that's called out in the real world. That's called theft; it's called stealing; it's called extortion. It's an absolute disgrace. Yet the minister behind it continues to sit on the front bench alongside his compatriot, Minister Tudge, who's been found by the Federal Court to have behaved criminally. How is the man still in cabinet?

The Federal Court has found a minister of the Crown to have acted criminally. You're looking at me quizzically, over there, barrister Deputy Speaker, but that's what the Federal Court said.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Wallace ): You're sailing very close to the wind—very close to the wind.

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: I'll conclude on that remark. But that's what the Federal Court found.

A government member interjecting—

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: It's not an allegation. It's a finding by a Federal Court judge; it's not commentary. So robodebt under this minister—

A government member interjecting—

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: Wouldn't be hard to find comments, mate.

A government member interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

A government member interjecting—

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: You go and look at the court finding. Look at the court finding.

A government member interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

A government member interjecting—

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: You go and look at the court finding: criminal.

A government member interjecting—

Mr BRIAN MITCHELL: So this Prime Minister—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The honourable member's time has expired, at the appropriate time. The question is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Mr GOSLING (Solomon) (12:35): Can I just make the observation that I don't think that some of the members sitting in this House right now want to be defending people who have acted criminally.

I want to support what the member for Lyons has just said and I particularly want to take up his point about how the outsourcing of these roles by Centrelink, by Human Services, has meant that the staff in our electorate offices have seen and heard about a lot of trauma. They've heard a lot of very difficult stories from people who it was wrongly claimed owed money to the Commonwealth and who don't know how they they're going to pay some of these robodebts. It's been difficult not only for the staff of Human Services but also for the staff at our electorate offices. So I want to thank the member for Lyons for making that point and I want to acknowledge the staff in my electorate office in Darwin—in particular, Sharon, who, during this whole sorry saga, has been a caring person who has listened to and helped some of these very distressed individuals through what has been a traumatic time. We know that some of the people wrongly charged with owing money to the Commonwealth—they didn't—lost the battle with that mental anguish and, in some cases, took their own lives.

Like the member for Perth, I'll be speaking for about 10 minutes or so, and I welcome, as he did, anyone from the other side—any minister of the Crown—who wants to stand up and apologise for all the hurt, anguish and distress caused by that program. We've seen that no action has ever been taken against any minister in this federal government of Australia when there's been clear evidence of wrongdoing. It's like they're all Teflon. They've got their own standards of behaviour. There is no ministerial code of practice anymore; it's just whatever Scotty from marketing believes he can get away with—and he seems to get away with a lot. He's just got away with putting out a trillion dollar budget, after haranguing our fine Labor governments for reacting to a global crisis like the GFC by putting money into things like social housing, by stimulating the economy, which brought us through that difficult time, that difficult financial time, for our country well—exceedingly well. And we had high standards of ministerial responsibility. They threw royal commissions at us. We held our heads high, behaved honourably and got the country through that crisis when it visited our shores.

I just wanted to echo those words, as well as the words of the member for Oxley, who spoke incredibly well about some of the people in his electorate who were adversely affected by robodebt; and of the member for Cowan in her passionate acknowledgement of Human Services staff and her advocacy for people on the margins—people on low incomes and people who are not eligible for support. We saw that in the budget just the other day, with those over 35 not being eligible for assistance to get back into the workforce. People might remember Newstart; it was before the JobKeeper slogan. Those opposite and the Prime Minister seem intent on having that go back to $40 a day. You might be an over-35-year-old working Australian. You might have a mortgage, and you might have kids and child care, and you're trying to get back into work. Was there any new childcare assistance? No. It's back to $40 a day as of Christmas time. Happy Christmas from the Prime Minister and Treasurer!

I'll now go to the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. The core issue here is Services Australia, the arbitrary staffing cap imposed across the public sector and the effect that has had on human services. It's the exorbitant amount of money that's being spent on labour hire, outsourcing and consultants when Australians could be employed in good, secure jobs and helping other Australians who need a hand. Those Australians are in their greatest hour of need and greatest despair, something we've seen in the past months. We've got people who've never come into contact with Centrelink or Human Services before in their working life. They've paid taxes, but COVID and the stop to some commercial activity have meant that some of these people have needed assistance from Human Services for the first time. We do acknowledge that there was a big need to bring on and engage additional workers through the agreement—service delivery partners, labour-hire agencies and redeployments from within the APS. The staff did their very best.

Unfortunately, the demand for Services Australia's Centrelink services is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. We hoped that there would be some more encouragement provided in the budget for more jobs to open up without depending so strongly on the write-offs that were announced—as well as those write-offs that were announced for business that will hopefully generate more economic commercial activity. Those opposite fail to understand that it is people on lower incomes who spend almost all of their income—by necessity—in the economy. They very much need that assistance. On this side, we have consistently called out the government for its disgraceful running down of the APS over the past six years. We know that they've sacked 19,000 staff since they came to office, not to mention the litany of service failures, including robodebt, that I mentioned previously, as well as using the NDIS underspend to prop up their budgets. I've been working with NDIS staff in Darwin, and, again, like Centrelink staff, they're doing a good job. They're doing the best that they can.

But I want to bring the House's attention to the fact that, in my electorate, at least 25 per cent of APS positions—those jobs for Australians—are gone. This was from the government who said they were going to decentralise the APS into regional areas of Australia. Well, I'm in Darwin. You've not moved anything to Darwin; you've cut 25 per cent of the APS jobs in the Greater Darwin region. You might say, 'Well, they probably weren't needed.' But, if you said that, you would be an idiot. Agencies have been forced to outsource and contract out, spending exorbitant amounts—more than it would have cost to have Australians employed in those roles as part of the Australian Public Service.

Famously, some of these cuts have been in the Australian Electoral Commission, and what the Northern Territory has seen is tens of thousands of Territorians not even on the roll. The AEC APS staff were cut from 15 down to three. You might say, 'Well, what were those 15 doing?' They were in something called the Indigenous Electoral Participation Program, the IEPP. Where did this government move those positions? To Brisbane. So they moved positions from Darwin to Brisbane, even though, as I would hope most honourable members understand, the Northern Territory has the highest percentage of Aboriginal Australians in our nation: 30 per cent. Up to one-third of them aren't on the roll. They are not getting a say in what is happening in their country.

Territorians will decide who represents them in this place, but the Prime Minister still hasn't said a word about the fact that the AEC was going to take one of our Northern Territory seats away. Fortunately, some Nationals have said: 'That is not on. Regional Australians are so underrepresented in this place.' There's a concentration of MPs, particularly from those on the government benches, around the big cities on the eastern seaboard. There have been three, I think, from Sydney—the last three prime ministers. I won't call it a deliberate disenfranchisement of Aboriginal Territorians, but what they've overseen is a cut in AEC staff—the very people who are supposed to be enfranchising Australians—

Mr Pasin interjecting—

Mr GOSLING: Now, two-term Tony, you may not have picked up on the fact that the deputy—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Wallace ): Order! Order!

Mr GOSLING: What are you, Pasin?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. The member will refer to honourable members by their correct name—

Mr GOSLING: What is it?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Barker.

Mr GOSLING: The member for two—what?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Barker.

Mr GOSLING: The member for Barker. You should be sticking up for regional Australians. But, nothing!

A government member: He does every day.

Mr GOSLING: He does every day, does he? Well, I'm glad—

Mr Falinski: A point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I haven't called the member yet. The member for Solomon will resume his seat. Yes, what is your point of order?

Mr Falinski: I am struggling to understand how this comes anywhere close to anything we are meant to be talking about in the chamber at the moment. And this has just been going on for 10 minutes almost. He has taken us past the point of exasperation.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I thank the honourable member. You can resume your seat. The member for Solomon is vaguely on point and the member for Solomon has the call.

Mr GOSLING: Where's the honourable member from again? I can't remember.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mackellar.

Mr GOSLING: Where's Mackellar?

An honourable member: North Sydney.

Mr GOSLING: Oh, North Sydney! I think you are being one of the PM's numbers men in the caucus decisions that we didn't want. I'm just glad the member for New England stood up—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Solomon will resume his seat. The member for Mackellar.

Mr Falinski: Deputy Speaker, I humbly request: while I respect your ruling, how is this even vaguely associated—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Mackellar will resume his seat. The member for Solomon will return to the bill at hand.

Mr GOSLING: I will, Deputy Speaker. The member opposite is trying my patience as well as yours, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is without doubt connected, and I will draw those dots for you quickly in the time I have remaining.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That would be good.

Mr GOSLING: Services Australia and APS people have been let go by the government that you're a member of. In the Northern Territory that has had a specific outcome, which has been a massive decrease in enfranchisement. I'm extending, through you, Deputy Speaker, my thanks to the member for New England, who said: 'Enough of that—regional Australia has been underrepresented for too long and we can't let another regional seat go.' I would expect that someone from Sydney would argue against that, as I understand some have been, but it's unfortunate. Australia is a big place. The Northern Territory is one-sixth of the Australian land mass—250,000 people. They deserve to be represented fairly down here. (Time expired)

Mr FALINSKI (Mackellar) (12:50): I want to thank the member for Solomon for his entertaining contribution to this debate. I will also thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for ensuring that he was able to make that contribution. Normally, of course, the member for Solomon would wear far more provocative garb in the chamber, but I think it is good that the minister for energy is here—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Wallace ): The member for Mackellar will resume his seat. Is there a point of order?

Mr Gorman: I don't see how attire of members is relevant to this debate.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member will resume his seat. The honourable Member for Mackellar, if you could keep your remarks to the bill—

Mr FALINSKI: I see. Oh, right. Okay, so that's how it's going to be, is it?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Mackellar is not reflecting on the chair, I hope.

Mr FALINSKI: No, not at all. Absolutely not.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Mackellar will continue. The member for Mackellar has the call.

Mr FALINSKI: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. What I was going to say was, of course, that the member for Solomon's tie—if I may get that point out—is something that perhaps, if the minister for energy would consider plugging it into the national grid, could solve all our energy problems.

We are here to speak today about the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. We are not here to talk about the grievances of members opposite, who may not have seats after the redistribution. The independent Electoral Commission will determine that. That's what it says about those opposite, that we're here talking about servicing the most vulnerable Australians—

Ms Butler interjecting—

Mr FALINSKI: The member for Griffith can shout as much as she likes, but those of us on this side are actually interested in helping vulnerable Australians. That's why we're in here talking about the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. Throughout this pandemic, this government has been taking every possible step to support Australians and help get people back on their feet and back to work as soon as they can. Services Australia has been at the forefront of the Australian government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing support to millions of vulnerable Australians.

Since March, Services Australia has delivered more than $21.2 billion in additional payments and processed more than 1.7 million JobSeeker claims, providing income support to people in need. More than $12.4 billion in the coronavirus supplement has been paid to new and existing eligible income support recipients in addition to their usual payment.

This government's economic support payment has delivered more than $9 billion to some seven million lower income Australians, people that those opposite are yet to mention when talking about this bill. These include people like pensioners, other social security and veterans' support recipients and eligible concession card holders. Some $14.9 million in pandemic leave disaster payments has gone to almost 10,000 people who work in Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and New South Wales and who have been directed to self-isolate but don't have sick leave or payments through JobSeeker or JobKeeper. The crisis payment is also available to assist individuals who are in financial hardship as a result of being required to quarantine.

As of February this year, Services Australia has been established as an executive agency under the Public Service Act. Schedule 1 of this bill amends various pieces of legislation to support this establishment. In particular, this bill makes direct textual amendments to legislation so that acts correctly refer to Services Australia or the Department of Social Services; amends various secrecy provisions so that information that was held by Services Australia or the department of human services as a department of state can continue to be protected by those secrecy provisions; and amends the Human Services (Centrelink) Act 1997 to protect the name 'Services Australia' from unauthorised use. This change is needed. It is needed to ensure that legislation clearly and correctly refers to Services Australia or the Department of Social Services. This will allow the federal government to continue in its duties, supporting Australians through the appropriate agencies. The legislation will also ensure that the name 'Services Australia' cannot be used inappropriately—for example, by a business or a union seeking to imply a connection with the Australian government.

Schedule 1 will also amend various secrecy provisions so that information that was held by Services Australia or the department of human services as a department of state can continue to be protected by those secrecy provisions. This schedule will operate retrospectively from 1 February 2020, the date Services Australia was established as an executive agency. However, the expansions to the offence relating to protected names will only apply from the day after royal assent. In a rapidly evolving environment, Services Australia has worked closely with policy agencies to streamline processes and to ensure people impacted by the pandemic receive the government's unprecedented economic support as quickly and easily as possible. This includes the billion-dollar JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs, which have kept people in jobs and kept businesses in business. We have made it easier for people to claim payments and access support through this crisis. Online payments have been upgraded to accommodate the surge in demand, and additional staff have been mobilised to call centres and payment processing. In fact, in the space of 55 days we processed 1.3 million JobSeeker claims. That's the number normally processed in 2½ years. At the peak, we completed more than 53,000 claims in a single day. We are processing the majority of social security and welfare claims in eight days, which is nearly 20 days faster than last year, and calls are being answered about 15 minutes faster than last year.

Also, myGov now has the largest capacity of any authenticated online platform in Australia. The system remained stable despite averaging up to 837,000 sign-ins daily during the peak month of June, compared with an average of 575,000 in June 2019. It is now possible to manage all Medicare related claims, changes or inquiries online or over the phone. This includes newborn enrolments, re-enrolments for people returning to Australia, linking Medicare cards to myGov and transferring people from one Medicare card to another. Australians are encouraged to make sure their details are up to date with Medicare, including their bank account details, during this time. Services Australia service centres have remained open throughout the pandemic, but we encourage only the most vulnerable in the community to visit. Most business can be completed by using Services Australia's online and call service options.

Schedule 2 of the bill makes governance changes relating to Services Australia. Currently the Human Services (Centrelink) Act, Human Services (Medicare) Act and the Child Support (Registration and Collection) Act require the chief executive of Centrelink, the chief executive of Medicare and the child support registrar to be different SES employees in Services Australia. It is no longer necessary for those offices to have different occupants, given Services Australia has broad service delivery functions and the overall responsibility of the CEO for the operations of the executive agency. Schedule 2 amends the Human Services (Centrelink) Act, the Human Services (Medicare) Act and the Child Support (Registration and Collection) Act so that the CEO of Services Australia will also be the chief executive of Centrelink, the chief executive of Medicare and the child support registrar. This will extend to an acting CEO of Services Australia.

Schedule 2 also amends the Human Services (Centrelink) Act, Human Services (Medicare) Act and the Child Support (Registration and Collection) Act to allow the Governor-General to appoint a person as chief executive of Centrelink, chief executive of Medicare and child support registrar if the office of the CEO of Services Australia ceases to exist. The chief executive of Centrelink, the chief executive of Medicare and the child support registrar exercise statutory powers and functions under many acts, so it is essential that there is always a person in those offices for service delivery to continue uninterrupted.

This bill will also amend the Human Services (Centrelink) Act and the Human Services (Medicare) Act to require a person acting under a delegation, for example the Secretary of the Department of Social Services or a subdelegation, to comply with any direction given by the delegator. These changes are needed to streamline governance arrangements in Services Australia. It will improve deliverability and efficiency, further assisting Australians in their hour of need.

That's what this bill is about. It's about helping people when they need to be helped, at this point in time when people need help. It is not about pre-selections in the Northern Territory. It's not about union featherbedding in our Public Service. It is about helping vulnerable Australians. It disappoints me, at this time, in this place, during this pandemic, that there are some people who can't see past the vested interests of those constituents that they claim to represent to help our most vulnerable Australians. I commend this bill to the House.

Ms BUTLER (Griffith) (13:02): That was a masterclass in buffoonery from someone who clearly doesn't understand the connection between the importance of staffing these services properly and the effect that the services have on the lives of our constituents—that is, the people who we not only claim to represent but do represent. So let me, for his information, explain some of the experiences that people in my electorate have had when they have had to rely on public services during the coronavirus pandemic and recession.

I've got a quote here from someone who contacted me, absolutely distraught. She said: 'I know they're overwhelmed, but I just keep going in circles. I waited for someone to contact me, like the instructions said, and they finally did. They took my details and created a linking code to link my CRN to myGov, but the names don't match. She said this was supposed to fix this, but it didn't, so she put me through to tech support to fix it, but when I got through to someone it was something to do with education, so the guy transferred me again. I waited for two hours to get through but then received a message that they were too busy to take my call and to call back later, and the call was ended. I kept trying all day, to no avail, until I finally got through just before 10 pm on Monday night. The lady tried to help me but said the area I needed was closed and she would email them. I waited but heard nothing, so I called again at 8 am this morning and was told again that I needed the help desk. This lady offered to go through for me, rather than transferring me. However, when she got through, she was told the team I need isn't available and she had to log a call back. No time frame was given, and I assume everything is closed for the next four days. I cannot even claim JobSeeker until this gets sorted. I've given my ID three times now over the phone. I don't have any income. I had to submit a humiliating application to my real estate agent this morning, as with every bill I pay, to justify why I need relief with my rent. The truth is I need relief with everything because I have no income coming in until the JobSeeker goes through.' This was the experience of one of my constituents who tried to use public services and was incredibly distressed and distraught, like so many people across my electorate and across all of the electorates that are represented in this chamber.

I had another woman come through. She said: 'I would like to advise you that, as we speak, I've been on the phone for hours with Centrelink for a CRN. I don't even know if I'll get one today. I have rent to pay this week, with no money to pay it with. Will my family become homeless?' This was a question from another constituent of mine who was going through this situation. So to the member for Mackellar: yes, we do care about staffing for public services. It's not because of 'vested interest', as he said; it's because these public services are the public services that people need when they are at their lowest point—when they have nowhere to turn. They rely on the support.

Labor will—and everyone should—support modifications to public sector governance structures that lead to good outcomes for employees and the Australians who rely on those services. But this bill fails to address the biggest core issue at the centre of Services Australia—that the arbitrary staffing cap imposed across the public sector has led to an overreliance on labour hire to keep up with demand as well as exorbitant overspend on outsourcing and on consultants.

Staff at Services Australia have over recent times—and of course I'm talking about the recession, the pandemic and the national bushfire crisis that preceded them—had to manage a remarkable workload, whether they were dealing with people who had lost their homes in the bushfire, people who had lost their jobs because of the recession, people who were trying to negotiate on real estate, people who were working out how to pay their bills and people who were working out how they were going to be able to focus on getting things done for their kids and their families when they were under so much stress and pressure because of a loss of income. So many people have needed help, and the Services Australia staff are there for these people. As I have read out to you, they are people who are just trying to help, but they're understaffed and overworked. So when people are calling in their moments of greatest need and despair, the Services Australia frontline staff are working very hard to try to support them. They in turn deserve support from their government and from the people in this place.

I do want to give specific thanks to all of the people who live or work in my electorate. We've got some great public services and we've got some great Centrelink offices that have had very stressful times and that have had incredible demands on them—not just the workload demand but the human and emotional demands that are carried by those people, who, on behalf of the people of Australia, are at the front lines trying to help those most in need. People who work at Centrelink and people who work at Services Australia are people who are doing their absolute best to try to help, so I want to thank them.

As I said, I've got some great Centrelink offices in my electorate. I've got a number of people who live in my electorate who work in public services, and there are more who don't live in my electorate but come and work in my electorate. To all of them: thank you for everything you have done during these extraordinary months that has led up to today. Thank you so much for the work that you have put in. We know your jobs are rewarding, but we know that they're tough, and we are very grateful to you.

We were very happy back in March when the government announced that they were going to engage 5,000 additional new workers to help move through the demand on Services Australia, but it also bore stating at the time and bears repeating now that this is almost exactly the number that this government—the Morrison government and the Liberal-National government—over its time in office had cut from frontline services over the previous six years prior to that date. We're now in our third term of a Liberal-National government in this country. This is a government that has consistently cut public sector staff, and we see the consequences of that when the rubber really hits the road. We've seen the consequences of it this year. In my portfolio of environment, we've seen the consequences of the cuts to public sector staffing through the massive delays, noncompliance and errors that the Audit Office found in the environment department in relation to decision-making under environmental laws—a 510 per cent increase in approval delays, 79 per cent of decisions affected by error or otherwise non-compliant and 95 per cent of key decisions being made outside the statutory time frames in the 2018-19 fiscal year. So we see the consequences of public sector job cuts.

We as a nation are now reaping what the Liberal-National government has sown over now more than seven years in office. And given the series of crises that we've faced in the past 12 months alone—I've talked about the bushfires, I've talked about the pandemic and I've talked about the recession, but of course there's more: there was the drought, and in some parts of the country there were floods—I hope that the government, in reflecting on the way those crises have been managed, will reflect on the value of employed public sector workers who can do a lot to relieve the suffering, the stress and the problems faced by Australians. And I hope they will reflect on the impact their cuts over many years have had.

One thing that should be considered and that clearly needs to be addressed is the situation that has arisen because of the arbitrary staffing cap placed on Services Australia, along with the rest of the Public Service. It is really important that this government faces up to the difficulties that have been caused by their smaller-government agenda, as they have previously called it. What they really mean when they say that—it's just code for cutting jobs and cutting services. Australians are sick of it. They've seen the consequences of it and they don't want to see it anymore. And, as I said, I certainly hope this government will reflect on the consequences of their actions for Australians, both in my electorate and across the country.

I'd like to see the government really reflecting on the consequences of outsourcing, where you have a worker next to another worker or two workers potentially doing the same job for different pay and conditions, and the impact on workloads of artificially low and constrained numbers of workers in these services. I'd like the government to consider all those impacts and, more broadly, I'd like them to consider the stories I have read out here in my contribution—the stories that were provided to me, unsolicited, by people in my electorate who were terrified and distressed, who needed help and didn't know where else to turn.

I'd like the government to think about those stories being replicated suburb by suburb, electorate by electorate, across this entire country—the distress that people have felt. I'd like them to think about that now in the context of the fact that we have nearly a million Australians unemployed, with the government expecting more than 160,000 more before Christmas. They need to reflect on the quality of public services and the importance of proper funding in this country. So, while I support the bill, it is important that we do make those comments in respect of the public service provision and the people on the front line who are responsible for it.

Mr THISTLETHWAITE (Kingsford Smith) (13:12): I'm speaking in support of the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020, and before I get to the crux, to the details of the bill, I also wish to add my praise and thanks to all the wonderful staff of Services Australia, who over recent months have been doing a sterling job in providing support to Australians in their time of need. I represent an electorate that has as part of it Sydney's economic powerhouse: Sydney airport. Anyone who goes to Sydney airport at the moment knows that it's on its knees—it's a ghost town. And many people who work around the airport or are associated with the airport have lost their jobs or been stood down. They've been calling on and have been provided with services and support by the wonderful staff of Services Australia.

I also have in my electorate the University of New South Wales, one of Australia's largest universities. And of course many have been affected by COVID there, who have either been stood down or have lost their jobs. Unfortunately the government chose not to support the higher education sector, one of the most vitally important employers not only in my community but in many communities throughout the country, particularly rural and regional areas. Many people who work in the university sector have suffered and have had to call on the staff of Services Australia.

I also want to recognise the emotional element of this sort of work. Often when people are under stress and pressure, having lost their job or been stood down—losing income, with their family budget under pressure and having bills and a mortgage to pay—they can get anxious and they can get quite testy, particularly over the telephone or if they're experiencing frustration in dealing with the internet. Quite often it is the staff of Services Australia and the former department of human services who bear the brunt of that frustration, and they do a great job in dealing with that and ensuring that people still get the service they deserve in these trying times. I think it is important that we also recognise that there is an emotional element in the work that these people do in providing support for Australians, in their time of need.

The bill sets out a structure for a newly established executive agency, Services Australia, to replace the now abolished Department of Human Services. Labor supports modifications to public sector governance structures that lead to good outcomes for not only the Australian people but also the employees of the government who work in these departments. Staff at Services Australia have managed a remarkable workload in recent times, from dealing with the bushfire and the response in January to the surge of new applications associated with that. Then, of course, they have been dealing with drought—not only over the course of the last 12 months but basically for the last four or five years—and the new challenges that that has brought with the new programs that the government has been providing to assist those affected by drought. Then we were hit with COVID, and the wave of people who lost their jobs and were accessing government payments for the first time were having difficulty navigating that system. We all remember the queues of people lining up for unemployment benefits, for JobKeeper payments, for the first time in their lives. The skill, experience and dedication that Services Australia staff showed to the Australian public during that time was quite remarkable. These undoubtedly are tough but rewarding frontline services jobs and they deserve our greatest thanks and efforts, always, but in particular over the past few months.

Approximately 800,000 new claims have been processed for JobSeeker, the same number of applications that would generally be processed by the agency across a two-year period. I think that perfectly highlights just how hard people in this agency have worked over the course of the last few months. Many of those new applicants have never accessed Centrelink before and one-in-eight new applicants need to apply for a CRN—a registration number—for the first time. Labor therefore welcomed the government's 22 March announcement on engaging 5,000 additional workers to help move through the new demand at Services Australia—poignantly, almost exactly the number they have cut from the front line over the past six years. I think that says everything about this government's approach to the Public Service—the cuts that are routinely undertaken by this coalition government, the contracting out of waves of jobs that are highly important to the proper delivery of services. And let's face it: that's the reason Australians pay taxes. We pay taxes so that we get access to decent services, be that through Medicare, through education or through Services Australia and other frontline jobs. We pay taxes to ensure that we get access to good services. The notion of good services, and paying taxes for them, has been broken down by this government successively over the last seven years. It's not just across Services Australia; it's across basically every single government agency in the Public Service. There have been job losses, staff caps and contracting out, and quite often it costs the government and the budget a lot more money than it ordinarily would to have those employees directly employed by the government and doing work directly for the government. There have been a number of cases where the Auditor-General has exposed waste and mismanagement, particularly in relation to work that is contracted out to private organisations. There seems to be a posse of them, if you like, that seem to get all of this work that is contracted out by the government. There have been instances where there has been abuse of public funds and it hasn't been in the interests of the Australian taxpayer and the Australian people.

Services Australia initially brought in an additional 5,000 staff through the agreements with their service delivery partners and other labour hire agencies, as well as 7,000 others redeployed across the Australian Public Service. Unfortunately, the demand for Services Australia's services is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. Despite the Morrison government's illusion that somehow the economy is going to snap back in March, many Australians are still going to experience being stood down or unemployed at the time that some of these government payments are proposed to run out. That's going to put enormous pressure on the staff of Services Australia, particularly when a lot of these people learn that they are no longer receiving support but don't have a job to go back to. That is going to be a big challenge for Services Australia management and staff, and it's something that this government should be aware of in the lead-up to that March deadline.

This bill fails to address some of the core issues that exist at Services Australia. I mentioned some of those earlier, such as contracting out and the diminution of expertise in the area. A classic example in the Public Service is when this government got rid of a number of employees of ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. They did that in the lead-up to the banking royal commission. When the banking royal commission hit, it found that the regulator wasn't sufficiently resourced to deal with the litany of complaints about financial services coming from across Australia. When the government actually woke up to it and decided that ASIC needed additional personnel, it was too late. A lot of the expertise, particularly around investigations and prosecutions, had been lost, because the Abbott government had got rid of it in the 2014 budget. The government then, arguably at an additional cost to the Australian taxpayer, had to go searching for people to fill these positions in the lead-up to the banking royal commission. The royal commission was critical of the fact that a lot of the expertise of the regulators had been lost in the lead-up to these scandals occurring, which affected literally hundreds of thousands of Australians and their welfare. That is a classic example of this government's short-sightedness when it comes to the Public Service.

This arbitrary staffing cap that the government applied across the Public Service has led to an overreliance on labour hire, as well as exorbitant overspends and outsourcing to consultants, to keep up with demand. I note that in the budget released a couple of days ago the government saw fit to lift the cap by 3½ thousand across the Public Service. But, again, in the ultimate act of short-sightedness, that lifting of the cap only lasts 12 months. They're going to revert back to the original cap in 2022. The 3½ thousand that they're going to bring in to deal with the extra demand associated with COVID, which is going to last well and truly beyond the next 12 months, are going to be removed in 12 months time under this government's plan. If that's not short-sighted and working against the interests of the average Australian, I don't know what is. That is once again going to see enormous pressure placed on those that are doing the work and are the public face of providing support for Australians during this difficult period.

The reality is that the staffing cap is a cut in real staffing numbers and also, in many respects, a privatisation by stealth, because a lot of that work then ends up in the hands of the private sector. It ends up being profit for private organisations, when it could be revenue that comes back into the government coffers to ensure that we build the Public Service and build better services for all Australians. Agencies are forced to outsource, to contract out, to spend exorbitant amounts on consultants or to engage labour hire contractors to staff departments to make up for the lack of in-house staff that we've seen across a number of government departments.

The shadow minister for the environment spoke before me in this debate and mentioned the fact that a lot of private organisations in Australia are saying that government approvals for environmental projects are taking too long. There's a reason why those approvals are taking too long. It's because this government has cut the resources and staff that are there to assess those approvals. The government has been claiming that there's something wrong with the EPBC Act and its operation, that there's too much green tape, when in reality those opposite are themselves the problem because they got rid of department staff that were specifically tasked with assessing projects and their suitability for environmental approval, and with providing timely decisions so that, where projects do meet the tests in the EPBC Act, they could be up and running as quickly as possible and provide jobs for Australians. So there's a bit of hypocrisy in this government's argument that there's too much green tape, because actually they're the problem—they cut staff and services in our public sector.

This bill is a positive development. It does reorganise a very important department, but the government really does need to wake up to itself and realise that if you're going to deliver decent services—services that Australians pay taxes for—then Services Australia and other government departments need to be properly resourced, and that means ending some of the contracting out, the outsourcing, and removing some of these arbitrary staffing caps that have held back Australians and meant they haven't got the services that they deserve.

Mr HILL (Bruce) (13:25): I'll make a few brief remarks about the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020 before I get cut off. I'll talk about the second reading amendment later on. At its heart this bill is not controversial. It proposes a framework and a change in structure for Services Australia replacing DHS. It modernises terminology and streamlines reporting lines. Labor supports modifications to governance structures across the public sector where they will improve outcomes. I hope it's successful.

Sure, it's a little reorganisation and, as the Prime Minister loves above all else, it's a marketing bill. It has rebranded DHS. DHS is now called Services Australia. That's great. The government is big on announcements and small on delivery. This government is very big on spin—we see it with the budget and we hear it in question time every day—but it falls short on delivery. That's certainly what we see here with its rebranded Services Australia. It's great spin, a new logo, new letterhead and a new name. When you reorganise things like this it's hard to join the dots of what has happened in the past and hard to join the dots in the budget papers. This government is short on delivery.

I'll repeat what other speakers have said. The bill fails to address the core issue. The core issue that drives people nuts—people in my electorate and right across the country—is the lack of skilled, permanent, trained staff at Centrelink, Services Australia, DHS or whatever you want to call it this week. There are simply not enough public servants there to do the job.

The government's ASL cap was introduced when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister. In a brilliant piece of public policy then Prime Minister Abbott introduced the ASL cap. It's a fancy way of saying that he cut 15,000 jobs from the Australian Public Service in his two-year term. Malcolm Turnbull maintained them and this Prime Minister is similarly addicted to this privatisation by stealth. As the Australian population continues to grow year after year—or at least until now—the number of public servants to support and service the Australian people does not rise, so this means that, in practical terms, for seven long years under this government we've seen a cut every year to the number of public servants available per head of the Australian population.

Make no mistake, this is privatisation by stealth. Public sector managers—secretaries of departments, CEOs or whatever you want to call the head of an agency—are forced to get the work done by outsourcing and employing more expensive labour hire workers, consultants and contractors. The Auditor-General revealed this. It's no wonder the government just cut his budget, because he shines light on these things and what is really going on in departments and public administration.

The APS had more employees in June 1992 than in December 2019, despite the fact that the Australian population grew by 46 per cent over that period. Can anyone honestly say that services at Centrelink are better? Last year there were 46 million unanswered calls—that is, for every Australian, two calls didn't get answered. The biggest frustration I certainly hear about from people is the waiting time to get through to Centrelink and get an answer on what has happened with their age pension application, their Newstart application, their healthcare card and those basic things that Australians have every right to expect some decent service on.

This bill does fail to address the core issue, which is the privatisation and the overuse of labour hire firms and consultants. We've seen thousands of call centre jobs outsourced under this government, and that will continue. And, as the previous speaker, the member for Kingsford Smith, said, buried in the budget papers is a little commitment to increase the number of jobs in Services Australia, but it's a one-off; it's for this year. They're saying that, after this year, they're going to go back to using more labour hire workers and casual staff, and it doesn't actually solve the problem in a sustainable way. I'll talk further on the second reading amendment in part B of my speech.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Llew O'Brien ): The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate will be resumed at a later hour. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.

The SPEAKER (14:01): As I informed the House on Tuesday, I received a letter on 18 September 2020 from the Hon. Dr John McVeigh resigning his seat as a member for the electoral division of Groom. I would now like to inform the House that it is my intention to issue a writ on Monday 26 October 2020 for an election of a member to serve for the electoral division of Groom in the state of Queensland. The dates in connection with the by-election will be fixed as follows: close of rolls—Monday 2 November 2020; close of nominations—Thursday 5 November 2020; polling day—Saturday 28 November 2020; return of writ—on or before Wednesday 3 February 2021.

The SPEAKER (15:16): Pursuant to section 65 of the Parliamentary Services Act 1999, I present the annual report of the Department of Parliamentary Services for 2019-20.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

Mr GEE (Calare—Minister Assisting the Minister for Trade and Investment and Minister for Decentralisation and Regional Education) (16:18): I move:

That the amendments requested by the Senate be considered immediately.

The SPEAKER: The question is that the Senate requests be dealt with immediately.

Mr GEE (Calare—Minister Assisting the Minister for Trade and Investment and Minister for Decentralisation and Regional Education) (16:26): I move:

That the requested amendment be made.

Ms PLIBERSEK (Sydney) (16:26): Last year's slogan was 'back in black'. This year it's 'dirty deals done dirt cheap'. I'm not surprised that the Liberals and the Nationals have teamed up with One Nation, but I'm a bit surprised about Centre Alliance joining—

Mr GEE (Calare—Minister Assisting the Minister for Trade and Investment and Minister for Decentralisation and Regional Education) (16:26): I move:

That the question be now put.

The SPEAKER: The question is that the question be now put.

The SPEAKER (16:30): The question now is that the requested amendments be made.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ) (16:34): I have received advice from the Chief Opposition Whip nominating a member to be a supplementary member of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport for the purposes of the committee's inquiry into approval processes for new drugs and novel medical technologies in Australia.

Mr GEE (Calare—Minister Assisting the Minister for Trade and Investment and Minister for Decentralisation and Regional Education) (16:34): by leave—I move:

That Ms McBride be appointed a supplementary member of the Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport for the purpose of the committee's inquiry into approval processes for new drugs and novel medical technologies in Australia.

Question agreed to.

Mr CRAIG KELLY (Hughes) (16:35): On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement, I present the committee's report entitled Summary report of the 24 June 2020: public hearing on the Australian Institute of Criminology's National Deaths in Custody Program.

Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

Mr CRAIG KELLY: by leave—The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement held a hearing on 24 June 2020 into the Australian Institute of Criminology's National Deaths in Custody Program. This hearing was not part of a wider inquiry but was held consistent with section 7(1) of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement Act 2010, which sets out the committee's functions.

The committee report being tabled today presents a summary of findings from the most recent annual report of the National Deaths in Custody Program, summarises the discussions of the committee's public hearings, sets out the committee's views and makes a number of recommendations. This inquiry was also held against a background of wide media reporting and wide public protest. The common thought amongst those protesters was that there was a very significant increased risk of death amongst Indigenous Australians in custody as compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

However, the committee noted that, in the Australian Institute of Criminology's 2017-18 report, the rate of Indigenous prisoners' deaths in custody was 0.14 per 100 prisoners, compared to the rate of non-Indigenous prisoners' deaths of 0.18 per 100 prisoners. So, in this country, we actually have a lower rate of deaths in prison for Indigenous Australians than we do for non-Indigenous Australians, and this is the exact opposite to what many sectors in the media are reporting.

In fact, at the conclusion of the hearings, I had a discussion with Dr Rick Brown, the Deputy Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology. I asked Dr Brown to conclude. I said, 'I will ask you to agree or disagree with a couple of points.' The first was: 'The bad news is that the percentage of Indigenous prisoners in the prison population is increasing over recent years?' to which Dr Brown answered, 'Yes.' I asked: 'The good news is that the rate of deaths in custody has been decreasing and has significantly decreased since the royal commission?' Dr Brown said, 'That is correct.' I then asked: 'The majority of deaths in prison custody are due to natural causes?' Dr Bricknell answered, 'Yes.' I further asked: 'The rate of deaths in custody is lower for the Indigenous population than the non-Indigenous population?' To that, Dr Brown answered: 'That is correct too, yes.' So we have this annual report which shows the exact opposite to what many in the media are saying to the public.

We made two recommendations. The first recommendation of the committee is that copies of the National Deaths in Custody Program report be forwarded to the major media outlets accompanied by a press release with a link to the report. Such media releases should include a statement of the limitations of their research, and, in particular, that it is quantitative in nature.

The second and final recommendation is that future National Deaths in Custody Program reports on deaths on an annual period include comparisons of death rates per 100 in the broader community by age group and gender for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons with the death rates in custody, noting that this number would be usefully presented as a five-year moving average, given the small numbers noted. The reason for this recommendation is that many segments of our community and demographics in our Indigenous community actually have a higher death rate outside of prison than they do in prison.

So I am very pleased to table this report, hopefully to dismiss many of the myths that are perpetuated in our society and perpetuated by our media, that we have this much higher rate of Indigenous deaths in custody. That is simply not true. It is not true, not only for the last report but also for the last 10 years: every single year of the Australian Crime Commission's report has shown similar results. Across all states it is similar, with one exception and that is Victoria. Victoria is the only state in the nation where the rates of Indigenous deaths are higher than the rates of non-Indigenous deaths. Outside of Victoria they are lower, and overall, across the nation, they are much lower. I table the report.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ): I thank the member for Hughes.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ) (16:41): The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Dobell has moved as an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question. I call the member for Bruce—in continuation, I think.

Mr HILL (Bruce) (16:42): Yes. Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I addressed, in the first few minutes of my speech, before question time, the substantive bill. I'll turn my remarks now to the second reading amendment.

This bill on Services Australia fails to address the core issue, and the core issue is the lack of staff to do the work at Centrelink for the Australian people. This government is addicted to cutting and privatising public services. The little-known ASL cap, which was introduced by this government, by Prime Minister Abbott, is effectively a staffing cap that forces departments to privatise their operations. It's privatisation by stealth.

What it means is that, over the last seven long years of this government, as the Australian population has grown and aged and as the demand for quality public services naturally has continued to increase, government departments and agencies have not been allowed to employ any more staff. The practical effect of this is: either service quality goes down and people can't get through on the phone to Centrelink, or government agencies are forced to privatise and to use temporary, casual, labour-hire workers throughout their operations. We see this through Centrelink. When people try to call them, they can't get through—46 million unanswered phone calls; that's two for every Australian. We see it right through the National Disability Insurance Agency. They have about 3,000 staff and thousands more casual labour-hire workers.

Astoundingly, we even see it in the aged-care quality regulator. The government's failings in aged care are manifest, but the quality regulator, the federal government body that's supposed to oversee quality in the aged-care sector, also has numerous casual workers staffing it. Ironically, many of these casual workers are supplied by the same company that supplies casual staff to nursing homes. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Thousands of call centre jobs in Services Australia have been outsourced. Indeed, the former DHS secretary stated, at Senate estimates: 'We don't want to let our service levels drop. If we were just to allow our staffing levels to drop to the ASL cap then there would be an impact on service. We are engaging staff by other means so that we can continue to provide the service that customers want.' In plain English, it means that Services Australia needs more staff to do their work but they are not allowed to employ them. So, the response is to hire more-expensive casual labour workers to do the job. It is a false economy. It actually makes no sense. These workers often are sitting alongside public servants, and they are actually paid less to do the same job, but the private firm that supplies them takes a clip on the ticket and makes a profit from them. The taxpayer doesn't save money. This is not even what some might argue is a proper use of labour hire workers to fill a temporary need or a surge in demand—seasonal work. Perhaps the tax office explains to us that they have seasonal work—that's their response. These are basically permanent labour hire workers—permanent casuals. In 2018 there were more than 2,000 of them in DHS, because the ASL cap, the staffing cap, has not been raised.

The government, of course, loves their labour hire mates. We saw this with their failed visa privatisation. Unbelievably, they are so addicted to privatising public services that they waisted $92 million of taxpayer funds trying to outsource the visa and citizenship processing system—$92 million! About half of that went to Boston Consulting. Goodness only knows what you get 40-something million dollars for to design a failed privatisation.

One of the key proponents of this, the key bidders, was one of the Prime Minister's close mates, Scott Briggs. His firm donated $133,000 to the Liberal Party. They didn't get a great return, because they had to abandon the failed tender after blowing $92 million. But imagine what could have been done if they put that money into actually employing some public servants to do the job and had stopped this nonsense of casual labour hire workers staffing government departments.

Labor and the members on this side of the chamber at first welcomed the government's announcement in March that they recognised the urgency of restaffing Centrelink and were going to employ 5,000 new workers to help with the increased demand with the Morrison recession, as it started off. But now we've learnt that they brought on 14,800 new staff and 6,500 of these were through service delivery partners and labour hire agencies. Another 7,000 were from across the APS and a few others were from within Services Australia. So, even in times of crisis, after cutting thousands of staff since they were elected, they still can't bring themselves to just employ more public servants.

Their ideological obsession shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who actually follows them in this area. The Treasurer said before the budget that he was inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and that these people were figures of hate for the Left because they were so successful. I think they're figures of hate for ordinary people because they are leaders who cut and privatised state owned enterprises and public services. Over the last 40 years their policies have directly led to massively increased inequality in Western countries, including Australia, and the degradation of public services. In the middle of a national or global crisis where unity was needed, our Treasurer was off seeking inspiration from a person who said she didn't even believe in society—there was no such thing.

Forty years on from the failed policies of privatisation and so-called small government, it is time that the government actually admitted that their slogan of small government has failed. It is actually meaningless. It is a marketing slogan. If you have a look across the budget papers over the past 10 or 20 years there is very little material difference in the size of government between either party. There is a whole lot of rhetoric about small government over there but, if you have a look at spending as a percentage of GDP, it peaked under Malcolm Turnbull. It was high under John Howard and had a little bump with Kevin Rudd for a couple of years with the GFC. It bounces around between about 24 per cent and 26 per cent of GDP. The myth of small government over there, that somehow they will spend less just because they are Liberals, is not borne out by the facts. What Liberals really mean when they say small government—and through policies like the ASL cap, it is destroying public services, including Services Australia—is privatising public services, sacking public servants, employing labour hire workers, getting expensive consulting mates to do the work, and attacking the most vulnerable people in society.

Unashamedly, I don't support this privatisation approach. I challenge the government that I don't believe most Australians do either. This small government thing sounds okay. It sounds like we might save a bit of money or get a bit of better value, but it doesn't stack up. Ask ordinary people if they would rather the government spent the taxes employing proper skilled public servants who have permanent jobs and are not treated as permanent casuals, like the hidden underclass staffing government departments now, never able to get a home loan, never knowing from week to week whether they will be sacked and given the flick, without any rights. As we saw with COVID-19, the casualisation of the Australian workforce has been a terrible thing for this country. Who knew sick leave has a purpose? There's a point to sick leave. There's a point to having a permanent job. Surely, when somebody turns up to work year after year for four or five years in a row, they should have a right to actually be an employee of the Australian government, and not be an employee week to week living hand to mouth as a labour hire worker, which tens of thousands of people across the Public Service in Australia are now doing because of this government's policies.

These policies of privatisation are not without consequence. We've seen, as I mentioned, far too many casual labour hire workers staffing the NDIA, the National Disability Insurance Agency, doing assessments on vulnerable people and their disabilities: 'Do they get a plan? Don't they get a plan?' We've seen the aged-care quality regulator staffed by casuals—unbelievably. We've seen the impact at Services Australia of literally thousands of, effectively, permanent temporary labour hire workers because there's this mad, blind ideology of privatisation. It doesn't save money. It doesn't deliver better service. It really makes no sense. We've also seen it, to be fair, in Victoria with the hotel quarantine disaster. The use of private security guards there led to a public policy failure. This is something that all sides of politics should reflect on. There are many cases where it is simply not appropriate. Continuing this idiotic approach of privatisation doesn't deliver good quality outcomes and doesn't deliver value for money for the taxpayer.

We should not be proud of the fact that the Australian Public Service has fewer workers now than it had in 1992. That should not be a source of pride. We shouldn't be proud of the fact that we still have 15,000 fewer workers in the Australian Public Service than seven years ago when this government came to office given that the population has grown by 20 or 30 per cent and is ageing. This is not a source of pride. Any government, whatever their political colours, should see themselves as stewards of the Public Service. This is capability which has been built up by the taxpayer over decades. It should be preserved and nurtured. We should treat it as a stewardship responsibility, not as some sort of business management restructure opportunity where you just cut the numbers and think you've achieved something. It really makes no sense.

We 've proven this through the Public Accounts and Audit Committee. We looked at the figures last term. We had government departments come to us. The Australian Bureau of Statistics said: 'We could save literally millions of dollars if the government would stop the ideology and let us employ some staff. We have to employ these IT contractors. They're permanent. We pay a 40 per cent premium to employ them through labour hire firms instead of just employing them as public servants.' But logic doesn't sway the government. They're not actually interested in saving taxpayers' money. They're not interested in better service. The numbers don't persuade them. They're interested in this mad ideology of privatisation. For every Australian who calls Centrelink trying to get through on the phone, that really is what it boils down to. This bill is not going to help. It's not going to make your experience better to change the name—'Scotty from marketing' rebranding DHS as Services Australia. It's not going to help. You actually need to employ more public servants who know their job and turn up to work year after year and develop the skills to provide services.

Mr CONROY (Shortland) (16:53): I'm pleased to make a contribution on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. Services Australia, the old DHS, is a crucial government department for all Australians. Every single person in Australia relies on the information services they offer—from people making claims for payments, to families having a baby. to those needing help in an emergency. Despite this, the coalition government has proven time and time again how little it thinks of this fundamentally important government department.

While no one could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, Australians, including Services Australia employees, were let down during this extremely challenging period due to the government's inability to take swift action when the threat was identified. Centrelink, one key part of Services Australia, has experienced an unprecedented surge of customers over the last six months. Seeing the footage and images of people lining up out the front of Centrelink at the start of this crisis was devastating. It's something I hope we will never see again. It's one of the many reasons Labor urges the government to extend the JobKeeper wage subsidy and return it to its previous level. If they don't and if it ends too soon, we will see these heartbreaking images again because more people will lose their jobs. Scenes like this are a reminder of the Great Depression of the 1930s and should not be repeated in the 21st century.

Of course, while COVID-19 changed our lives so quickly there's no doubt Australians were let down by the Minister for Government Services bungling the Centrelink response. The government declared COVID-19 a pandemic in late February. Lockdown, social distancing, the introduction of JobKeeper and an increase to the JobSeeker base rate were looming, yet weeks later when it was clear the devastation the crisis would have on our nation the minister still had not bolstered Services Australia. They simply did not have the necessary resources to support Australians in their time of need. This resulted in those queues out the front of Centrelink and the myGov website crashing.

What did the minister do as a result? Instead of admitting he'd stuffed up, he blamed it on invisible hackers. It was disgraceful. These invisible hackers were the cause of the myGov website crashing, not the minister's own incompetence. Not long after that he was forced to admit that it was his fault that he did not anticipate the demand for Centrelink services. What was his response? What was his deep apology to the Australian people? 'My bad' were his exact words. 'My bad'. This was a minister of the Crown making a glib response to the huge stress and anxiety that he placed on so many people. Hundreds of thousands of Australians were in one of the most stressful periods of their lives. 'My bad'—I'm sure that was music to the ears of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who suddenly, through no fault of their own, had lost their jobs.

This complete lack of preparedness and poor implementation is not a surprise from this government. The Prime Minister is great with good news and spinning half-truths—such as we saw recently with the so-called vaccination deal, which was no deal at all—but when we have to respond to a serious situation promptly and efficiently he and his ministers display atrocious incompetence. They are all photo-op and no follow-up. To quote the Prime Minister: he doesn't hold a hose. He didn't hold a hose. He didn't help Services Australia during this period.

Of course it wasn't just the website and Centrelink offices that were inundated. In the fortnight from 23 March there were 6½ million busy signals, two million congestion messages, 1.5 million unanswered calls and an average call wait time of over 40 minutes. Many groups of Australians were impacted by this. The hotline for parents and families had 2.3 million attempts met by busy signals. Almost 300,000 inquiries to the older Australians hotline were met with a busy signal, while only 37,711 people got through to speak with someone. The BasicsCard inquiries had an average wait time of well over an hour, with many of these cardholders having no other source of income to rely upon. Imagine how stressful this would have been in this period for someone like this who had no other income but could not get through to speak to someone at Centrelink. The number of answered calls were comparable to other reporting periods and did not significantly increase until after 20 April, signalling that capacity in this area was not sufficiently ramped up to meet the needs of Australians until four weeks after the initial hit to employment.

The minister's 'my bad' isn't good enough. It never was good enough. It was such a glib assertion. But people might have copped it if he immediately leapt into action and solved the problem. Instead, we had another four weeks of chaos and lack of response. It wasn't good enough for Centrelink staff, who were inundated with inquiries and subjected to abuse from many stressed Australians. It certainly wasn't good enough for the Australians who were desperate for assistance, including the many constituents who contacted my office in desperation and often in a state of high anxiety because they could not make contact with Centrelink.

Just after the lockdown was announced in late March a distraught father called my office on behalf of his son, both of whom had been trying for days to speak with someone at Centrelink. The son hadn't even been able to apply for JobSeeker because he hadn't been able to get a customer reference number, the dreaded CRN. The father was exasperated by the situation. His exact words were: 'Can't you see that this situation is thoroughly unacceptable?' All my electorate officer, who was trying to assist him, was able to say was that of course it was and the government should have had a better system in place to deal with the sheer volume of applications. This was predictable. The minute lockdowns were contemplated by the national cabinet the government and the minister should have leapt into action and ensured that Centrelink had the adequate staffing resources to answer the massive flood of calls and visits that were coming.

Of course, the pandemic isn't the first time that the government did not anticipate the potential for our social security infrastructure to become strained. With COVID-19 taking off overseas long before it reached Australia, the government had months to prepare for increased demand at Centrelink, but they have a history of such lack of preparation. Past IT systems unpreparedness, such as the myGov outage at the 2019-20 tax return time and the 2016 census debacle, shows that the government has not learned from its mistakes, and it's the Australian people who suffer as a result. In fact, such is this government's lack of shame about its own incompetence that the one response you get from the Prime Minister to a minister stuffing up is to promote them. For example, you'd think the census debacle would have been grounds for sacking Minister McCormack. Instead, the Nationals party room, in their wisdom, with the support of the Prime Minister, made him Deputy Prime Minister. If this is the quality of the contributions of government ministers, I look forward to seeing where Minister Robert ends up after his 'my bad' moment.

The government also have so little regard for Services Australia that they failed to listen to its advice. Take the robodebt scandal, for example. Services Australia told cabinet in February that this program was no longer viable and called for it to be scrapped. But it wasn't until May, three months later, that the minister finally admitted that 377,000 Aussies had been ripped off by the Morrison government through this scheme and said that the government would refund people $721 million. Not only was this scheme the most expensive defrauding of or theft from Australians by a government; it also had devastating, unforgivable impacts on its victims. If the government had any respect for Services Australia or Australians in general, they would have announced their mistake in February. Instead, they ignored the advice from Services Australia and buried their heads in the sand for three whole months, choosing to come clean only when there was the threat of significant legal action hanging over their heads. It was disgraceful.

Finally, I want to turn to the impact that seven years of coalition government and the implementation of their conservative ideology have had on Services Australia and the many millions of Australians, ranging from students and single mothers to age pensioners, who rely on Services Australia. They have borne the brunt of the government's radical right-wing agenda. The coalition came to office in 2013—as they did in 1996—with a plan to slash and burn the Public Service. They have implemented this agenda with chilling efficiency, sacking tens of thousands of public servants. What conservatives never understand is that the government cannot provide services without public servants. Coalition members who, like me, represent regional areas, such as the member for Lyne and the member for Robertson, should explain to their constituents why the government they are part of has made it more difficult for Australians to access public services, like Services Australia. The rebranding of the Department of Human Services as Services Australia could not have come at a worse time for the government.

And what are the impacts of cutting employees of Services Australia over the past seven years? I'll tell the House. Many of my constituents, particularly elderly constituents who applied for the age pension, waited months and months for their applications to be processed. One lady at Cardiff contacted my office in desperation because her pension application had not been processed after six months. It was only when my office became involved that the application was approved, and this was not before the constituent had to use up nearly all the savings she'd worked so hard for in the course of her working life. There was also a gentleman from Charlestown who, whilst waiting over four months for his pension to be processed, actually had to go back to work in order to ensure that he could afford the basic necessities. And, when his application was approved, the department transferred the money into the wrong bank account and he had to wait until the bank processed a reversal before he finally received the pension.

My office, like every electorate office in this country, particularly the Labor ones, has had to intervene in case after case to get applications resolved. I remember a case where a young uni student had to wait over nine months to get their youth allowance approved. Centrelink weren't waiting for documents. They weren't waiting for further confirmation. As in almost all these cases, it was a lack of staffing that caused the delay, not any miscommunication or a lack of documentation. Centrelink physically do not have the staff to do the job that they are being asked to do, because of this government's cuts.

We can see that in the customer service approach in bricks-and-mortar Centrelink offices. If you go into a Centrelink office, you are instantly steered towards a computer or sent back out. You have to actually insist quite stridently if you want to talk to a human being. This isn't because Centrelink staff aren't trying to do their best; they just physically don't have the staff to handle the level of customer inquiries. At every single community assembly and seniors expo I held pre the COVID crisis, the No. 1 complaint was the lack of access to a human being at Centrelink to process pension applications and to answer simple questions.

If you're applying for a pension and you're 66 or 67, it's very daunting to be referred to a computer, especially if you've come from an industry that hasn't used IT like that. It's very daunting to be told to go and get a CRN and lodge all the documents online and then hope that it gets processed in time. It is unacceptable. I still maintain that, in a rich and developed country like Australia, it is a fundamental human right to be able to speak to a human, preferably in person, when you need assistance from the government. I think it's a reasonable proposition for people who've paid taxes all their lives, if they're unable to use a computer or don't have the resources to access a computer or the internet under the government's so-called NBN, to be able to speak to a human being. I think it shows the out-of-touch nature of so many coalition ministers that they don't understand that not everyone was born with access to these services or that not everyone is familiar with these services. Many of my constituents, be they in Windale or San Remo or places further afield, are not comfortable with using computers. They would like to speak to a human. If they've worked their whole life, I think it's entirely reasonable for them to ask to speak to a human to get help with a pension application or to answer a simple question about family tax benefits. Unfortunately, given this government's ideology—they haven't seen a public servant they didn't want to cut or a service they didn't want to defund—it is unlikely to change.

We come back to the origins of this bill, which is principally about rebranding, from a government obsessed with branding—not delivering, not implementing, but branding. It's not a surprise that it's led by Scotty from marketing.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ): Order!

Mr CONROY: I withdraw. I will use his correct title. They're very sensitive about it. The minister at the table was very keen—

Mr Howarth interjecting—

Mr CONROY: You're very sensitive about it. You were ready to leap up from the table.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member for Shortland will address his remarks through the chair.

Mr CONROY: The Prime Minister is all about marketing.

Mr Howarth: Show some respect.

Mr CONROY: I'll respect him when he respects the Australian people. He doesn't respect the Australian people when he is all about the photo-op and not the follow-up. He does not have an inch of concern for the Australian people. It's all about pursuing power and staying ahead with spin, and that's what this bill is, sadly, about—rebranding rather than delivering real services for Australians.

Mr Tim Wilson interjecting—

Mr CONROY: We've really touched a nerve here. The two Liberal members in this chamber know I'm right, and that's why they're objecting so fiercely. They're very, very sensitive, and that goes to the root of this government. It is all about spin and marketing. It is not about serving the Australian people and providing the services they need. I say shame on them for that.

Mr WILKIE (Clark) (17:08): [by video link] I will be supporting this bill, the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020, and I will also be supporting the opposition's amendment. I want to make something perfectly clear before I speak on: what I have to say this afternoon has nothing to do with the Centrelink staff. I think officers in Centrelink and in the department more broadly do a good job. They do as good a job as they humanly can do in very difficult circumstances. In fact, during the robodebt fiasco, for example, it was often Centrelink officers who were the source of information to inform the community and to inform us members of parliament about the problems with the scheme. I approached the Commonwealth Ombudsman on a number of occasions, passing on a number of concerns, and many of those concerns were informed by Centrelink whistleblowers. So my comments this afternoon should not in any way be taken as a criticism of the staff. Rather they are in support of the staff. The staff in the department, in particular in Centrelink, are labouring through very difficult circumstances. They're understaffed, underresourced and underfunded. They are having to be party to what I think is reckless haste to go online. They have to implement policies and procedures and laws created by politicians, which often, in fact, demonise Centrelink recipients.

The opposition amendment, I think, is well founded, because so many of these problems go to outsourcing. No wonder the federal government wanted to change the name of the department from the Department of Human Services to Services Australia, because the government want to take 'human' out of the equation. Far too often it's about some poor Centrelink client having to deal with a computer or a telephone or an ad in the paper or a nasty letter co-branded with an AFP badge.

In the 10 years I've had this job, and in particular since the election of the Abbott government in 2013, I have dealt with countless—certainly hundreds; it might even be thousands now—members of the community, particularly from the Denison and now Clark electorates, but also from right around Australia, who have had terrible problems dealing with the government, government agencies and Centrelink in particular.

I'll recount some of the sorts of things that have been brought to my attention over the years. One of the big issues is a lack of communication. In fact, I would say that it's probably the biggest frustration experienced by Centrelink customers. Here are examples. People spend hours and hours waiting on the phone. Centrelink says there's only a 20-minute wait to get onto Centrelink, but that's if you can actually join the queue. Often the line is engaged or the line goes dead after you've waited a certain period of time. It may well be that the people who get through to Centrelink only wait 20 minutes in many cases, but a lot of people from time to time throughout the year—often the majority of people—can't get on the queue in the first place.

There's also the issue about Centrelink clients waiting months for the outcome of an application. For example, people call or go into Centrelink to follow up and are told there is a backlog and to keep waiting without being given any further information or time frame about their application. There's also the issue of the complicated and nonsensical forms and online applications that need to be filled in if you're going to attempt to deal with Centrelink. Indeed, I've had countless people approach me who thought they had submitted an application or uploaded the correct document when they had not. That often resulted in them not being back paid or no longer being able to appeal, because the time had expired in which they might have appealed some judgement.

What comes up quite a lot is losing documents. How on earth a federal government department or agency can so consistently lose client documents beggars belief. I'll make the point again: this isn't about incompetence by Centrelink staff; this is about Centrelink staff being under the pump and underresourced but doing the best they can with archaic systems that simply don't work. There's also the issue of random text messages or emails that are automatic and look like spam, which some receive from time to time. Just this week I had an email from someone who's niece had become so distressed by a text message from Centrelink, saying her payment was cut, that it put her in hospital due to a serious panic attack. That is a true story. When Centrelink was contacted, no-one could explain why the text was even sent in the first place. There is also the use of template letters that are automatically generated and don't make sense or provide any detail.

Then there is the appeals process. How can a person appeal a decision when they don't even know the reason for that decision? Having something complicated verbally explained on the phone is not good enough. How do you appeal? I've had countless people who thought they had appealed, because they had lodged a document outlining their appeal, but they subsequently found out that it was just sitting on their file.

There are so many problems with communications from Centrelink, which almost always go back to an underresourced agency with not enough people, archaic systems and too much haste to go online. Sometimes there is even a cultural problem where they don't want to help these people, but, fortunately, that's very, very rare. This doesn't affect just one particular payment among clients. I've had people come to me with problems with the age pension, with youth allowance, with the disability support pension and with JobSeeker, or the previous unemployment benefit. There is clearly a systemic problem. It isn't a problem with just one part of Centrelink or with the department. It's a systemic problem affecting all payments.

The age pension is a particular problem. It's one of the big issues. Frankly, for many age pensioners, dealing with Centrelink is simply too difficult, too hard to navigate. When they go into an office for assistance, these older Australians are just referred to online and phone services. Many people wait months for an outcome of their application and receive no communication at all from Centrelink during that time. Moreover, there are other problems with the system, with what goes on, not just customer service: the deeming rate's wrong; the assets tests and the assets assessments are poorly done.

With youth allowance, I've encountered a commonplace problem whereby the delays go for ridiculous lengths, so much so that I've had parents, schools and universities contact my office quite regularly—alarmingly regularly—because students haven't been paid their youth allowance. They're destitute, and the parents are unable to afford to pay their child's rent, food and other expenses. I've even heard of some students having to drop out of their learning because they had to work to earn money with which to eat or they had to return home, away from their learning institution.

On the disability support pension, I've had countless vulnerable people—terminally ill, permanently disabled and chronically ill people and people suffering from extreme mental health problems—contact my office because their application for the DSP has been rejected. And it's been rejected because the medical evidence was deemed insufficient, yet they are now on a two-year waitlist to see that specialist again. Or it's been rejected because an independent medical assessor, over the phone, disagreed with the information provided by their medical specialist. Or it's been rejected because the person's condition was getting worse and so could not be classified as stabilised. As a result, people are forced to drag themselves into Centrelink again and again—people with serious mental illness, people with serious physical disabilities—and drag themselves to see multiple specialists, when it is abundantly clear that this sort of treatment is unwarranted and they need the disability support pension and need it quickly.

And where do I begin with JobSeeker? One of the significant problems here, apart from the paltry amount that it used to be, at $40 a day—and let's hope it never goes back to $40 a day—is that too often there is an attitude from government that people who are on the dole are bludgers. The government then creates all these absurd hurdles for someone who is on unemployment benefits, and the agency will cut their payments in half if a compulsory meeting is missed because of sickness or other valid reasons. I talked in my opening remarks about demonising. And I'm not talking about Centrelink officers demonising Centrelink clients; I'm talking about the government demonising Centrelink clients. There is no better example of how that demonising manifests itself than the robodebt fiasco. Thank God the courts will hold the government to account for the robodebt fiasco. But please understand: it's not over.

In fact, just today I sent another letter to the Commonwealth Ombudsman bringing a number of issues to the attention of the Ombudsman, because the government's decision to only repay debts calculated wholly or partially on averaged ATO income data ignores the flawed and inconsistent internal processes that were applied to recalculate appealed robodebts. I've asked the Ombudsman to conduct another inquiry. I've lost count of the number of times I've approached the Ombudsman over robodebt, and I'm proud to say that it might help in some small way to encourage the Ombudsman to investigate these matters, to intervene and to be part of the process of holding the government to account.

Much has already been said about outsourcing. In fact, just yesterday I gave a 90-second statement about outsourcing. I'm pleased to see the opposition today picking up on the points that I raised yesterday and going into even more detail in the extra time that they've had. I'll mention again the figures that I mentioned yesterday. I'm talking about the Public Service broadly here, not just about any one department or agency.

I refer to the work done by Michael West and publicised on michaelwest.com.au. It shows that the number of outsourced staff in the Department of Defence is 1½ times the number of public servants in that department; the Attorney-General's Department spent $13.4 million on labour hire contractors last financial year; Home Affairs outsourced 1,082 positions, including intelligence analysts, legal practitioners and border enforcement officers; nearly 40 per cent of the department of infrastructure staff are outsourced, including 16 assistant directors—I will say that again: nearly 40 per cent of the department of infrastructure staff are outsourced, including 16 assistant directors—and 5,000 positions at the ATO call centres are outsourced. This is just madness.

No wonder the standard of service by the government to the people it's supposed to serve is so bad. No wonder members of parliament—and I'm sure government members of parliament as well—are approached by people every single day with legitimate concerns about the problems they're experiencing at the hands of government agencies. They're running into bottlenecks and roadblocks because there are not enough staff and there has been a hasty move to online processing of services. Basically, agencies are under-resourced and over-outsourced.

All of this is simply not good enough. It could be so easily turned around, but it will only turn around when the federal government acknowledges that there's a problem. When you have ministers dismissing issues and problems with, 'My bad,' and then just ticking the box to acknowledge the problem and moving on, it leaves the community with no confidence whatsoever—none at all—that the government really appreciates there's a problem and really understands that it's in the public interest to fix those things.

So, please, whether it be Centrelink or other government agencies, let's resource these public servants properly so that they can deliver a public service. Let's stop cutting the jobs. Let's stop outsourcing. Let's upgrade our systems. Let there be leadership from the very top of the government. The government should say: 'We are here to serve and we serve by having the very best agencies we can possibly have.' We can have the best agencies in the world, but we'll need to start with an acknowledgement of the problem and we need to follow up with serious funding of these agencies.

Let's stop demonising the people who rely on the government. Let's face it: the people who walk into Centrelink are some of the most disadvantaged people in the country. They should be the people we pull close and embrace and look after as well as we humanly can. That's our job. That's what the government has to start understanding. The government has to start doing its job. Let's resource these agencies. Let's stop the outsourcing.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ): I call the member for Macnamara, who has finished doing his hair.

Mr BURNS (Macnamara) (17:23): [by video link] There are no hairdressers open in Victoria at the moment. As soon as there are, I will be visiting my local one. But that's not why I rise today. I rise to speak on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. I start by echoing the comments of previous speakers from the opposition and say that of course we support this bill—and it's a bill that has some small machinery changes—but, like many pieces of legislation from this government, it really misses the core problems and issues. Instead of actually tackling the issues that our nation faces, this government fiddles around the edges and just tinkers with the small things. This bill does not go to some of the core issues in Services Australia that I will be speaking about today.

One of the most vivid weeks of my time as a member of parliament was at the start of the pandemic. I remember the member for Canberra, who has recently had a beautiful baby, saying that if this pandemic teaches us anything it is that people, through no fault their own, can find themselves out of work. If this pandemic can teach us anything, it is that anyone at any time, despite absolutely no wrongdoing on their own behalf, can find themselves out of work, and that's exactly what's happened.

We saw a million Australians join the unemployment queue. It was devastating to watch, and I'm sure that every member of the House of Representatives can think of examples of devastation when speaking to people, to businesses who have been operating for 20 to 30 years and to people who are close to them—people who are friends and who are family members. It really touched every corner of our society. A million Australians who have never had any engagement with unemployment benefits all of a sudden found themselves needing to access services and needing to access Services Australia or Centrelink.

I remember that throughout this really difficult period Australians were forced almost overnight to access the services. We all remember the queues around the corners and around blocks where Australians were forced to line up during a pandemic, one by one, standing next to each other in groups in their hundreds and in their thousands, waiting to access Centrelink services and Centrelink offices. Instead of planning, instead of accepting responsibility and instead of acknowledging the difficulty that literally a million Australians were going through, the hapless minister—to be frank, it is absolutely astonishing this guy is still a minister, but I'll come back to that—who oversees this program said that a bunch of hackers had slowed down the myGov website. He said that a bunch of hackers had made it crash.

Before that, there was also mass confusion around people having to line up in order to get a CRN. In the end, it wasn't true. They just didn't have the planning and the ability to do it through the myGov website in the first place, and then they had to revisit their processes and do it on the fly. We were told it couldn't be done; it was a mess. We had thousands of people standing next to each other on the streets, and the best that Minister Robert could muster was, 'My bad,' and that there were hackers who were trying to slow down the government processes. That is the minister responsible for the social safety net of Australians during a pandemic, so it is hardly surprising that he is overseeing scandal after scandal after scandal in this policy area.

I want to say something really clearly. I have only sincere thanks to give—and I'm sure that all members of the House of Representatives would agree with me—to the staff of our Centrelink offices, certainly the local ones. Locally, in South Melbourne and in Prahran—which just borders on my electorate—the staff do a herculean job. Throughout this pandemic, they have really risen to the challenge. We speak to them on almost a daily basis, going through specific cases and trying to help people access the services. I know my office is deeply committed to it and does a fantastic job.

I also want to extend a thankyou to the staff of Centrelink. But, of course, the staff at Centrelink are not treated with the thanks that they deserve from the government and from this minister. If you want to have a look at why, during the pandemic, during some of the most difficult days to work in our Centrelink offices, this government was looking at shutting down Centrelink offices. They had already been planning to shut down the Mornington and Newport offices, and then I remember that the minister decided that he was going to shut down the Abbotsford office and tell people: 'Just go down to South Melbourne. Just head on down to South Melbourne and that'll be fine.' People who are accessing these services are facing so much difficulty. For the minister to flippantly say, 'You can just go to South Melbourne,' when they were already under the pump, when they were at peak servicing and already doing their bit, shows exactly how the government sees their Centrelink staff. They do not value their work, they do not respect them and they do not give them the adequate resources that they desperately need in order to fulfil the crucial job of staffing Services Australia and specifically the Centrelink services. So, while we say thank you, this minister says 'my bad'. While we appreciate the work of Centrelink and Services Australia, the best that the minister can offer is, 'My bad—we didn't quite get it right.' He is the minister for 'my bad'—not myGov, 'my bad'.

One of the big issues in Services Australia is obviously the rate at which people are accessing the JobSeeker payment and the coronavirus supplement. One of the things that I find absolutely extraordinary is that the minister overseeing this program was once caught spending over $2,000 a month on home internet bills, which he later had to pay back. We can spend an afternoon having a laugh, thinking about how on earth you can rack up $2,000 of home internet bills, but let's put that aside for a second and actually look at something serious here. The rate of Newstart in this country, before the coronavirus supplement, was $40 a day or about $1,130 a month. At the moment there is an extra supplement of $250 a fortnight, which takes the payment up to about $1,630 every four weeks or a month—a little bit more depending on how long the month is. But let's be generous. Let's say, on the very worst-case scenario, it was just under $1,200 and, with the supplement at the moment, it's just under $1,700. This minister spent more on home internet, on downloads, than people receive in unemployment benefits in this country. This minister charged taxpayers more money—which he later had to pay back—than people receive, even with the coronavirus supplement, and almost double what they received under the previous rate of Newstart. This guy is spending more on internet than people in this country are getting as a social safety net, and it tells you everything you need to know about his priorities and what he thinks is fair.

I know that the government is absolutely desperate to bring the JobSeeker rate back down to the previous levels. I am dialling in from the greatest electorate in the country, the electorate of Macnamara in St Kilda—I can see lots of nodding going on in the chamber—

An honourable member interjecting—

Mr BURNS: I can't see who's interjecting. I am connecting remotely from St Kilda, proudly so, but I am not in the chamber, because Victorians have faced probably some of the most difficult months that we have ever had to face. I want to thank every single Victorian who has done the right thing and helped us to overcome what most countries around the world have not been able to do, which is to bring down their coronavirus cases.

Despite this, despite Victorians still not being able to have their family members over, to see their friends, to open their businesses, despite the fact that we are still asking Victorians to try to save other Victorians' lives and get us into a stage where we can come out of the current restrictions, the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and this minister are happy with reducing both the JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments to Victorians. Victorian restaurants and businesses are absolutely on their last legs. They have done it tough. People on JobSeeker and on the unemployment queues are not there because they have done something wrong. They were working. People in this pandemic have found themselves in this position where they have had to join an unemployment queue that is so unfamiliar that they had to line up and try to access a CRN in the first place.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer like to say that this budget is about saying to Australians, 'We've got your back.' They haven't got Victorians' backs. I'll tell you what they are doing. They have their hands in their back pockets, taking away supplement payments from Victorians during this pandemic. They have their hands in the savings and in the support payments for Victorians during this pandemic. This government doesn't have Victorians' backs. This government is taking funds and support away from Victorians in their hour of need, just at the very end of months and months of Victorians doing the right thing. It is hardly surprising, because the very people who are overseeing this clawback of support, the clawback of the JobSeeker payment, right at the time when Victorians cannot afford it, is the minister who spent more on his home internet than people who were receiving this payment receive in a month.

In this country, we have set up over years and years a social welfare system that is designed to be a safety net for Australians. It is there to try to support people. This government's record is to trash it, to reduce staffing, to send vulnerable people debt collection notices, and persist with the scheme, to be advised that it was illegal, and then to continue sending debt collection notices to vulnerable Australians. I know that many members have spoken of the absolutely heartbreaking cases of people who have received these debt notices, only to be told that they don't have to pay and this whole scheme was illegal.

Australians have gone through some of the most difficult periods in our country's history, especially in Victoria. We need to thank our Centrelink staff and work with them. We need more Centrelink staff. We don't need to be privatising Centrelink, we don't need to be privatising Centrelink offices, we don't need to be dismissing the needs of people who are in our social safety net. Australia is a fantastic country because we look after Australians, except this government doesn't. This government is slowly clawing back support from the very people who rely on it at the very time when they rely on it most. We can do better than cutting payments from Victorians in our hour of need but, unfortunately, with this minister and his track record of scandal and ugly ministerial behaviour, I don't hold out much. But we must do better than his hapless efforts.

Ms CLAYDON (Newcastle) (17:38): I am very pleased to contribute to the debate on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. The bill lays out the proposed framework and structure for the Department of Human Services replacement agency, Services Australia. As my Labor colleagues have mentioned, it puts forward a number of changes, really to modernise the terminology and streamline reporting in the transition to the new agency. Labor will support the government in these aims. What we are not willing to do, however, is to sit mutely while those opposite privatise the public sector by stealth. It is that point that the member for Dobell's amendment goes to. It calls on the government to do some very important things, including abolishing the ASL offset rule, which has the effect of capping average staffing levels within Services Australia. It calls on the government to stop the excessive use of consultancy firms and contractors to outsource important government services, including Centrelink. It calls on the government to recognise that the staffing cap is a false economy that undermines the quality of government services, especially those delivered by Services Australia. I am very pleased to put on the record today my strong support for these calls and that amendment. I do note that the budget flagged an increase of 3.5 per cent, but it was significantly below the staff cap and it only represents an increase of 325 people above the previous staffing cap.

It's important that we have these sorts of discussions in the Australian parliament about what we want from public agencies like Centrelink, especially as we start to make the big decisions about what sort of country we want to build in the future. COVID-19 has demonstrated that, when the will is there, big changes can be made and that this can happen very quickly. It has also demonstrated the importance of a strong, responsive Public Service. Contrary to the constant attacks and undermining of Liberal governments, who have long insisted on the virtues of small government, it turns out that the Public Service had a major role to play in the fight against coronavirus. Yet it's a role that could have been more effective had the Public Service not been subject to years of savage cuts and an unrelenting push to privatise essential services.

Centrelink has always been there for Australians when they have been at their lowest ebb. When people face bereavement or disability, they look to Centrelink for support. When they take on caring duties or get sick, they rely on Centrelink to get them through. Indeed, it's Centrelink that millions of Australians have turned to in recent months as COVID-19 restrictions threatened or destroyed an unthinkable number of jobs and businesses. Sadly, this profoundly important agency was found wanting because of the way it has been neglected by this government. As the queues grew, so did the frustrations with Centrelink's failure to keep up. Despite the hard work of committed staff, people queued for hours but weren't served. Calls to the hotline were unmet, with engaged signals or never-ending on hold messages. Online visitors reached a dead end when the myGov website crashed.

But these weren't problems born just of the pandemic. Under the Liberals, staff have been cut, queues have grown and phone wait times have ballooned. Additionally, an arbitrary staffing cap, installed by this government, has forced management to farm out some of its most sensitive and fundamental functions to casuals and contractors. The government pretends that this is about saving money, but everybody knows that's a nonsense, because contract workers cost the taxpayer even more than salaried public servant, even though they personally get paid less. The difference, of course, goes to the bottom line of private labour hire companies, who are making an absolute motza out of this mess. Too often we have seen staff start work in frontline roles without adequate skills or training, so that, when people do get to speak to a person, they often find they don't have adequate knowledge to answer their questions. I want to be clear: this is not the fault of any of these workers. They are just doing the best they can in the face of concerted government attacks.

The sad truth is that Centrelink has been so diminished by this government that it now struggles to fulfil some of its core responsibilities. Year on year this Liberal government has set out to starve Centrelink of resources and cruel its ability to deliver for Australians. But it gets worse. Not content with capping staff and slashing resources, the Morrison government recently turned its attention to shutting down Centrelink's physical presence in communities—the very offices that people go to when they need help. Indeed, this year, community after community has learnt that their frontline Centrelink offices are slated for closure. Initially, we thought it was just the one office. Then we learned of another and another and another. It quickly became clear that they weren't isolated decisions. No, they were part of a devious, coordinated plan to shrink Centrelink's frontline footprint by stealth. From Mornington and Newport in Victoria, to Tweed Heads, to my home city of Newcastle in New South Wales, local communities woke up in shock to find their Centrelink offices shuttered, merging or under threat.

Of course, the Morrison government wasn't honest with the public about these plans, which will leave jobseekers—needy and vulnerable Australians—out in the cold. Newcastle was one of the first to be targeted. The first I heard was when the minister wrote to me to tell me that the government will be closing the Mayfield and King Street Centrelink offices to replace them with a single office in a yet to be determined location. He talked coldly of consolidation, which of course we all know is Liberal code for cuts, cuts and more cuts. I can't begin to tell you how furious I was when I got this letter. How dare this government set about axing my critical local frontline services with so little regard for the consequences, how dare they treat Novocastrians with such contempt and how dare they think they can get away with this appalling plan.

When I found out what the government had cooked up and spoke to my community about the implications of these plans for them, I launched a community campaign. I called on Novocastrians to join with me in the fight to save our Centrelink offices at King Street and Mayfield. I asked them to denounce the government's nefarious plot. I requested their personal stories which showed what these local offices mean to them, and, boy, did they step up. It has been quite incredible, actually. I have received dozens and dozens of calls, letters and emails of solidarity. People wrote to me about how much they relied on Centrelink's frontline services. They shared their personal stories about what those offices meant to them and their families, and they sent me copies of the letters that they had sent to the minister urging him to axe this stupid plan.

If I was heartened by the letters of support, I was completely overwhelmed by the support for my community petition. Today, I'd like to formally record in the Australian parliament that 3,458 Novocastrians signed this petition which called on the government to axe this terrible plan and leave Newcastle's Centrelink offices alone. And I'd like to sincerely thank each and every person who took the time to write, to call, to email or to drop in to my office to register their dissent. On this matter, there can be no doubt: Newcastle loudly, proudly and unequivocally said no to these closures. I stand here now on behalf of my community to deliver this message. I say no to this shameful plan. Mr Morrison, Newcastle says no to this shameful plan—no to starving Centrelink of the resources it needs to properly support Novocastrians in times of need.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Owens ): Order! Point of order?

Mr Howarth: I ask that the member for Newcastle refer to the Prime Minister by his correct title. Thank you.

Ms CLAYDON: I say no to the Prime Minister and to his appalling plan to deprive Newcastle of these Centrelink offices. I say no to his minister, who thinks it is a good idea to deprive Novocastrians of critical frontline services that have been so essential in getting us through this pandemic. I say no to reducing any of our frontline services and no to shutting down our local offices. I'm very pleased that the minister on duty tonight made that intervention, so that I had an opportunity to speak directly to the Prime Minister, who appears to be pretty tone-deaf about these sorts of issues. I hope the Prime Minister is listening very carefully today: the message from Newcastle is loud, clear and unequivocal, and I hope you understand.

It may well be that this government is starting to see the error of its ways after seeing the disastrous impacts of its ongoing campaign to hollow out public services. Indeed, we've already seen them postpone some of their plans to shut down offices—Abbotsford Centrelink in Melbourne, for example. But it's not enough. The government need to put an end now to the entire shameful plot that they have been hatching. They shouldn't allow this to be swept under the rug. I will not allow this issue to be swept under the rug, ready to be revived when no-one's looking. Maybe the Prime Minister thinks he can put that kind of shoofty over Newcastle. Well, I've got news for this government: we will be watching you very closely.

This plan must be abandoned once and for all. We are heading into the deepest recession we have seen in almost a century, and Australians need to know that Centrelink will be there for them when they need it. It is the Morrison government that has created this mess and it is the Morrison government that now needs to fix it. The government has an opportunity now to remedy the terrible, terrible situation in which it is placing so many Australians. It is diabolical for a government that relied on a professional public service to get millions of Australians through this pandemic to even contemplate paying back that loyalty, that service to our communities, by shutting the doors on those workplaces, saying, 'We don't need all these Centrelink offices.' At what point does this government stop and reflect on the serious implications of its diabolical plans—the implications for the millions of Australians who rely on Centrelink for professional advice and guidance and to receive timely payments? That is the whole purpose of a social security safety net.

Over a long period of time, Australian men and women fought very hard to ensure that this country had a protective social security safety net. It was indeed the blood and sweat of working men and women in this nation that struck the social accord that afforded the decent safety nets put in place in this country, whether it was income support through Centrelink or universal health care in the form of Medicare—hard-won victories. Of course, these offices that the government is intending to close down are also Medicare offices in many of our cities, country towns and regions. So it shows the complete disregard and disrespect that this government has for two of the most fundamental doctrines in this nation—that is, a universal healthcare system and a social security safety net. (Time expired)

Mr ZAPPIA (Makin) (17:53): I begin by commending the member the Newcastle for her contribution to this debate on the Services Australia Governance Amendment Bill 2020. Like so much of the Morrison government's legislation, this bill is more about window-dressing and cost-cutting than about service improvement. The bill re-badges the Department of Human Services as an executive agency called Services Australia that will have oversight of Centrelink, Medicare and child support registration. In the future, the departmental head will no longer be referred to as the secretary but as the chief executive officer.

These are largely superficial changes that will incur considerable implementation costs, including new titles, new structures, new contracts and extensive rebadging, which will all be worn by the taxpayers. I believe that none of these things will provide better services. I suspect the real reason behind these changes from the Morrison government is to bury its robodebt, COVID app and data breach bungles and the appalling difficulty people have experienced over recent years in dealing with those departments—and that's not because of the people who work within the departments. As other speakers have quite rightly pointed out, it's not the staff who are at fault here, but rather the fact that they have been working underresourced and undersupported for way too long.

There are two Centrelink offices in my region—one at Modbury and one at Salisbury—and I can only applaud the staff at those offices for what they have been doing during the time I have been the member for Makin. They have always been helpful and supportive. I know that they've always gone out of their way to deal with difficult situations. But when you don't have the support you need and when you are not allowed to do what you think is the right thing to do then obviously it means poor services for the people who need those services.

That all comes down to the number of staff who have been cut by this government since coming to office in 2013 and the staff caps that have been put in place by this government. We know that some 19,000 staff have been cut from the Public Service over the life of this coalition government. I note that only in March the Prime Minister announced that there would be some 5,000 staff reinstated. My questions to the government are: How many of those 5,000 have been reinstated? Are they full-time positions or part-time positions? Are they casuals or permanent staff? I don't know. Indeed, it would be interesting to know exactly what has happened since that announcement because the implementation of many of this government's announcements never seems to eventuate.

The staff cuts have meant that not only the officers have been left underresourced but also they have been relying heavily on temporary staff, as other speakers have pointed out time and time again. The problem with that, as I'm sure anybody would appreciate, is that temporary staff do not always have the experience or the familiarity with the issues that they are having to deal with on a daily basis, nor do they have the long-term knowledge of the people they are trying to assist. It means that when people go to those offices quite often they are dealing with one person on one day and a different person on another day and often getting different advice because of that.

Indeed, only yesterday I responded to constituents in my electorate who had been attempting for three years to resolve a matter with Centrelink. Over those three years they had got conflicting advice time and time again. This is probably because different staff have had to deal with the husband and wife each time they contacted the Centrelink offices. It was finally resolved as a result of intervention from my office. That was after a three-year period. I'm also aware that, in addition to the issue of staffing that has been referred to in this place by me and other speakers—

The SPEAKER: Member for Makin, could you resume your seat. We have a six o'clock cut-off and there are a couple of things we need to do. The member for Makin will be able to resume his remarks when we resume. I table a document on the voting positions of non-aligned members.

Mr ALBANESE (Grayndler—Leader of the Opposition) (19:31): My fellow Australians, we live in a great country. Amidst all the chaos and hardship that has shaken our world in 2020 there is nowhere you'd rather be. The credit for that, as always, doesn't belong to the politicians here in this chamber tonight; it belongs to you, the people of Australia. We're coming through this pandemic because of your hard work; your sacrifices; your sense of community; your willingness to put not just your friends and neighbours but people you have never met and probably will never meet ahead of yourself; and your values, Australian values. We look after each other. It's that spirit and those values that should define what happens next, because the challenge—and the opportunity—facing us now is not just a matter of getting things back to the way they were; we have to aim higher than that, strive for so much more than that. We have a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild our economy and our country for the better, to launch a recovery that delivers a stronger, fairer and more secure future for all Australians.

This budget fails the test. The budget reflects the government's character of being guided by short-term politics rather than long-term vision. Our economy was already struggling coming into the crisis—slow growth, flat wages, declining productivity, business investment going backwards and a doubling of debt. Now they are cutting wage subsidies, are slashing unemployment benefits and have no plan for child care, aged care or social housing.

This budget leaves people behind. Women have suffered most during the pandemic but are reduced to a footnote. The best the government can offer is that they can drive on a road. If you're over 35, you've certainly been left behind. This week your wage subsidy was cut. In March your wage subsidy disappears. If you're then unemployed, you will get $40 a day and be forced into poverty. Then you will compete to get a job with people who will have their wages subsidised. It's a quadruple whammy from the Morrison government. The Morrison recession will be deeper and longer because of this budget.

I was brought up to look on the bright side. My mother, Maryanne, was a great optimist. She was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and other health conditions that meant constant pain and often long stints in hospital. She was a single mum who raised me in public housing and relied on what was then called the invalid pension, which is now known as the disability pension. She did it tough, but she always had a smile on her face. She never complained about her lot in life. One of her favourite sayings was: 'There's always someone doing it tougher than you.' Like every Australian parent, her greatest aspiration, and the reason for all her sacrifice, was to make sure that her child had a better quality of life and greater opportunity than she enjoyed.

That aspiration for others has been on full display in 2020: volunteers fighting bushfires; healthcare workers fending off a pandemic; cleaners, supermarket workers and truckies working around the clock to keep our economy going; teachers redefining education, practically overnight; farmers and regional communities who had already copped drought and bushfires; small businesses reinventing themselves, and locals backing them in; trade unions agreeing to temporarily put aside hard-fought industrial gains to maintain jobs and keep businesses going; public servants reminding us of the honourable profession that they belong to—Australians rallying to help each other through tough times.

But, if this crisis has reinforced what we know is good about our country, it has also revealed what is wrong with our economy. The budget figures tell the story: an end to three decades of economic growth; a million unemployed, with 160,000 more by Christmas; $1 trillion of debt; debt, which had already doubled under this government, now four times that which the coalition inherited.

And there were the damning silences. Too many Australians are in insecure work—the first to be laid off, with low wages and few entitlements—and this budget said nothing about that. Too many women are shut off from economic opportunity, earning less and retiring with less, and this budget said nothing to change that. Too many family budgets are being pushed to breaking point by the cost of child care, and this budget said nothing to help with that. Too many older Australians, who built this great nation, are being treated without the respect and dignity they deserve. Too many older Australians are lonely prisoners of a broken aged-care system. Facilities are run for the highest profits at the lowest standards. A care economy workforce in child care, aged care and disability care is overworked and underpaid, and Tuesday's budget said nothing and did nothing about that. How can the government push the national debt to $1 trillion, yet leave these fundamental problems unresolved?

Tonight, as Labor leader, I want to outline how we can change this for the better—how we can emerge from this crisis with a stronger economy and a fairer society. The pandemic has shown that Labor's values of fairness, security and the power of government to change lives for the better are the right values in a crisis. They are also the right values for the recovery. Throughout this crisis, my colleagues and I have been constructive. As the party that led Australia safely through the global financial crisis, we understand that, in the middle of an emergency, the priority is on urgent action.

Still, we sought to make improvements, including arguing for wage subsidies, which the Prime Minister first rejected as 'very dangerous'. We wanted casuals, universities and the arts to be included. This would have saved tens of thousands of jobs. We warned of the damage caused by a smash and grab on superannuation, forcing desperate people to raid their own retirement savings while they waited for support to arrive. We called for telehealth and mental health support. We backed the trade unions' call for the government to introduce a national scheme of paid pandemic leave so no-one had to choose between turning up to work sick and putting food on the table.

Our constructive approach contrasts with that of the coalition during the GFC. It voted against the Rudd government's major economic stimulus to protect jobs and complained about the debt it inherited, which was one-quarter of the debt created by the Morrison government. The only legacy delivered by this budget is trillion dollar debt. It's a reform desert. The decisions in this budget should be about setting Australia on a course for the next decade and beyond. And when those decisions are wasteful, unfair, short-sighted or just plain wrong, then it's not the government who pays in the long run; it's the whole country.

Just have a look at the NBN. The Liberals have wasted years trashing Labor's plan for high-speed broadband delivered by fibre to the home and business. They went out and bought 50,000 kilometres of copper—literally enough to wrap around the entire planet—so they could build a slow, third-rate network that was out of date before it started. Now, at a cost of $4.5 billion, they've got to fix up the mess that they created. Instead of leading the world on internet speed, business connectivity and online learning, Australia is playing catch-up.

If we're going to come out of this recession stronger and fairer, then our country needs a plan to ensure that no-one is left behind and no-one is held back. Our plan to take Australia from recession to recovery is this: rehire our workers, rewire our economy, recharge workforce participation of women and rebuild our nation.

Labor knows that education is the key to opportunity. Our schools, TAFE and vocational education, and universities are vital national institutions. And making sure a quality education is accessible and affordable for every Australian doesn't just open doors of opportunity for individuals; it makes us a smarter, more productive and more future-ready country. Investing in education needs to begin at the beginning—with quality child care. We all know how much our kids change, learn and grow before they're at school. Ninety per cent of human brain development occurs in the first five years of life—an extraordinary figure. What children learn at child care is so vital for giving our kids the best possible start. But the current system of caps, subsidies and thresholds isn't just confusing and costly; it actually penalises the families it's meant to help. Right around Australia, instead of child care supporting families where both parents want to work, the costs—and the tax system—actively discourage this. And, as is too often the case, it's working mums who cop the worst of it. For millions of working women, it's simply not worth working more than three days a week. This derails careers, it deprives working women of opportunities they've earned and it costs workplaces—not just day-to-day productivity but years of valuable knowledge and skills that have been built up.

If I'm elected Prime Minister, I am going to fix this. Tonight, I announce that a Labor government will, from 1 July 2022, remove the annual cap on the childcare subsidy, eliminating once and for all the disincentive to work more hours. We will increase the maximum childcare subsidy to 90 per cent, cutting costs for 97 per cent of all families in the system. We will order the ACCC to design a price regulation mechanism that will ensure that every taxpayer dollar flows directly through to savings for Australian families. This is what real reform looks like. It will boost women's workforce participation, boost productivity and get Australia working again.

Building a childcare system that works for families will turbocharge productivity in workplaces, delivering a much-needed boost in economic growth of, conservatively, $4 billion a year. For me, the principle is very simple: early education is vital for children's future. And child care is an essential service for families, but as well for the economy. So our long term goal, and the mission we will set for the Productivity Commission, which will be asked to report in the first term of a Labor government, is to investigate moving to a 90 per cent subsidy for child care for every Australian family. This is not a welfare measure. This is economic reform. Labor created Medicare—universal health care. We created the NDIS—universal support for people with disability. We created superannuation—universal retirement savings for workers. And, if I am Prime Minister, I will make quality, affordable child care universal, too.

This global pandemic has exposed the terrible damage seven years of Liberal government has done to Australian manufacturing. I don't want our country to always be the last link in a worldwide supply chain. My vision is for us to have the skills and smarts and people and industry to make things here and sell them on the global market. So, tonight I want to talk about Labor's plan for a future made in Australia, a mass mobilisation of resources, an across-the-board strategy for job creation, training and skills, lower energy prices, infrastructure, government purchasing, manufacturing and construction—a plan to grow our economy out of this recession and build for the future, too. The first policy that I announced when I was in Perth, as Labor leader, was to build on the success of the Infrastructure Australia model that I created and create Jobs and Skills Australia. This is about joining up the needs of our economy now with training opportunities for the future. We have a shortage of nurses, welders, bricklayers, hairdressers and engineers. Yet, under this government, there are 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees doing courses than there were seven years ago. We want to equip every Australian with the skills for a good, secure job and we want to make sure that every employer has access to a well-trained Australian workforce. Right at the heart of our plan for skills and training is the great institution of public TAFE.

But there is more that government can and should do. Every year, the Commonwealth spends billions of taxpayer dollars on building and upgrading roads, maintaining railways and repairing bridges. To deliver maximum public value for money, Labor will create an Australian Skills Guarantee. On every major worksite receiving federal government funding, one out of 10 workers employed will be an apprentice, a trainee or a cadet. These commonsense measures will train tens of thousands of workers.

We will also consider how this principle can be extended to federal government subsidised sectors, like aged care, disability care and child care, in co-operation with providers. And we'll bring the same approach to Defence acquisitions. Over the next decade, there is $270 billion of Defence spending on the books. These investments in national security should also deliver a dividend for national skills, training, research and manufacturing. A Labor government will implement concrete rules to maximise local content and local jobs. At best, the Liberals' approach is all over the shop when it comes to Australian content. Remember when one of this Liberal government's defence ministers said that he wouldn't trust Australians to build a canoe.

Australians will never forget that it was this government that drove Holden, Ford and other car makers out of Australia, taking tens of thousands of jobs in auto manufacturing, servicing and the supply chain with them. This wasn't just dumb and devastating in the short term. Cutting down the Australian auto industry also cut Australia off from the next round of opportunities, dealing us out of a new wave of technology that could have been made in Elizabeth and Altona and Geelong but instead is being made in Detroit and Tokyo.

It's the same at a state level. Liberal governments consistently say that we can't build trains here, yet the ones they've bought from overseas have been too long for our stations, too narrow for our tracks or too tall for our tunnels. Last December, I visited the Downer EDI site in Maryborough, Queensland where skilled Aussie workers are refitting rail carriages purchased from overseas by the former Newman LNP government. This work is being done in a factory that's been proudly building trains and employing Aussies since the 19th century. Our country has the skills, the experience and the know-how. What's missing is a government that believes in manufacturing and has a plan to deliver. Tonight, I announced that a Labor government will create a national rail manufacturing plan. We will provide leadership to the states and work with industry to identify and optimise the opportunities to build trains here in Australia for freight and for public transport.

Labor will invest in the skills, research and training to kickstart the next generation of Australian manufacturing jobs, and we'll deliver the affordable, reliable energy to power industry into the future. The Liberals have had 22 energy policies in eight years, and all they have to show for it is higher electricity prices and higher emissions. Australia can do so much better. We can be a renewable energy superpower, with clean energy powering a new era of metal manufacturing and hydrogen production. Labor has a clear target to tackle climate change: net zero carbon pollution by 2050. Every state and territory government—Labor and Liberal—supports this goal. The Business Council, the Australian Industry Group, the Australian Energy Council and the National Farmers Federation all agree on it. Qantas, Santos, BHP and a host of other major companies all back it too—everyone but the Morrison government, which is frozen in time while the world warms around it.

Of course, there is a lot more we can do right now to make energy more affordable. The truth is that Australia's electricity network was designed for a different century—a bit like copper and the NBN—a time when solar panels ran pocket calculators, not the one in four households that currently have rooftop solar. The current network takes no account of the rise of renewables as the cheapest new energy source and doesn't help link up these new sources to the national grid. A Labor government will tackle this head-on. We will establish a new rewiring the nation corporation to rebuild and modernise the national energy grid. By using the Commonwealth's ability to borrow at lower interest rates, it will be done at the lowest possible cost. The projects needed to rebuild the grid have all been identified in the Australian Energy Market Operator's Integrated System Plan. The planning work is done. Rebuilding the grid will create thousands of jobs, particularly in regional Australia, and deliver up to $40 billion in benefits. Fixing transmission is technology neutral and will allow the market to drive least-cost new energy production.

Reforming child care, rebuilding the national energy grid and revitalising Australian manufacturing are at the heart of Labor's plans for job creation over the next decade, but, in the middle of the first recession in 30 years, we know Australia needs a plan to create jobs right now. One of the fastest ways to lift economic growth and get tradies back on the tools is to invest in social housing. There are 100,000 social housing dwellings around the country that are in urgent need of repair. The roofs leak, they're full of mould or damp and the plumbing isn't up to scratch. If these were MPs' offices, they'd be fixed overnight. These are people's homes, and they're a job-creation plan that is ready and waiting in every city and town. Tradies could be ordering from suppliers today and be on site tomorrow. The pipeline of work doesn't stop at existing houses that need fixing; there are new houses that need to be built too. Almost 200,000 Australians are on waiting lists for social housing

I grew up in public housing. I know that, when you don't have much, having a roof over your head provides security and makes all the difference to your life. So many economists have identified investing in social housing as the best way to provide immediate stimulus to the economy. It would create thousands of jobs in construction and the trades and, just like for my mum, it would give thousands of people a better life.

The pandemic has exposed Australia's vulnerability. This has particularly impacted the elderly, with more than 670 tragic deaths in aged care, in a system that was described by the royal commission, in the one-word title of the interim report issued last year, as neglect. This budget has done nothing to address this neglect and nothing to ensure that aged-care residents have enough nurses, carers and other staff, which they need and deserve. The royal commission declared last week that there was still no plan for aged care.

It's also the case that our pandemic preparedness was poor. The last time we had a best-practice national pandemic preparedness exercise, it was run by the Rudd government back in 2008. A Labor government will establish an Australian centre for disease control to bring us into line with other advanced economies. We're the only country in the OECD that doesn't have one.

On Tuesday night, Australia needed a plan to seize the economic opportunities of the next decade. We are, after all, located in the fastest-growing region of the world in human history. Instead, we got an incoherent grab bag, fixated on the photo opportunities of next week. That's the defining flaw of this government and this Prime Minister. They think an announcement is an end in itself—always there for the photo-op, never there for the follow-up. We see it time and time again.

Remember the 'back in black' mugs they were selling last budget, ahead of delivering the biggest deficit in Australian history? I think they picked the wrong AC/DC song. The mugs should have said 'dirty deeds done dirt cheap'. Just look at the waste and the grift and the pork-barrelling exposed by the Australian National Audit Office, which has had its funding cut in this budget, as payback. There's the sports rorts scandal, the $30 million paid for airport land that was worth just $3 million, and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation arriving at a meeting and walking out with more than $400 million they didn't ask for, and, two years after announcing they would support a national integrity commission, the legislation is as visible as a Morrison government surplus. A Labor government will deliver a national anticorruption body to restore faith in our democracy.

In seven years, the gap between what they've promised on infrastructure on budget night and what they've delivered is nearly $7 billion. They turn up, they turn over the first sod, and years later weeds are growing on the empty lot. In spite of a budget drowning in red ink, there were no new, game-changing infrastructure projects funded. As Australia's first ever infrastructure minister, I know what a missed opportunity this budget represents.

Then there's the Emergency Response Fund. This $4 billion fund was created in the aftermath of the catastrophic bushfires, with $200 million available each financial year from last year, 2019-20. It's for recovery as well as resilience in the lead-up to bushfire seasons and other natural disasters. Not a dollar has been spent, not one. This week I spoke to Zoey Salucci in Cobargo. The Prime Minister should remember her. She was the young pregnant woman who had lost her home and asked for more help for the Rural Fire Service. She was reluctant to shake his hand. Zoey's son, Phoenix, turns six months old this week. It's a great name. He was named after the Greek mythological bird that obtains new life by rising from the ashes. When Phoenix was born, Zoey and her husband and their two-year-old daughter, Uma, were still living in a van. She despairs that so many of her community are still living in temporary caravans on land that is yet to be cleared and yet the $4 billion funding announced remains untouched. That's why the true test of this budget isn't this week's headlines. It's not the rhetoric or the promises; it's whether money reaches the people who need it.

Australia is at a crossroad. It's not of our choosing, but the choices we make could change everything. This is an opportunity to reset and renew. There was a time when the average wage let you buy a house and when secure jobs with sick pay were the norm. That was before the balance tipped so far one way that ordinary people were left vulnerable. Let's use this opportunity to get the balance right again. Let's put security back into work so that people don't have to choose between their bank account and their health. Let's transform child care so that it's affordable and accessible to every family. Let's fix our aged-care system so that it's driven by dignity and care, not profit.

The choices we make now will define who we are in the future, so ask yourself what sort of country you want. Do we want to return to the same work insecurity, the same cuts to TAFE and universities, the same second-rate services for the bush and the same stale arguments over climate change? I want us to do better. I want a country that makes things and that creates wealth and shares it. I want a country where the next generation inherit opportunity and prosperity, not debt and doubt. I want a country which respects our farmers and miners in the regions and our cleaners and musicians in the cities. I want a country that respects those who've come across the sea to enrich our society. I want a country that recognises the privilege that we have of being a part of the world's oldest continuous culture and recognises First Nations people in our Constitution and gives them a voice to this parliament. I want a country where, when the going gets tough, government is on your side. That's the Australia I believe in. That's the better future I want us to build together.

The year 2020 has been the year from hell, but during this calamity we learnt a lot about ourselves and about each other. A man called Tom Uren was the closest person in my life I had to a father figure. Tom fought in World War II. He spent his 21st birthday as a Japanese prisoner of war on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway. He never talked much about what he went through, but he always said that Australians survived because of a simple code: the healthy looked after the sick, the strong looked after the weak and the young looked after the old. Those values are at the heart of what it is to be an Australian, and those values are why I'm optimistic about our country's future.

Just as our people have rallied to each other and risen to the challenges of this pandemic, I know Australians can seize the opportunities of the recovery and can seize the chance to rebuild and renew our country. But people can't do it on their own. My mum battled a ton of adversity to give me opportunities that she never had, but government played a part too. It put a roof over our head. It gave me an education and a start. That's why I want to be Prime Minister. It's because I know that government has the power to break down barriers of disadvantage and to change lives for the better. I've seen it. I've lived it. And that's what Labor's plans are all about: creating jobs for today, and training our people for tomorrow; making quality child care a right for all, not a luxury for some; rebuilding our manufacturing sector; and powering our recovery with clean energy. Tonight, I've talked about how we can make this once-in-a-century crisis the beginning of a new era of Australian prosperity and Australian fairness. With the right plans, the right policies and the right leadership, I truly believe our country can make this moment our own. With strength and fairness we can beat this recession, we can launch a recovery and we can build a future where no-one is held back and no-one is left behind.

Debate adjourned.

House adjourned at 20: 05

Thursday, 8 October 2020

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Zimmerman) took the chair at 10:00.