Walker Holly: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 18 July 2012. Volume:681;Page:3643. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 I had been planning to use this call to speak to my Supplementary Order Paper 77 and to offer it in fact in the spirit of cross-party cooperation and constructiveness as an additional protection for children from the sanctions imposed by this legislation. Given that we have just heard that this Supplementary Order Paper has been ruled out of order because the Government has chosen to exercise its financial veto I would like to speak a little bit to that and perhaps invite the Minister for Social Development if she is prepared to take a call to outline the financial impacts of the Supplementary Order Paper and the rationale behind the use of that veto.  
If I perhaps can just spend a minute or two outlining what it is that this Supplementary Order Paper would have done. I was going to in fact thank and congratulate the Minister on her constructive engagement with my questions about the impact of sanctions on children in this Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill during the debate on Part 1 last night and this relates to what is on the Table now in Part 3 acknowledging that beneficiaries will be sanctioned only by up to 50 percent in an acknowledgment that their children need to be protected from the loss of income that a sanction imposed on them may incur. The Minister was quite constructive with her comments about that last night and agreed I think that the last thing that this legislation wants to do or is designed to do is have detrimental impacts unintended consequences on the very children whom it is setting out to assist.  
So this Supplementary Order Paper which has very strangely been ruled out of order was going to give the chief executive the additional discretion not to impose a sanction or not to attempt to recover a debt if it was deemed by the chief executive that to do so may deprive the child of food or shelter or would otherwise be detrimental to the well-being of the child. So what it would have done is add an additional layer of protection there; an additional discretion for Work and Income not to impose the sanctions. It does not actually change anything materially about the bill. It does not change the sanctions themselves. It does not change the policy behind the bill or any of the other material provisions of the bill. It simply inserts a protection and a discretion on the part of Work and Income not to apply the sanctions that the bill allows. If it can be shown that a child is put at severe risk—that their food or shelter or otherwise their general well-being would be put at such risk by the imposition of a sanction on their parents—it would give the chief executive the discretion not to apply that sanction.  
What I think I can understand by the Government’s decision to rule this out based on the financial veto—and I see that the number of $128 million has been quoted here and I would be very interested to hear how that figure was arrived at—and what I assume it means is that the Government would be anticipating imposing that $128 million worth of sanctions under this bill and is anticipating that that is the level of sanctioning it will be doing of parents. That is very concerning if that is the case because that is a significant amount of money and it is a significant amount of sanctions and there are large numbers of children potentially affected by the sanctioning of their parents’ income. I would like to invite the Minister to take a call—if she could—to explain perhaps the rationale behind that $128 million figure and whether in fact we can take that in the Committee to be if you like a guarantee by the Government that that is the level of sanctioning that it is expecting to apply because that seems very significant to me.  
I must say that while the Greens do take issue with many of the substantive provisions of this bill this Supplementary Order Paper was in fact simply seeking to add in an additional level of protection. I would have thought it was something that all members of this House could support or at least see the merit in given that all it does is provide discretion—not even requiring the chief executive of Work and Income to exercise this discretion but simply gives them the option not to apply the sanction if it could be deemed not to be in the best interests of that child. That seems to me very important both from the perspective of child well-being but also to comply with our international obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and I am referring here to article 27 which talks about the rights of the affected citizen in need of social security to be able to support themselves and their children. There is a risk I think that if we allow this bill to pass—