Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Let me add some contributions that hopefully shouldn't come across as controversial in that I think people should be treated with respect and dignity including people on the benefit. Everybody should have a right to participate in their communities and everybody should have a right to a warm safe home and enough kai to put on the table. Yet despite seeing the nots" from members on the other side what this bill is intending to do is to undermine all of these things by lowering the increases to benefit levels that have been already set by successive Governments below the poverty line.Benefit levels as they stand do not enable people to do any of these things and the system does not treat people who are receiving income support with respect or dignity. And it is not good enough for the Minister to say that because things have always been this way because for 30-plus years we've just indexed benefits to inflation we should keep things as they are. That statement is so so indicative of the approach of this Government and in fact too many Governments. They believe that the policies introduced by neo-liberal approaches in the 1980s and the current status quo is good enough. They omit the fact that we have seen record inequality as a result of these policies introduced during that neo-liberal period and they do drive intergenerational poverty.So to pretend that just because things have always been this way they work is to completely ignore the evidence that we're living in a period of heightened inequality with our front-line services charities and community organisations being under the pump. So the Minister once again needs to turn her face to the street to actually engage with the realities that people who are going to be impacted by lower benefit increases are going to be subjected to.Our communities deserve more than crumbs. Our communities deserve more than us debating for the crumbs that indexation will cause and will deliver for our communities. Our communities deserve benefit levels that enable them to fully participate in the community enable them to put enough food on the table and enable them to feel like they're treated with respect and dignity.And to that last point when we have members of the Government making speeches and talking about people on the benefit as if they're just numbers and people that can fill in a stadium that contributes to the dehumanisation of a whole group of people. When we don't engage in relation to the lived experiences when we don't engage with the realities that when someone is on a benefit they're subjected to conditions that do not enable them to even participate meaningfully in the workforce when we have a social security system that cannot even quantify the kind of jobs that people go into or the wages that people go into then the arguments from the Government around how lower increases to benefits will lead to better employment outcomes is nothing but spin and omits the hardship that this bill will contribute to. The hardship that already exists will be compounded by a Government that out of sheer cruelty wants to lower those benefit increases.There is no balance to be struck in relation to the outcomes of this bill. The savings the Government supposedly will make by lowering benefit increases will be incurred in costs by people needing to get hardship grants and people needing to take on more debt just to survive. They are simply passing down the costs either to the hardship assistance that is already being delivered and is already at record-high levels or to the front-line services that are already struggling to make ends meet.So let's make it clear: this bill is just shuffling the costs that would have been incurred by increasing baseline benefits to other parts of the system and other parts of our community. Having baseline benefits that allow people to live with dignity actually takes pressures off the system. It takes pressures off staff who are delivering food grants day in and day out and who probably want to more meaningfully engage with people on the benefit in relation to those employment outcomes that the Government talks about.The reality is that the Government members have not actually accurately described the realities that Work and Income staff members experience or the realities that people on benefit experience. They think that it's simply a matter of making life harder for people so that they feel more encouraged to find work when the system doesn't even enable people to participate meaningfully in employment.Picking up on those first reading comments is really really important because they're indicative of the broader debate we're having in relation to this bill but also to the welfare system more generally and this assumption that we can just push people further into poverty and that doing so will further encourage them into employment. But all it will do is again contribute to toxic stress poverty debt homelessness and criminalised communities that are already struggling to make ends meet.The paper that other members alluded to helps illustrate this picture as well particularly in relation to a group that will be most disproportionately impacted. When I did some parliamentary written questions to the Minister the answer I got painted an even clearer picture in that disabled people those without those work obligations are going to be the ones who will lose the most compared to jobseeker beneficiaries. For example cumulatively over a period of four years somebody on the jobseeker benefit will be worse off and will not see about $1800 as a result of these changes whereas for somebody on the supported living payment that difference will come up to $2200.These are people who we identify and recognise as needing support and we know that full-time work may not be suitable. But actually independent of somebody seen to be fit for full-time employment or otherwise it doesn't mean they don't have a right to life with dignity or that they should not be treated with respect. And for those who are on the jobseeker benefit we don't account for all the other contributions they do. The system in fact has very little way of accounting for that—for example the care that they may be providing to family members particularly those that may not be part of a nuclear family or the volunteering work they do. In fact our volunteer workforce is in large part made up of people on benefit yet the system does not take that properly into account.The Government members paint a picture as though people on a benefit don't deserve to live with dignity and as though they're not making contributions of their own outside of employment. When members talk about the dignity of work they're basically implying that there is no dignity when somebody is not in paid employment—that there are no other contributions that bring about dignity. And when members of the Government talk about the poor outcomes that people on a benefit experience—for example lower incomes—they fail to admit that those members are the ones who set those incomes. Those poor outcomes are decisions by successive Governments. The paper that the Minister keeps referencing in terms of those outcomes are just outcomes out of the decisions that people like her have made for decades. They didn't just appear out of thin air. We decided to enable those poor outcomes by setting our welfare policies in a way that is punitive and doesn't contribute meaningfully to employment. Again when the Minister talks about how lower increases to benefits will incentivise employment she may want to reflect on the fact that we don't actually even keep a record of who goes to these work seminars. We don't keep a record of the type of wages that those people get when they do enter employment. She has no information about this. She has no evidence of what she's talking about. She's going off on these assumptions and on Q+A when being questioned about the evidence that she was using to base this bill she talked about "Well there's a different range of views. There's a different range of research." Actually she's not even able to substantiate the type of research that would back this once again breaching her coalition agreement and the supposed approach of basing legislation on the best available data.In fact we have the opposite. We have available research from here and from overseas jurisdictions with similar income support systems that show that benefit sanctions and low incomes contribute to many things but not to good employment outcomes. We have people on the benefit who have generously for years shared their experiences whether it's in the We Are Beneficiaries report or the Welfare Expert Advisory Group report or constantly in the media talking about what it is like for them.And we cannot pretend—Ministers or any of us—that our lived experience is indicative of the hundreds and thousands of people who may be on the benefit. We cannot go into this place and assume that our sole experience of people who are now in a privileged position reflects the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to be impacted by lower increases to benefits.So I look forward to engaging with the Minister on the facts not just on her vibes on why she wants to drive lower increases to benefits in the long term effectively pushing people into hardship and into debt."