QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (15:25): I move: That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Water (Senator Watt) to a question without notice I asked today relating to welfare payments. The Commonwealth Ombudsman's investigation into unlawful automatic cancellations of welfare payments has documented significant evidence of harm arising from government decisions, but the excuse given by governments to justify this harm always seems to be financial cost and personal blame, never once acknowledging the costs born from the rot of privatisation.

We've seen this across employment services, where private job service providers absorb billions of dollars of public money, churning people through the system to pad their own profit margins with little actual oversight. Despite the pervasive reports of provider wrongdoing, their funding never seems to get cancelled. Their payments never get suspended.

In his response to my questions, the minister referenced a difference of philosophy between the Greens and Labor, but Labor's philosophy actually seems to contradict the evidence. Compulsory activities don't work. They don't get people into jobs—and the department knows this and the government knows this—but it's easier to blame ordinary people who are under immense financial pressure than to look at the systems causing unemployment.

By resuming financial penalties, Labor are washing their hands clean of people's very real struggles to find work. What the government doesn't want you to know is that unemployment is purposefully manufactured. Michele Bullock, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said: … if unemployment remains too low for too long, inflation expectations will rise … Unemployment is how the governor is trying to solve inflation and unprecedented cost-of-living increases, but higher unemployment isn't going to stop corporations price gouging everyone on groceries, power bills or bank fees.

This Labor government is punishing people on welfare to distract from the corporations and decision-makers that Australians should be angry at. That's their philosophy. Australia is a rich country.

Instead of giving billions of dollars in contracts to private employment service providers or in tax concessions to massive corporations, this government could build a social security system that puts people first. Instead, the minister made clear in his answers today that, in Labor's view, the system is working as it should, and punishing people on welfare is the point.

Question agreed to.