Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2026

Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR (Barton) (17:26): Let me start with schedule 1, advance payments. For people across Barton in Hurstville, Kingsgrove, Rockdale, Kogarah, Bexley and Carlton, advance payments are often the difference between meeting a large, unavoidable cost and falling behind. Car registration, school shoes and uniforms in January, a fridge that finally gives out—these are the moments advance payments are designed for.

It is a lump sum drawn against the person's own entitlement, repaid gradually through small deductions from future payments. Nationally, around 2.7 million advance payments were granted in the last financial year alone. That is an enormous number of Australians relying on this mechanism.

In an electorate as diverse and multiculturally rich as Barton, where so many households are juggling multiple jobs and caring responsibilities and the rising costs in Sydney, I have no doubt advance payments are a lifeline for many local families. This bill removes outdated legislative provisions, including a requirement for Services Australia to be satisfied that repayments won't cause hardship.

This is a test that no longer reflects how advance payments are actually assessed and delivered today. It also aligns mobility allowance advance arrangements with the rest of the system. Without these changes, people would be pushed back onto phone queues and in-person appointments just to get an advance assessed—longer wait times, more stress and delayed support for people who often can't afford to wait.

Schedule 2 deals with something that matters enormously to anyone who has practised before a tribunal. At present, if Services Australia or the Department of Social Services identifies new information relevant to a decision that is already before the second tier of the Administrative Review Tribunal or the Guidance and Appeals Panel, they cannot act on it. That means a person in Earlwood or Bexley who has provided updated information that might resolve their case in their favour sooner could be stuck waiting for a review process to run its full and often lengthy course, even when the department itself agrees the decision should change.

This bill fixes that. It allows the decision to be corrected so that the tribunal reviews the most accurate and most current version of a person's circumstances rather than a stale snapshot. When we reflect on schedules 3, 4 and 5, they all turn on what is called pre-issue income data, which is a person's self-assessed taxable income drawn from their tax return before the Australian Taxation Office formally finalises their notice of assessment.

For 99.8 per cent of people, this figure doesn't change once the final assessment is issued. This is a remarkably high degree of accuracy, and it means Services Australia can use this data with confidence to reconcile family tax benefit and childcare subsidy payments and to administer child support assessments without waiting months for a final tax outcome. For the parents dropping their kids at long-day-care centres around Hurstville and Rockdale, juggling childcare subsidy alongside work and family life, getting that subsidy calculation right and getting it right earlier means fewer nasty surprises, fewer families discovering well after the fact that they've been overpaid and now owe money back, and fewer families underpaid and left short in the meantime.

It matters just as much for child support. I think of the single parents in my community waiting on child support payments to arrive so they can pay the rent or put dinner on the table. Faster, more accurate income data means more and more accurate payments sooner, fewer retrospective adjustments and less debt chasing on both sides.

It also protects the tax refund interception process, which recovers around $41 million in unpaid child support owed to children every year. That belongs to kids, not adults who have fallen behind their obligations. I'll take you through schedule 6, which responds directly to a systemic issue identified by the Administrative Review Tribunal that automated decisions to offset a person's tax refund against a family tax benefit debt currently carry no merits review pathway.

In practice, that has meant some of these offsetting decisions were effectively irreversible, even in cases where a person was experiencing genuine hardship. This bill fixes that gap, and it gives the department the power to exclude cohorts of recipients experiencing hardship from offsetting altogether. I want to flag something I feel strongly about here.

In my work of advocacy, I've heard from families in Barton dealing with the fallout of family and domestic violence, including coercive financial control, particularly during my time working at St Vincent de Paul Society and connecting with local services, such as Kogarah Storehouse and St George Family Support Services. Since December last year, more than 500 social security and family payment debts nationally have been waived where family and domestic violence was recorded.

This is meaningful progress, but it only works if the review architecture around it is sound, and this schedule strengthens that architecture. Schedule 7 fixes a technical but important issue with how a person's paid parental leave superannuation contribution is calculated when the employer paid leave is later adjusted. This sits alongside one of the changes that I'm pretty proud of as part of this government since last year.

Superannuation is now paid on government paid parental leave. For new parents in Barton taking that full six months of leave, receiving over $1,000 a week and having their retirement savings protected while they're caring for a newborn, this is exactly the kind of structural fairness that closes this gap, particularly the gender retirement gap, that has disadvantaged women in this country for way too long.

Finally, schedule 8 aligns the legislative framework for urgent payments with how Services Australia actually delivers them today, cutting down the number of calls a person in crisis needs to make just to get help fast, and schedule 9 makes minor but necessary corrections by fixing cross-references to the definition of 'granny flat interest' in the Social Security Act and clarifying review rights for debt-recovery decisions made under the resolution scheme.

None of these schedules will make the front page of the news, but in the electorate of Barton, home to one of the most multicultural communities in the country, where families are often supporting each other across generations, across borders, where a shiftworker in Rockdale might also be caring for an elderly parent and raising two kids on family payments, these technical fixes are the support that keeps the family net standing.

When the support works, nobody notices. Where it doesn't, people fall through the cracks. This bill builds on the substantial improvements this government has already delivered.

JobSeeker increased by more than $4,300 a year for a single recipient. Commonwealth rent assistance is up by 50 per cent since 2023. More than 200,000 single principal carers are benefiting from changes to the parenting payment eligibility, and the family tax benefit is lifting more than $1,500 a year for families with a teenager.

These are really meaningful reforms that ensure that families—the people that live in my electorate of Barton and across this country—can actually live with dignity whilst we build the social conditions for hope. I'm very proud to say that this Labor Albanese government aspires to make real change that Australians will feel in their lives.