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

Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (17:39): Between 2015 and 2019, the Commonwealth told 433,000 Australians that they owed it money that they did not owe—around $1.7 billion worth. It arrived at those figures by taking a person's annual income and spreading it evenly across fortnights that they had not worked, which is not how anybody's working life has ever functioned.

Then it put the onus on them to prove otherwise. The Federal Court found there was no proper legal basis for it. A royal commission called it 'a crude and cruel mechanism' and found it had been known to be inconsistent with social security law from the beginning.

We all know that was not a computer error. The choices were, sadly, made by people, some of whom sit opposite, to reverse the onus so that a person had to prove that they did not owe a debt, to remove the humans who used to check and to send the letters anyway after being warned. Every one of those choices flowed from a single assumption about who was on the other end of them—that that person receiving a Centrelink payment was probably rorting the system, that the risk worth managing was not the risk of ruining someone's life but the risk of someone getting away with something.

We know that they were not rorting the system. They were cleaners, cooks, delivery drivers, disability support workers, students, carers and a great many people who were working the whole time, but their hours moved around because that is what work looks like for millions of Australians. The system they were dealing with, however, was built for a world where a person simply had one job with the same shifts every fortnight.

They weren't rorting anyone; they were just trying to stay afloat. It did not appear out of nowhere. This was under a coalition government whose then Treasurer told the country that there were 'lifters' and there were 'leaners', a coalition government that came into this place proposing Australians under 30 should wait six months with no income before they could get any support, a coalition government that put people on a card that told them where they could spend their own money and a coalition government that dragged parents of small children into a compulsory program under threat of losing their payment.

I raise these examples not to score a point but because you cannot fix the machinery of government until you name the assumption it was built on, and that unfair and inaccurate assumption is still in this building. There are people in this parliament—and One Nation are the clearest about it—who think the real problem with social security is the character of the people receiving it, who back drug testing income support recipients and quarantining 80 per cent of their money onto a card and who talk about the safety net as though the risk we should be worrying about is that somebody undeserving might touch it.

They have never explained why the same test is never proposed for someone receiving any other government concession. What makes this position from them and others deeply disturbing is we can all recite moments in our electorate offices where a woman who could not sleep has gone through a debt letter, line by line, that makes no sense to her and who's scared. She is not a 'leaner' or a rorter.

She is a cleaner whose hours move around or a single mum of three just trying to stay afloat. She, like so many people, comes into our offices because the system has let her down, not the other way around. It took a royal commission to put the truth on the record and to highlight to our country the experiences of our most vulnerable and what happens when compassion and empathy are removed from government policy.

A royal commission alone cannot fix the law. That has taken four bills in two years, each one going through the statute, line by line, and repairing the places where it does not say what everybody assumed it said. This is the next of them.

Much of what this bill does is described as resolving legal and compliance issues. In practice, that means the law has fallen behind the way these systems actually operate, and in some places it no longer clearly authorises what people have long assumed it authorises. Schedule 6 is one of them.

Where a family has a family tax benefit debt, a tax refund can be applied against it automatically and, until now, there has been no way to have that decision reviewed. The Administrative Review Tribunal identified this as a systemic issue. Without merits review an automated offset against a family in hardship could not afterwards be undone.

This bill fixes that. Schedule 6 makes those decisions reviewable, bringing them into line with almost every other decision in the family payment system, and it lets the department exclude cohorts experiencing hardship from offsetting altogether. In some cases, the money is never taken and nobody has to appeal anything at all.

I do not think those opposite were incapable of drafting this legislation. I think that, for a decade, they were solving a different problem to this one. If the question you are asking yourself is how to stop people rorting the system, you don't go looking for places where the system quietly takes money off people who cannot afford to lose it.

You are not looking in that direction. That is only a problem worth finding if you think those people are entitled to the money in the first place. Once you accept that people are entitled, you build the machinery differently.

You put reviews in, because sooner or later you will be wrong about someone. You put waivers in, because circumstances differ and always have. You build self-service, because people have jobs and kids and no interest in explaining how their household budget to a stranger.

Every member in this House deals with this system every week. Our offices are where it turns up when it goes wrong. And I would say the staff who do the work see more of how the safety net actually functions than any of us do.

What they see is that people aren't trying to try it on; they are trying to keep up with a system that changes their entitlement when their hours change, and most of them are doing it while working. You can see it most clearly in the part of this bill that will affect the most people. An advance payment is not extra money; it is a person's own entitlement brought forward as a lump sum, repaid through small deductions from future payments.

And it exists because life delivers big bills in one hit, and income support does not. There's rego, back to school or a fridge that dies. In 2024-25 around 2.7 million advance payments were granted.

People get them now on their phone, after the kids are asleep, without asking anyone for anything. There was a time when the way you got access to your own money early was to front up in person and explain your household budget to a stranger across a counter. I don't think we appreciate how much that costs a person who is already having a hard year.

Schedule 1 is what keeps the current arrangement lawful and working. Without it, it involves a phone call in business hours or a drive to a service centre and a queue, and the money arrives later than needed. A late payment is not just an inconvenience.

We know what a late payment means. We know it's a car rego that lapses, a doctor's visit put off or a shift you cannot get to because there's no fuel in the car. Schedule 1 does the same for urgent payments, which in practice means fewer calls a person has to make to get the help they are already entitled to.

Single mums carry more of the system's delay than anyone. A child support system cannot be made properly until both parents' incomes are known. So when one income is not yet available, she has to wait.

Again, we know that while she is waiting, technically on an administrative outcome, she's actually waiting on groceries and a way to pay rent. Schedules 3 to 5 let Services Australia use pre-issue income data—the income in a lodged tax return—before the commissioner's formal notice of assessment, which is the same figure in almost 99 per cent of cases. That's instead of sitting on its hands until the paperwork catches up.

That means the right assessment comes sooner. Fewer back payments are chased months later, and there's less debt collection, which matters at both ends. The tax refund interception process alone recovers $41 million a year in child support owed to children, and it sits alongside what this government has already done for those women.

Coercive debt, where a partner's control produces a social security debt in her name, can now be waived under the expanded special circumstances provisions. And, since December, more than 500 deaths have been waived where family and domestic violence was recorded. Coercive debt is abuse run through our social security system, and we have started treating it as such.

Then think about who an automated debt letter actually lands on hardest. In an electorate like mine, a letter in formal English about the reconciliation of an entitlement is unnecessarily cruel because so often it is the thing that kids get asked to translate in the kitchen. There are homes in Flemington and Kensington where this has happened more times than any of us would want to count.

Every measure in this bill that keeps a payment accurate the first time or let somebody sort out in advance on their phone rather than by ringing a call centre and working through a menu in a second language is worth more to those families than it looks on paper. And schedule 3 gives proper legal basis to the way Services Australia already handles people who are not required to lodge a tax return at all, many of whom are on the lowest incomes in the country.

Older women are the people past governments have been the worst at noticing. Women over 55 are among the fastest-growing groups of Australians experiencing homelessness. They are the generation who did the unpaid care, came back part time and arrived at 60 with a superannuation balance that did not reflect their quiet service to this country.

Schedule 9 corrects a cross-reference in a note about granny flat interests in the Social Security Act. It concerns the rule that decides how an older person is assessed when they hand over their money or their house to move in with a family, one of the most consequential financial decisions many older women ever make and one where the law should be stated exactly right.

And then there is the paid parental leave superannuation change in schedule 7, which is for the other end of that same life. Super started being paid on paid parental leave last year, and the whole purpose of it is to stop the retirement gap opening the moment a woman has a child. Schedule 7 makes sure that, when an employer's payment is later adjusted, the contribution is still worked out correctly.

This is a pretty big change, and it matters because superannuation only does its job if the contributions are right. For women of her mother's generation, they were wrong for 40 years. Underneath all of it is the argument that I think matters most: a social security system is not only a transfer of money; it is a promise, and its value depends on whether people believe it.

When they do not—when they think the thing is arbitrary or that a letter could arrive demanding money they do not have with no-one to talk about it—they stop claiming what they are entitled to. They wait until things get far worse before they ask for help. That costs this country in the plainest economic terms because the reason we build a safety net is not only compassion; it is that people take useful risks when they know something is underneath them.

They retrain. They leave the job that is grinding them down to find another that lifts them up. They leave a relationship that is not safe.

They start something. Every one of those decisions gets easier when a person is confident the system will hold and harder when they have been taught to be afraid of it. Trust like that is not restored with one announcement.

It is restored by the unglamorous work of making the thing operate properly, which is what four bills in the last two years and nine schedules in this one actually amount to. So there are advances secured and kept where people can reach them at any hour of the day, urgent payments aligned with the way people actually contact the agency, appeals so the tribunal reviews the decision as it stands rather than a version everyone knows is out of date, pre-issue income used so children get the right money sooner, automatic offsetting reviewable at last and of course paid parental leave superannuation calculated properly.

This bill, like those before, it, does not fix everything, and our government is not pretending otherwise. It does not repay the sleep lost by women who opened a letter they did not understand and had no-one to ring. It does not undo what was done to 433,000 people, and nothing that this parliament passes ever will.

What it does is make sure a mother waiting on child support gets the assessment built on what the other parent actually earned this year, not next year. It means a family that does not easily deal in English gets the payment that is right the first time. Instead of a letter that ruins a fortnight.

And it means that, when the system automatically takes a household tax refund, the household can finally ask a real human being to look at it again. None of this is complicated. Get the law right, and the system does what the parliament always meant it to do.

Get it wrong, and people who can least afford it wear the difference? Our government is determined to get it right. I commend the bill to the House.