QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (15:37): I move: That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister representing the Minister for Social Services (Senator Gallagher) to a question without notice I asked today. I note with some dismay that this government seems utterly ignorant of its role in creating and perpetuating poverty in Australia. You would think that during Anti-Poverty Week, when advocates and people living in poverty are here in Canberra, lobbying the government to do more than just mouth platitudes about doing what they can, Labor would have something significant to offer people who are struggling for survival.

Instead, we got the social services minister announcing meagre funding for emergency relief charities amounting to a dollar per welfare recipient—one dollar. Poverty isn't an accident. It isn't some surprising by-product of policy.

It's the result of deliberate choices made by successive governments over decades, and Labor has made the deliberate choice to keep all social security payments below the poverty line. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's latest report on mortality outcomes showed that people accessing the JobSeeker payment are up to 10 times more likely to die than people not on any income support payment.

Almost three in five people aged 22 to 64 who passed away over 2012 to 2022 were accessing income support. More and more Australians are hungry, homeless and desperate, and they are running out of places to turn. We see this every day in my electorate office in Gladstone.

Every week, we hear from dozens of constituents who contact us looking for help: help getting into public housing, help navigating Centrelink, help with emergency hampers because they're escaping domestic violence and they haven't eaten in days. With every month that goes by, we hear from more and more people. The minister, in her answer, said that Labor is the party of job creation.

That's all well and good, but unemployment is literally baked into our economy. Unemployment is a tool used by the Reserve Bank to control inflation. We know this.

Just last month, RBA governor Michele Bullock said an unemployment rate of 4.5 to five per cent would take the heat out of inflation. What does Labor have to say to the people who, through no fault of their own, are forced into unemployment so that the RBA can make a number on a computer screen go down? Not very much, it seems.

Meanwhile, life is pretty sweet for the gas companies and the billionaires who get richer and richer off the back of Australian workers and Australia's resources. Prosper Australia Research Institute released a report just this week showing that Australia could rake in $45 billion more each year if we properly valued and taxed our resources. We know that if the government simply chose to tax gas exports at 25 per cent, a measure that has massive national support, we could raise $17 billion a year to go towards public housing, affordable groceries and raising the rate of welfare payments.

The social security system is supposed to help people, but it's increasingly complex, highly conditional and riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Poverty payments, dodgy debt recovery, punitive compulsory activities, income control regimes—the social security system under Labor resembles Squid Game more than it does a safety net. Choosing to keep people in poverty when you have the tools at your disposal to lift them out of it is indefensible.

But it's a choice that this government, a Labor government, continues to make time and time again. I note that the minister said that they have raised income support. Well, it's currently a meagre $400-or-so a week, and I challenge the minister to find a single rental property in this country that someone on income support can afford, let alone put food on the table, pay their bills and keep themself healthy and well.

Question agreed to.