Morrison Government's cuts to Pension and Newstart in Parliament today

Linda Burney addressed a press conference - Monday, 2 December 2019

LINDA BURNEY, SHADOW MINISTER FOR FAMILIES AND SOCIAL SERVICES, MEMBER FOR BARTON: I’m here to talk about the government’s Social Security Integrity Bill. Now, when the word ‘integrity’ comes into it with this government, as we’ve seen over the last week, there is absolutely no integrity. The bill being introduced has two odious aspects to it. And it will affect 40,000 people in Australia. And many of those people are in the regions. The profile of people on Newstart is not what people assume. It’s not mostly young people. It’s actually mostly people over the age of 45. Half the people on Newstart are over the age of 45 and a quarter of the people on Newstart are over the age of 55. The government wants to introduce this integrity bill – which is kind of a joke when you think about this government.

But the two onerous or odious bits of this bill is what’s called the Liquid Assets Waiting Time. If you are a middle aged man, who’s lost their job; been made redundant; and you have more than $36,000 in the bank – or if you’re single and have $18,000 in the bank – the government wants to double the wait time before you can access social security. So it’ll go from 13 weeks to 36 weeks, which is half a year. And it means that the government expects people to run down all their savings – any buffer they’ve got for a disaster in their life, like sickness – before they can access social security. The second aspect of this bill which is odious as well is what’s called the migrant wait time. That means if you’re someone that’s migrating here from overseas, and you go back to your home country for more than six weeks the government wants to take the age pension supplement off you.

So the government is proposing cuts to Newstart; and also cuts to the age pension. These two aspects of the social security integrity bill are completely unacceptable to Labor and we will not be supporting this bill.

LINDA BURNEY

TRANSCRIPT - MONDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2019