ABC Radio National Drive
E&OE
WALEED ALY:
One of the Cabinet Ministers… who has several measures of his own in the Budget is Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews and he’s been good enough to join me. Thanks for coming in.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Pleasure Waleed.
WALEED ALY:
I’ve been reading today that you, on the specific measure of the dole for young people, so six months on six months off that you would be willing to consider a compromise if it came to it ultimately if this was to be defeated in the Senate. Is that right?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well what I said was that we would put the measures to the Senate, we will call upon the Senate to pass them because we believe that they are appropriate measures particularly given the consequences of the ageing of the population, but if the Senate come to us and talk about various things well obviously we’re open to discussion, but we believe that the measure is an appropriate measure.
WALEED ALY:
So what kind of compromises do you have in mind?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Oh look I’m not going to jump hurdles before I get to them; we’re not even on the track in the Senate yet. So you know we will look and see what any of the Senators say but at the moment it would appear that Labor and the Greens have indicated they’re opposed to these measures so we will hear from any of the other Senators. I’m happy to have a briefing with any of the Senators who want to have it about the measures and have a discussion about it.
WALEED ALY:
There is a design flaw in that particular proposal though isn’t there, in the fact that you, on this regime of six months on six months off straight away. So I mean, for example, in the United states where they do have a situation where the dole does disappear at a certain point, you get something like 100 weeks so you can actually build up some money and maybe be able to afford a mortgage, a lease arrangement or something, if you have to move for work. But to get them off straight away pretty much only six months behind them, doesn’t it trap them in this cycle?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
No because you can simply avoid this. Firstly there’s a whole range of exemptions, so if you can’t work for example more than 30 hours a week you’re exempted, if you’re a parent you’re exempted even if you’ve got 35 per cent you know a shared parenting responsibility you’re exempted. If you’re a stream three or four job seeker which are the more difficult job seekers, they’re all exempted. So who’s left? People who can work full time, who are not working and are not in training and the way out of this and this is what this is aimed at is get people into training. If you haven’t got a job then we believe you should be training to get a job in the future.
WALEED ALY:
What if they’ve done their training, they’ve been to university or whatever it is they’ve done a degree and they can’t necessarily….
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well University itself doesn’t necessarily get you into a job. You know I left university and I didn’t get a job straight away…
WALEED ALY:
How long did it take?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
I think I had a little time off, you know a few weeks, and then I actually took a job doing work experience basically for about three or four weeks and…
WALEED ALY:
Unpaid?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Unpaid, and then the people I was doing the work experience with offered me a job.
WALEED ALY:
Right so you pretty much did go straight from university to work then in that scenario?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well relatively soon…
WALEED ALY:
A few weeks doesn’t really count.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
But an Arts Degree or a Law Degree these days doesn’t necessarily get you a job…
WALEED ALY:
Right.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
They are general degrees and people are specialising so my view is and I think the Government’s view is that people should do additional training if they need to, simply because you’ve got a degree doesn’t make you necessarily qualified to do any particular job, and secondly we know that getting a job is usually the stepping stone to getting another job, so starting somewhere is usually the first rung on the ladder to where you might ultimately want to end up.
WALEED ALY:
You mention a law degree that is a specialised job for a specific vocation; I mean it has broader applications.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Much broader application these days. I think, I read somewhere there are more law students than there are practicing lawyers in the country so it’s become more of a generalised degree.
WALEED ALY:
I’m a former law student myself I know that…
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Indeed.
WALEED ALY:
That doesn’t necessarily mean you end up as a lawyer.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
So here we both are, we are neither practicing law.
WALEED ALY:
You’re right and we’ve both made very wise decisions along the way clearly, but the point remains that these are people, I mean I did a law degree it is a specialised form of training, it doesn’t necessarily mean you end up getting a job. Making them, well forcing them into a situation where they have to take a job flipping burgers at McDonalds or something because the job they are trained to do hasn’t opened up for them. How does that help them in the long run actually get the job that is sustainable that will help them when they are adults?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well taking a job, whatever the job may be in the meantime, is something which is useful. I mean you know you probably worked part-time when you were at university as I did, that wasn’t the ultimate job that you wanted but it gave you certain skills….
WALEED ALY:
Well I don’t think that would help you get a job in law at all. In fact what it probably would have done if I was forced to do that after I left law school was that it would have diverted me from taking on a proper career, if I can use those sort of in politic terms.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
No look I don’t think it hurts for people to take a job, it might not be what they ideally want, it may not be in the vocational area they want but there are generic skills you get from doing a job. I mean I worked in a retail store for most of the time during university. Did that help me to be a lawyer? Probably not in a pure sense but did it make me able to converse with people, deal with people, have probably a range of social skills if I can put it that way then I might not have otherwise had. So any job has got some benefit to it.
WALEED ALY:
So let’s consider the scenario where someone does want that job, they finally think they might be able to have a job but they have to travel to do it, that means they have to rent, but because they haven’t been able to access the dole for six months they don’t have the money (inaudible).
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well we give them assistance to travel, if you’re moving from, there’s travel assistance from moving from a location to another in certain circumstances so there are…
WALEED ALY:
What circumstances?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well if you’re going from one capital city to another there was a provision in place…
WALEED ALY:
If you’re going to the regions?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
If you’re going to the regions it would depend on where you’re going as to whether or not you could get some assistance. But remembering there’s also Youth Allowance, Austudy, ABSTUDY. There’s all sorts of assistances available. If you’re going to take on an apprenticeship we’ll now give you a $20,000 loan which you only have to pay back $16,000 of if you complete your apprenticeship. So there is a range of assistance available there but I come back to the point the only people caught by this measure are people who are capable of working full-time, are not in full-time work and this is quite clearly an incentive to get some further training.
WALEED ALY:
Everyone wants to know what Clive Palmer thinks about this, do you know?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
No I don’t, I’ve offered a briefing to the cross benchers and I presume they will take that up and then we can have a discussion about it.
WALEED ALY:
Mmmm okay, I would have thought he’d be an important man to have spoken to on this by now?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well his Senators were only sworn in yesterday.
WALEED ALY:
He’s been around, you’ve known him for ages, he’s given lots of money to your cause.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Look I don’t actually know Clive that well Waleed. I mean I think I’ve met him once or twice over the years but no look we will have if they want, we’ll have a serious discussion, we’ll have briefings for them, they can have access to my departmental officials, they can go through all of it and that’s what I would provide to any party whether it’s the new crossbenchers or the Greens or the Labor Party.
WALEED ALY:
Okay so a couple of the other measures that are in your portfolio, cutting family benefits payments, changes to the indexation of pensions, these sorts of things. Are they going to be blocked in the Senate, my guess would be that it looks that way at the moment. Do you have any information on that?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
No but again we will put this to them, we’ll have a discussion with them and explain why this is important and it’s important. The underlying why of this Budget is important and it’s not discussed that often, one of them is the ageing of the population. So if you look at the measures in relation to the pension, when the pension age was introduced in Australia I think in about 1907, 1908. (Inaudible) average life expectancy was less than 60 and today it’s over 80 and we haven’t changed the pension age for almost a century so we are catching up with the demographic trend. Equally one of the consequences of the ageing of the population is a contraction in the net growth of the workforce and that means that sometime in the next five-ten years into the future we are going to be looking for every worker we can find. So it makes sense to be encouraging young people to have the skills to be able to get into the workforce if they’re not there now.
WALEED ALY:
Let’s talk about disability payments, the disability pension specifically. So the McClure Report came out and it recommended that you would only be able to access disability pensions if you had a permanent disability. You seem to be making positive noises about the report generally, so I’m going to assume you’re broadly sympathetic to this sort of suggestion, and you can correct me if I’m not right about that, but how does this make any sense though? Because there doesn’t seem to be a very clear or meaningful correlation between permanent disability and employability.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
What the suggestion is permanent disability and no capacity to work so it’s not just one, there are people who’ve got permanent disabilities who are quite capable of working.
WALEED ALY:
Indeed your Government employed one of them until just recently, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well I know a number of people who have quite profound permanent disabilities but are in the work force.
WALEED ALY:
But the flip side is also true, people who have temporary disabilities or disabilities that are on and off, the way that they operate who can’t hold down a job because of that fact.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
And that’s the problem with the DSP at the moment. It doesn’t take account of chronic episodic illness and we know that an increasing number of people have chronic and episodic illness, sometimes physical but more often a mental or psychologically related illness. Now our view is that if people have got a capacity we ought to be looking to their capacity to work rather than simply looking at their incapacity or disability. So the McClure proposal is a new architecture for welfare with four basic payments. One related to the aged obviously, one related to disability, one related to working age people and then the fourth one child family related payments. Now for working age the idea is that if people have got a capacity to work then they should be in that working age provision and there will obviously be some graduations within it depending on the capacity to work and the disability.
WALEED ALY:
Right so, but it wouldn’t seem to be something worth pursuing on your part if it wasn’t going to mean that certain people on disability are no longer going to be receiving a payment, that seems to be one of the main thrusts here is to try and save money on this.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well there’s been a movement over the years, even the previous Labor Government tightened up the impairment tables, for example, and so we’ve seen the number of people qualifying for the DSP fall over the last few years since Labor tightened the impairment tables from about 63 per cent down to about 43 per cent today. So there are changes.
WALEED ALY:
But I don’t understand why permanence is relevant?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well it’s permanent and the incapacity to work…
WALEED ALY:
I understand but impermanent is still in a different category.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Yes and obviously when McClure comes back all of these things will be looked at. I mean at the moment he’s put up a basic architecture for the purpose of having a discussion and when he comes back that will obviously be part of the report but overall the idea of reducing the payments, allowances and supplements from some 75 now down to something more manageable makes a lot of sense because the reality is that the welfare system in Australia has been built up with ad-hoc decision upon ad-hoc decision over not years but decades.
WALEED ALY:
One final question, I wasn’t intending on asking but since you have a legal background it popped into my head to ask you now. It’s to do with the asylum seeker process that’s in the high court at the moment and a comment the Prime Minister made today which I found a little confusing I’ve got to say where he seemed to complain that refugee activists and lawyers were somehow getting in the way they were diverting or they were interrupting, I think disrupting might have been the word he used, the government policy. Surely, I mean is that an argument that the government shouldn’t be held to account to abide by the law, that any kind of legal process is somehow against the nation’s interest?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Waleed I didn’t hear what the Prime Minister said, I’ve been off doing other things but…
WALEED ALY:
Sure, and it’s a question (inaudible)
MINISTER ANDREWS:
But look the government will abide by the law if the High Court makes a decision, whatever it makes the government, whoever’s in government, will abide by the High Court decision and people have…
WALEED ALY:
Well it has no choice.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
That’s right but the Commonwealth should be a model litigant, should be a model citizen in that regard and…
WALEED ALY:
Does that include complaining about a process and saying its disrupting what we want to do?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Look I think it’s entirely appropriate for the Prime Minister to comment about things he thinks there is a legitimate reason to (inaudible)…
WALEED ALY:
Someone taking the Government to court to say that it’s gone beyond its power.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Well you know it doesn’t mean that they’re right.
WALEED ALY:
No it doesn’t…
MINISTER ANDREWS:
In doing that, people can make all sorts of assumptions that they want to but, you know, my view is that the government has operated quite lawfully in this regard, that’s all the advice that we’ve got, and we’ll continue to do that and if the High Court, as it does on, you know, a variety of issues makes a decision to the contrary then we’ll abide by the decision.
WALEED ALY:
Kevin Andrews thank you very much for your time.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Thanks Waleed, pleasure.