Topics: Helen Haines; Funding boost to protect Australians from gambling harms.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Today is a shocking day for members of parliament, but I think much more broadly for the Australian community after the horrific attack on Helen Haines last night. We are obviously all thinking of Helen and her family. I know she has a beautiful family that loves her very much, who would be absolutely besides themselves today. Her staff and many, many volunteers and supporters in her electorate will also be very worried about her today and sending her all our thoughts and best wishes. Australian democracy is different to other democracies. If you travel around the world, you're seeing members of parliament in armoured vehicles behind bulletproof glass. The thing that sets our democracy apart is the contact that we have as members of parliament with our communities. I love to be able to go out on a Saturday morning and do a street stall, so people can come and tell me what they like or don't like about what we're doing as a government. Have a conversation about issues they think that we're missing. That makes our democracy better and healthier. The idea that we should stop doing that because it's no longer safe isn't just a worry for us as individual parliamentarians. It is something that makes our democracy weaker. We are, of course, all thinking about Helen today and sending her our very best wishes and thoughts for her swift recovery. But we are also thinking about the state of our democracy, protecting what makes us unique and healthy as a democracy - that contact between parliamentarians and the people.
Today, we are proceeding with an announcement that we had already scheduled previously, because it is important to continue to do our work as a government. Today we are announcing that we are doubling funding for financial counselling related to gambling harm. We're taking that funding from around $5 million a year to around $10 million a year. We will double the number of people helped each year to 10,000. Just about every Australian can tell you about a friend or a family member who's had terrible impacts on their life from gambling. I've certainly known people that I've grown up with, friends who have seen the devastating impact of gambling and other harms. As a government, we've made some really big changes, particularly around advertising. But making sure that we're also dealing with the harm of gambling through greater availability of financial counselling for gambling is an additional step we can take to help more Australians. And we know the sort of help that financial counsellors can give, and I'm going to hand over in a moment for these wonderful people to say a few words about the work they do. But first, we're just going to hear a little bit from the Salvos about their work more broadly.
ROBYN BLACK, DIVISIONAL COMMANDER NSW/ACT: My name is Robyn Black, and I lead the Salvation Army in New South Wales and ACT. And we really welcome this announcement today by Tanya for gambling and financial counselling. And in Australia, per capita, there is greater loss per capita than worldwide. For every person who is gambling and in addiction, there are six people who are negatively impacted. Conversely, when we're able to intervene and offer hope, there are many more than six people associated with that one person who are positively impacted. Last week, I had an email from someone who said that the Salvation Army had helped them, and 50 people in their life, just their family members, had been impacted positively. So I'm going to introduce you to Noel, who's the lead of MoneyCare, our financial counsellors for New South Wales and ACT.
NOEL DUFFIN, NSW STATE MANAGER MONEYCARE: Thanks, Robyn. My name is Noel Duffin, and the message I want to get out today is to just encourage people to reach out for help. Help is there. It's free, non-judgmental. So I would encourage anyone who is in financial hardship to call the National Debt Help Line on 1800 007 007. I'll just hand you over to my colleague Bob.
BOB O’HARE FINANCIAL COUNSELLOR: Hello there. My name is Bob O'Hare. I'm a financial counsellor who has been working in the community for the last five years. I work a lot with the indigenous community here in central Sydney, and I've had the joy of being able to work with community members who want to improve their lives, to community members who want to get to a better place. I've had the opportunity to sit with them as they come to terms with their gambling challenges. It is a difficult challenge for them to acknowledge that they've got a gambling issue, but because of the non-judgmental way in which financial counsellors work with community members, we have the capacity to be able to see the story behind the gambling, why are they gambling, and the gambling because they have an emotional challenge in their lives, and this is the only way that they can get some clear space between their ears to be able to cope with all their challenges that they have. I was thinking of a client that I started working with a couple of years ago, beautiful Indigenous elder in the community, a grandmother working tirelessly in the services industry, supporting members of her community who are suffering from family and domestic violence. She was utilising gambling as a way to get some space because of a situation within her own home, but she wasn't free to use her own home, so she was couch surfing at the age of 67, and she was using the gambling as a way to be able to have that freedom of mind, so that she could have, you know, just to be able to do something repetitive and monotonous, but it allowed her to get some space between her ears. And whenever we sat down and we worked out what was going on, we worked out where the problem lay, and then we were able to encourage her to come into gambling and counselling. We were able to encourage her to be able to get help. And once she was able to get help, and we were able to show the help that she was taking on board, we were then able to work with her other creditors to be able to get her to a better place. And so I have the joy of being able to do that on a daily basis with other clients, and it's great to see that the government has seen the desire within the community for people to get better, and we have we have the capacity to be able to do that so thank you.
NERIDA KAZACOS, FINANCIAL COUNSELLOR: Hello, my name is Nerida Kazacos. I work for Salvation Army Money Care. I work here at Salvation Army Foster House, and I'm a financial counsellor who looks after most of the residents at Foster House who are referred to me by their caseworkers. Thank you very much for the funding. Wonderful news, particularly in the space of gambling, I see a lot of residents who come to me and the greater community within the inner city of Sydney, who unfortunately are suffering the fallout from having gambled. What that does is isolates them from family members. They lose their income. They preference gambling over their rent. I had a gentleman who came to me who preference gambling over paying his mortgage. Now the problem with that was his wife, and his children were not aware that the mortgage payment were in arrears. In this situation, what we do is we do an assessment, we conduct a budget, we look at bank statements, and we assist people in identifying issues and problems that can occur in the early phases of any financial difficulties that they may encounter. Now, in this case, we're managing, or we were able to contact the bank on behalf of the family, on behalf of the joint mortgage holders, who were the husband and wife, and we managed to look at the option of a moratorium on the arrears of that mortgage. What that did was that saved that family from their property being repossessed and having a ripple effect of an entire family breakdown, with financial counsellors being able to assist community members for free, they have those options available to them. As my colleague Noel Duffin did mention earlier, through the National Debt Helpline, 1-800-007-007. It is a free service, and I encourage you all in financial hardship to please reach out. Thank you very much.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you. I really should have said at the very beginning that the reason we're here with the Salvos is because the Salvos change lives and because they save lives. And my own husband was a resident of William Booth House for some time and at Miracle Haven Farm. They helped him with his alcohol and other drugs problems when he was a teenager, and it saved his life. And the Salvos do that every day of the week, all over Australia. I really want to thank you.
JOURNALIST: Not sure who's the best place to answer this, but in terms of figures on how many people this is going to help. Additionally, the salvos reach. How many people are currently getting support for financial counselling, and how much? How many more? Sorry, will this funding allow?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We spend about $70 million a year altogether on financial counselling as a federal government, and the gambling-specific part of that has been around $5 million a year. At $5 million dollars a year, we have helped about 5000 people every year dealing with their problem gambling. We're doubling the funding that's going to that problem gambling counselling. So, from 5000 people a year to 10,000 people a year will be helped with the specific financial counselling that relates to problem gambling. Now, most financial counsellors will have qualifications in financial counselling. If they're doing gambling financial counselling, they'll have an additional qualification on top of that. So we're helping to employ more people. We're also helping to train more people to be trained as gambling financial counselling specialists.
JOURNALIST: Just back on the Helen Haines matter, Minister. Obviously, details are still coming out, but there has been some suggestion that this attacker sort of ran into multiple times. Are those details chilling to you?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It is a horrific attack. There are really no words to describe that every single Australian should be safe to go to their job and do their job every day. We spend a lot of time making sure that we have safety protocols in place for those frontline workforces where people's lives are in danger. Our police are a really good example of that. We know that there is a risk to the work they do. We do everything we can to keep them safe. We want every Australian to make it home from work safe, and Helen Haines in particular, like Helen Haines, is a beautiful human being. She is a decent, hardworking, thoughtful, lovely person. The idea that anyone should be attacked is unspeakable, but that someone as kind as Helen Haines should be a victim of such an horrific attack, I think, is is just beyond description.
JOURNALIST: ASIO has obviously been warning of a rising temperature related to politically motivated attacks. Are there specific changes that you'd advocate? For now, to make sure this doesn't happen again.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think we need to allow the police and our security and intelligence services to do their job, and I don't want to start a running commentary. They will do their investigations. They'll no doubt make recommendations to the government, and they should be allowed to do that. I think the real thing that worry's me the most about this is it is a strength of our democracy that Australians can approach their local MP, have a conversation, agree, disagree, do it in a way that is safe and respectful. That makes our democracy strong. And when I come out and do visits like this to Foster House, one of the benefits of it is I'm hearing firsthand from people who work in Foster House and from people who live in Foster House who are using the service. It helps me do my job better when I can talk to people at the front line of service delivery, my constituents in the broader community. It helps me do my job better. I am a better representative if people can approach me at the supermarket, at the kids' sport, when I'm dropping the kids to school wherever. It makes our democracy stronger if we can do our jobs.
JOURNALIST: Wondering if perhaps you could talk about your own experience of threats in your line of work, and will you have to change your behaviour based on what happened yesterday?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I've been around for a while, and during the time that I've been in Parliament, I of course have had numerous threats made against me, you know, plenty of death threats. They are often accompanied by particularly vivid, graphic threats of sexual violence as well. Threats against my kids, one running in the court at the moment, we can't talk about that because it's going through legal processes. What I would say is that this problem-it's always existed in our line of work, but it has been exacerbated in recent years. I mean, our Australian federal police will tell you that the problem has increased in volume and we are not immune. We have seen attacks like this around the world and it is a sad realisation that we are not immune.
JOURNALIST: You've already spoken on radio this morning about the gender dynamic of this attack. Do you think that gender does need to be taken account when threat assessments are being done?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: The truth is, both male and female parliamentarians are the subject of death threats. It's usually only women who get threatened with rape on the top of it. And I would say that one of the things that concerns me most is for people who are considering representing their community, which shouldn't be part of their calculation, whether they will have these threats to them and whether they will be subject to this sort of violence, if we continue down this path, there would be a whole lot of people who would be competent representatives of their communities who won't be inclined to taking on the role, that that is bad for our country. That is bad for all of us.
JOURNALIST: There's also been a lot of commentary already about the tenor of political debate in this country. Do politicians on all sides of the parliament at the moment have a particular responsibility to try and improve the way that they talk about each other in parliament, at press conferences like this?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I've said for a long time we need to learn to disagree better. We don't have to agree. We have different visions for how the country should be, how we should run things. We've got different visions for the sort of country we want to see in 5 year or 10 or 50 years' time. But we need to discuss those issues in a way that leaves room for disagreement, but does it in a way that is safe and respectful. There is no need to be using violent language, to be normalising the sort of language that causes our political debate and we have seen that recently because we've seen the way that people talk to each other and we all need do better, to focus on the issues, to disagree, respectfully.
JOURNALIST: On another topic, NAB is planning to cut 2,500 jobs, about 6% of its workforce. Do you have any concerns in what's happening? Yes,
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We always have concerns when there are job losses. So we need to continue to make sure that we have a strong economy. We have historic unemployment rates in Australia, and as a government, we are very focused on that issue in particular. Thank you.