Dr CHALMERS (Rankin) (16:51): This issue is one that is pretty close to my own heart. There are something like seven different payday lenders within 450 metres of the front door of my electorate office. Two of them are in fact right next door to each other. So in great communities like mine, which have a lot of disadvantage, we see a concentration of payday lenders.

I want to commend the work of the member for Perth and the member for Oxley. It's an honour to speak after the member for Solomon, who made some very good points a moment ago in his characteristically eloquent way. This is an important issue. It touches communities like mine and communities right around the country. It treats vulnerable people very poorly, so I appreciate the work not only of the members for Perth and Oxley but of all of my colleagues here. It is disappointing that there aren't any speakers from the other side.

The payday lending industry makes a lot of promises about fast cash, giving everyone a fair go, and being there when they are needed, so it is not surprising that people who are doing it tough, including people in my community, turn to payday lenders or rent-to-buy schemes to get through those tough times. I do understand that in some cases these loans can play a legitimate role for low-income families in smoothing out some of those unforeseen financial pitfalls. But in the main I think it is true their promises don't always match up with reality. There are a lot of rip-offs and a lot of damage is inflicted on communities like mine. There are leases and loans going to people already crippled with the debt of existing loans. You have rent-to-buy contracts, where families are paying more than $3,000 for a clothes dryer that would normally cost $345, which is equivalent to an interest rate of 884 per cent. You have leases where an item isn't replaced when it's faulty. You have credit providers using rent alone to calculate people's living costs, but not all of the other costs associated with life. I could go on and on, unfortunately.

I want to make it really clear that when we talk about the concerns we have with payday lending and consumer leases we are not in any way reflecting on the good people who work in these businesses, a lot of them being in those seven outlets near the front door of my electorate office. We're in no way reflecting on the people who work there, but we are reflecting on a system that allows this sort of behaviour to go on. We need to fix it, to change it, and that is what this private member's bill is about. It is about protecting consumers and not demonising the workers who sit at the front counters of those businesses.

All we are trying to do here is to implement the key recommendations from the small-amount credit contract laws review. We want a cap on the total payments that can be made under a consumer lease. We want small-amount credit contracts to have equal repayments and equal payment intervals. We want to remove the ability for providers to charge monthly fees on the leftover length of a loan when the loan is paid off early. As the member for Solomon said, we want to prevent the door-to-door selling of leases at residential homes. We want to introduce broad anti-avoidance protections and strengthen the penalties for people who do the wrong thing. These asks that we have of the government are not that ambitious, frankly. They simply reflect what the government said they were interested in doing in the first place. We are seeking a bipartisan outcome, where the government would introduce its legislation and we would support it. Unfortunately, for reasons that are really beyond comprehension, it is left to us on this side of the House to move the government's own legislation to implement the recommendations of the government's own review. That's a pretty unfortunate, pretty shameful outcome, really, and we would prefer that it were otherwise.

There are all kinds of other elements to it, including the proportion of people's incomes that can be paid on loans and all of these sorts of things. We want to adopt, for example, the same 10 per cent income cap for lease payments on rent-to-buy schemes that we are proposing for payday lenders as well, to get that cap on how much you have to pay out of your income down to 10 per cent.

As I said, we've introduced this private member's bill because the government has failed to act. There hasn't been the action that has been promised, and so we are once again stepping into the leadership void left by those opposite. We just want to implement the government's own policy, and we think that enough is enough. We think that the government needs to realise this is about helping people trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and dependence on these schemes, whose lives can only be improved by this parliament standing up for them in the way that we've outlined in this private member's bill.