The Issues
No Australian should live in poverty. And no Australian should be punished for living in poverty.
Those living in poverty in Australia aren’t just subjected to the struggles of being poor and vulnerable in a society with low accessibility to cripplingly expensive housing, and increasingly expensive cost of living, education, transport, and healthcare. Indignity, insult, and real harms are also frequently heaped upon them by the very systems and departments tasked with assisting them out of poverty.
“Everyone should have enough to cover the basics. But right now, the punishingly low rate of income support is forcing people to make heartbreaking decisions between buying food and medicine. If we’re going to create a more equal and resilient community, we need to raise the rate of Jobseeker and other income support payments to at least $82 a day so everyone can keep a roof over their head and food on the table.”
— raisetherate.org.au
Our Plan
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Raise income support payments for people living independently to the Henderson Poverty line.
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Keep Income Management/Basics card optional.
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Stop harassing people in need with complex procedures and pointless job application requirements.
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Rationalise the bureaucratic income support systems so that they are fairer, more integrated, and more streamlined.
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Delegate employment, and funding for those services, to the States to enable localised and targeted assistance to those facing challenges in finding work.
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Ban private job seeker providers from cancelling welfare payments.
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Raise the minimum wage by 5% to help low income families struggling with the high cost of rent, food and services.
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Lift the Commonwealth Rent Assistance cap by 30%.
The Evidence
Many current income support payments are less than half the poverty level. One in 200 people are homeless in Australia and many more are struggling with sky-high rents and cost of living.
“About 9 percent of Australians (around 2.2 million people) are currently experiencing income poverty, and three percent of Australians – roughly 700,000 people – have been in income poverty for at least the last four years. People living in single-parent families, Indigenous Australians, people with low educational attainment, the long-term unemployed, and people with disabilities or other long-term health conditions are most likely to experience protracted income poverty.”
— Productivity Commission, Is Australia becoming more unequal? (2019)
Billions of taxpayer dollars are invested in keeping the most vulnerable in crippling poverty, while failing to achieve any of the outcomes the investments were intended to. Australia could lift its most vulnerable out of poverty without spending any extra money - simply by re-directing the money already being spent away from privatised corporations and into the pockets of those that the money was intended to help in the first place.
Current approximate rate per day for recipients:
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JobSeeker — $71
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Youth allowance (single, no kids, living away from home as student) — $45.64
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Disability support pension – max basic rate single — $72.90
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Disability support pension – max basic rate couple — $109.90
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Aged pension – max basic rate single — $72.90
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Aged pension – max basic rate couple — $109.90
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Parenting Payment max basic rate – Single — $70.55
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Henderson Poverty Line – Single person* — $87.45
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Henderson Poverty Line – Couple* — $116.98
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Minimum wage — $130.84
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Living away from home allowance for Members of Parliament — $291
*Poverty Lines.
Indignity
Not only does Australia condemn its most vulnerable citizens to crippling poverty, it punishes them for seeking the help that they are legally entitled to.
The royal commission into Robodebt laid bare a preventable crime that should never have occurred. At least 3 people are confirmed to have taken their lives after being hounded by Centrelink and the collection agencies it outsourced to for fabricated debts they did not owe. This was a systemic, targeted attack on the most vulnerable members of Australian society to claw back money that was never owed, in order to punish people for requiring assistance from their government.
When Dutch families were wrongly accused of fraud and ordered to pay back child support benefits by the Dutch tax authority, the Dutch government resigned in disgrace. In Australia, no one in the public service or the government was held to account.
Robodebt was not an isolated incident. Even now investigative journalists are uncovering more and more instances of social security payments being cancelled illegally, leading to yet more deaths of vulnerable Australians.
A complete review and overhaul of unemployment and other social security services delivered by Services Australia is required to ensure that Australia’s tightly targeted social security system is delivering support to the people who are eligible to receive it, and the Kafkaesque compliance culture and the social engineering of shame for seeking assistance is stamped out.
References
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Reports and Publications (raisetherate.org.au). Inequality-Report-2024_who-is-affected-and-how.pdf (acoss.org.au).
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No increase to base jobseeker rate in budget means Centrelink payment remains below poverty line — Unemployment — The Guardian.
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Abolished cashless debit card still divides, two years after Labor ordered its demise — Cashless welfare card — The Guardian.
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Research — Productivity Commission (pc.gov.au). Services Australia website.
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Business.gov.au – The minimum wage.
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Reply Submission to the Annual Wage Review 2023-24 — Australian Council of Trade Unions (actu.org.au).
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Out of the Maze: A Better Social Security System for People of Working Age (PDF. ACOSS, 2010).