I wouldn’t want to be Treasurer Jim Chalmers, as he puts the finishing touches to next week’s budget. Everywhere he looks he sees problems – problems that need solving by spending more taxpayers’ money. But the budget deficit must be kept low if we’re to get inflation down without even more rises in interest rates. Which raises what is, for any politician, a horrifying thought: perhaps we should be paying more tax, not less.
However, to any person with a shred of conscience, any belief in decent treatment of the less-fortunate, any care about maintaining Australia’s pride in being the land of the fair go, one issue towers above all others: our shameful treatment of the unemployed.
For years, we’ve gone on allowing the unemployment benefit – these days called the JobSeeker payment – to fall further and further below what the rest of us get, and further below the poverty line.
Get that? Since the mid-1990s, we’ve had – not as an unfortunate oversight, but as a conscious choice – a policy of starving the unemployed. Keeping them on a payment so low that, by the time they’ve paid rent and other inescapable costs, they often have to skip meals.
Late last year, the independent senator for the ACT, David Pocock, forced the Albanese government to introduce the biggest budget reform in ages. It had to set up a committee of experts to review the adequacy of welfare benefits, which would report its findings to the government every year, no less than two weeks before the annual budget.
The government released the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee’s first report about two weeks ago. It made 37 recommendations, but stressed that one recommendation trumped all the others: that the government commit to a “substantial increase” in the base rate of the JobSeeker payment.
Specifically, it wanted the JobSeeker payment raised from 70 per cent of the age pension rate to 90 per cent.
Some unemployed people told their stories to the committee. “You can buy a tray of sausages and bag them up in the freezer for the fortnight,” one person said. “But yeah, you rarely get to have any meat. Fruit and vegetables are absolutely shocking. You can’t afford to eat healthily, that’s for sure. So, they’re killing us, basically.”
Another said, “I needed to manage my budget strictly. This included going for cheaper items in the supermarket, having smaller meals (i.e. an orange for lunch, soup at dinner time), only filling up petrol when I really needed to, using public transport or walking where I could to save on the cost of fuel, managing health appointments around how much money I had left in the bank that week.”
Think of it. Every year, just before the budget, this committee will pop up to remind us what a mean-spirited people we are, and how much worse it’s become since last year – until we do something to get it off our conscience.
But here’s what sticks in my gullet: when the government released the committee’s report, its spin doctors did all they could to play down the report and stress the absurd notion that the government could possibly afford to do anything about it when times were so tough.
They made 37 recommendations, which would cost $34 billion. Are you kidding? Where could we find that kind of money? And what about the report of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce (which the government just happened to release at the same time) and all its expensive recommendations?
Get real. We can’t do everything. So, what’s it to be – the unemployed or the women? (Never mind that half the people on JobSeeker are female, including the sole parents who got pushed off the parenting payment onto the dole.) And, some helpful journos have relayed, just between you and me, there’s no votes in increasing unemployment benefits.
I fear that’s true. It may even cost a few votes. There’s a lot of “downward envy” among Labor’s working-class voters. And both sides of politics are well aware of the electoral benefits of pandering to the worst side of the Australian character – resentment of boat people and supposed dole bludgers.
It’s easy to exaggerate the cost of raising the dole. As former Treasury secretary Dr Ken Henry points out, the annual cost of the committee’s proposal is $6 billion, less than 1 per cent of total government spending. “No more than an adjustment at the margin,” he says.
Among rich countries, we have the third-lowest unemployment benefits. If, as usual, you set the poverty line at half the median disposable income, the single JobSeeker payment has fallen from 14 per cent below the poverty line in 2000 to 68 per cent below in 2022.
Is that a record we’re happy to live with? Is Anthony Albanese, who’s always telling us how hard he and his pensioner mother did it, willing to let the jobless continue to suffer because there are no votes in doing the right thing? Is that all modern Labor stands for?
