Some good news amid the struggle for the 700,000 Australians on JobSeeker: the government has agreed to “raise the rate” and will pay recipients an extra $40 a fortnight. The payment of $691.30 a fortnight will go up to $731.30, an increase of 5.7%, lifting the payment closer to — but still not above — the poverty line.
The benefit also goes to the 200,000 Australians on Youth Allowance and the 35,000 on Austudy. The higher rate will commence on September 20 after legislation passes Parliament, with the cost amounting to $4.9 billion over five years.
Extra boost
But that’s not all. Those aged over 55 will benefit from additional JobSeeker payments, receiving a total of $785.20 — a combination of the $40 bonus and the higher rate once reserved for recipients aged over 60, a bump of more than 13%.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers explained the rationale by referencing the disadvantage faced by older JobSeeker recipients.
“The majority of people aged 55 and over on JobSeeker are women, many with little to no savings or superannuation, and who are at risk of homelessness,” said the treasurer. “The government is committed to a fairer, more inclusive society.”
The new JobSeeker rate is still low enough that most recipients will remain below the poverty line. But not all — some recipients have a combination of welfare payments and earnings, which can lift them above the threshold.
The intention is that JobSeeker should not be snatched away just because a person makes a little bit of money from employment. (As the name implies, the payment is meant to encourage work, not discourage it!)
About 20% of JobSeeker recipients also make money in the market economy, with most making more than $250 a fortnight. The payment fades slowly as each dollar is earned, so nobody is ever worse off for having worked.
The result is that many people on unemployment benefits are not in fact unemployed — equally, many people who are unemployed are not on unemployment benefits.
More JobSeeker recipients
The irony of the JobSeeker payment is that there are more recipients now than in the year before the pandemic, despite Australia’s ultra-low unemployment rate and the fact there is effectively a job vacancy for every unemployed person in Australia.
Applying for JobSeeker was made easier by additional payments made available during the pandemic and the loosened eligibility, with recipients ballooning from 700,000 to well over 1 million. Most people who began receiving the payment during the pandemic have since transitioned off it, but some have not — as of late 2022, there were more recipients than in late 2019. That means increasing JobSeeker now is actually more expensive than it would have been in 2019.
As the unemployment rate is due to rise over the next two years, from 3.5% to 4.5%, the number of JobSeeker recipients is sure to rise as well. However, the government will also be moving some people off JobSeeker and onto the new single-parenting payment.
I gotta love the Treasurer’s rationale for boosting Jobseeker for those over 55s saying they find it harder to get employment. You don’t say!! Over 55 and looking for a job? Good luck with that. But the fact is that 15 years ago those over 60 who were unemployed, maybe aged around 62 or older and unemployed but still ineligible for the Age Pension, were put on to the Mature Age Allowance meaning they did not have to do the activity test, the humiliating process of looking for x number of jobs per fortnight and fronting Centrelink and handing in their forms to receive this paltry allowance. They could effectively cruise to the Age Pension on the unemployment benefit but not have to look for work, like a Disability Pensioner. I mean, who was going to give someone over 60 a job for Christ’s Sake??!! It would be hard for someone over 50 to land one. I went to a seminar 16 years ago at Commonwealth Bank headquarters in Martin Place for a superannuation seminar where this was discussed. A nasty person from Centrelink said that this change requiring older unemployed to look for work was a good thing and they were expected to look for work as part of new government policy. My agency is constantly looking to get rid of older workers but because it is government, can’t do so. I hope this nasty Centrelink person has his comeuppance one day but I will never find out but there you have it. The Howard Federal Government required older workers, over 60, prior to the Age Pension to look for work, knowing full well that no employer would hire them. I will soon put that to the test but I can at least leave with a dignified lifetime pension to fall back on and write about my experiences. If I land a job, a half decent one in 1 years’ time, I will be very surprised.
Billions to the middle men contracts in jobs, training,NDIS, aged care business and lobbyists.. where do ministers go after politics they go into plum roles in private sectors which use public infrastructures and services
You don’t want to end up on Jobseeker if you are over 50 unless you have paid your place off. But in these times who has done that by then? And the government forecasts unemployment to rise 1% over the forward estimates or even sooner. This marks the end of full employment. It will be the least skilled who will suffer most long term and prove that the only answer the Reserve Bank has to fight inflation is to engender and inflict poverty, unemployment, hardship and possible recession upon the Australian people.
“As the unemployment rate is due to rise over the next two years, from 3.5% to 4.5%, the number of JobSeeker recipients is sure to rise as well. However, the government will also be moving some people off JobSeeker and onto the new single-parenting payment.”
I think these single parents won’t be counted in the official unemployment figures. They will merely be listed as not receiving Jobseeker (formerly Newstart) once they transition off it if they are eligible from 1 July 2023. They won’t add to unemployment or reduce it as they are primarily parents.
Michel MacCormack, former Nats leader from Wagga, wnt to move the unemployed to rural/regional areas of high job vacancies. You know?! The unskilled tasks of picking fruit, planting fruit trees, lots of bending over, bad backs and all that. That’s his answer to raising Jobseeker. Not to raise it but move the unemployed out, like Stalin did to the Kulaks of Ukraine, to rural areas of no opportunity, no reward and plenty of health risks.
Get educated hard kids!
And women if you have kids 16 years doing year 10 to 12 and you are the only carer you can do a barista course or a training called “customer services” despite the fact you are a Uni grad and have years of work under your belt.. but the unchallenged ageism is sick; it makes us all collaborating in a ponzi scheme. older than 45 mean you prima facie have skills, experience and maturity and have all the education and training you need; why pay some scammer thousand to be a client learning nothing and they are invoicing the govt billions for nothing
I dream of this as a scheme; get the University sector to do training for men and women have have kids turn 18 in line with industry best practice in the field; provide a primary teaching course for women who have done degrees and guarantee a job in 20 months with the offset costs being the woman can walk back into a full time paid role and cut out the training providers of low repute and this is smart. Training in health, nursing, solar industry, hydrogen, new technological enterprises which actually make us smarter not gaslit, waste our creative and technical training .. and please stop telling unemployed to be all things at once. Do not say a degree is worthless if it is older than 2 years and stop asking for current manager and stealing applicants’ data and selling off of the above to private providers who have conflicts of interest in the contracts they have with third party employment contracts represented by a 20% portion of their yearly profit take