Welfare recipients are likely to get their payments boosted after the Greens said they were unlikely to blow up a government bill this week.
As Parliament returns, the government is seeking to increase JobSeeker payments by $40 a fortnight as part of its strengthening the safety net bill — as the opposition announced plans to introduce an amendment that would increase the income-free threshold instead.
As usual in this Parliament, it is likely to come down to the Greens, who hold the balance of power in the Senate. Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi told ABC’s Radio National on Monday morning that although the proposed increase was “woefully inadequate”, the party didn’t plan to stand in its way.
“We will definitely not stand in the way of these efforts, but we know that it’s not enough,” she said. “The government must increase JobSeeker to above the poverty line again, in this cost-of-living crisis … so we will be pushing for amendments.”
Crikey understands the party is prepared to support the increase even if it fails to get its amendments through.
The Coalition’s proposal would allow welfare recipients to earn $300 a fortnight without losing access to JobSeeker, The Australian reported.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the Coalition’s idea “a shocker”.
“The problem with their thought bubble is that increasing the income-free area will have a number of unintended consequences. It does nothing at all for the almost four in five jobseekers who don’t access the income-free area at all,” he told FIVEaa radio.
“The conservative estimates are, with a doubling of the income-free area, another 50,000 would become eligible for JobSeeker overnight because the thresholds in which they’re cut off increase.”
Welfare payments have to be above the poverty line, it seems crazy to have to even say that.
Especially with unemployment being a crucial, baked-in feature of this neo-lib economy.
I don’t think anyone’s advocating that welfare should allow you a luxurious lifestyle – but having a group of people who can’t afford rent, medicine and food is just plain bad, not just for the recipients, but for our society as a whole.
What kind of ****** ******** **** doesn’t get this?
The zero-sum idiocy of the ruling class inflicts industrial-scale misery and deprivation to support personal fantasies of high positions well-earned, and to punish the evident worthlessness of the unfortunate, creating a society which becomes sicker, dumber, more fractured and brutal by the day.
It’s got me pretty damn stumped how the ruling class remain the ruling class when their propaganda has worn so thin, and the venal stupidity of their agenda is so exposed.
Pitchforks and guillotines already, dammit.
I had no idea that unemployment was a deliberate economic strategy until I heard the Reserve Bank Governor saying that the unemployment rate being too LOW, was a trigger for interest rate rises. I’m flabbergasted that there hasn’t been more attention to paid to what that actually means. That means that it’s part of our country’s policy to DELIBERATELY have people unemployed. And then there’s all this demonising of the very human people on the other end of those deliberate policies – to the point where our poiticians are happy for people to be hungry, or homeless or go without doctors who don’t 100% bulk bill, go without any medicines that aren’t on the 100% free list, go without access to any education that has ANY cost. It beggars belief. Could we see an analysis series on this topic Crikey?
It’s The Stupid, Economy.
The biggest obstacle to people understanding the truth of our situation is that it’s too fundamentally stupid and frivolously cruel to credit. It’s just so damn far from what people assume must be the case.
Raise it to what it was during COVID. We can afford it. What is government for if not to help its citizens remain safe and in good health. $40 a fortnight increase is an insult to all of us.
The government is there to keep the boot of the ruling class on everyone else’s necks, silly. Have you somehow missed that it keeps only doing what the mega-rich want and pissing on the rest of us?
All the rest is just window-dressing to give the appearance of a general franchise.
But come on, we all know who’s getting the representation.
Autocrats and other rightwing dingbats always need an “other” to demonise. This includes neoliberals who think the world consists of 2 types, proper people like themselves and less than humans like everyone else. Under this doctrine it is ok to deliberately cause selected groups to live in misery, or even to die if it makes a profit for the billionaires.
Drill down enough and neoliberals are there specifically to enable the autocrats. The neolib creed is to allow the owners of wealth to do as they wish without any restriction. And yes, because this results in misery for the majority of people, an “other” to be the scapegoat is essential.
Interesting how old 18th or 19thC tropes of the 1% e.g. migrants cause unemployment and degrade employment conditions, are still taken at face value or even grounded empirical science. However, there isn’t any science behind it, it’s simply used to divide the local employees from (recent) immigrant employees, but if no migrants then it’s local employees or unions that cop it (damned if you do, damned if you don’t).
It’s eugenics of the social order, where people feel the need to look or even kick down, and then support right wing governments which want to remove the mobility ladder, making <1% permanent.
Woefully inadequate. Albanese says it took ‘courage’ not to give more cost-of-living relief in the most recent Budget, while refusing to rule out the massively expensive Stage 3 tax cuts or to consider other redistribution measures. Unfortunately, JobSeekers are not electorally important to Labor or the Noalition.