The
Guardian, 2
July 2018:
All across the country
unemployed Australians are today bracing themselves for more stress and
suffering, as the Coalition unleashes its new needlessly cruel benefit
sanctions regime.
Starting 1 July, the
Turnbull government is granting job agencies new, unprecedented powers to
punish Newstart recipients for failing to comply with gruelling compliance
demands.
Under this new “demerit
point” system, agencies will now impose payment suspensions if (they believe)
jobseekers are behaving inappropriately, or failing to attend appointments and
activities like Work for the Dole without a“reasonable
excuse”.
Alarmingly,
jobseekers currently battling drug or alcohol related illnesses are now no
longer (“reasonably”) exempt from activities, nor safe from financial
punishment.
Until 1 July 2018,
Centrelink has been able to overturn any job agency penalties if it deems that
they’re unfair or will lead to “extreme poverty”. It will lose much of this
power. Now, job agencies will be able to punish their unemployed clients
without government regulation or oversight.
Unemployed workers will
also lose significant powers of appeal. They will have to passively accept many
of the decisions ordered against them. In short, privately owned job agencies –
many of which are for-profit private companies – will wield unlimited,
unchecked power over the unemployed.
Under this system,
unemployed workers can be completely cut off Newstart if they refuse to attend
unsafe work for the dole activities. Even though 64%
of sites are failing to meet basic safety standards, jobseekers will be
forced to accept any dangerous, hostile conditions they’re met with.
Given that government
funding to job agencies is tied to outcomes, such as placing participants into
work for the dole, there is little incentive for job agencies to treat
unemployed workers fairly. On the contrary – there are significant financial
incentives to abuse unemployed workers.
Already this abuse has reached crisis proportions.
In 2015-16, job agencies
imposed a record 2m financial penalties on the unemployed.
As noted by the
National Welfare Rights Network, roughly half of these penalties were found
to be unfair and were rejected by Centrelink. This means that in 2015-16,
more than 1 million unemployed people had their payments cut off when they did
nothing wrong.
This kind of error rate
is staggering – in any other sector, it would surely result in a royal
commission. Earlier this year, a suspected 5%
error rate at the Australian Tax Office resulted in an immediate government
investigation.
Clearly, a culture of
lawlessness and unaccountability already pervades the employment services
sector. Under the new “demerit point’”scheme, this $10bn industry will enjoy
even more freedom to run riot. The 800,000 unemployed workers attending job
agencies will be left to fend for themselves.....
The author of
this article is Jeremy Poxon, media officer for the Australian Unemployed
Workers Union.
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