Scott Morrison has said of the pandemic, ‘we’re all in this together’ but his government has excluded more than 1 million people from assistance. Laura Murphy-Oates talks to some of those people and Ben Doherty analyses the government’s response.
You can read Ben Doherty’s reporting on people excluded from coronavirus relief funding here.
Continue reading...The Australian government has passed legislation for a $1,500 per fortnight wage subsidy for eligible employers amid the coronavirus. Check your eligibility, how much you’ll get, when it will be paid and how it works with the jobseeker payments
The Morrison government has passed a $130bn support package with a new jobkeeper payment – a wage subsidy to keep Australians in work.
So who exactly is eligible for this payment and how much will they receive?
Continue reading...Victoria and Queensland register deaths as Western Australia flags border closure and federal government acts on childcare and industrial relations concerns. Follow live updates
The PM stresses that the “health advice we have is that there is no health reasons why children can’t go to school”.
Asked if taxes will increase to pay for its massive stimulus funding, Morrison does not address this directly.
Obviously there will be a heightened debt burden as a result of decisions we have had to take. They have been necessary decisions. Otherwise the calamity for Australian households economic will be disastrous. We have taken that decisions of government to step up and to make this commitment to provide people with an economic lifeline over the many months ahead. But you are right, we will have to then work hard on the other side to restore the economy. Now, that’s why we are being so careful not to have things that tie the economy and the budget down off into the future. We do need to snap back to the normal arrangements on the other side of this.
Morrison says schools have been planning for a “balance – a combination of distance learning” and, for those who can’t “provide a learning environment at home, for the children to be able to return to school”.
School will return after the holidays. They just won’t be holidays that most school students have known for a long time. And when they go back, it’s the learning that matters, and we hope to have an arrangement that can return as much to normal as possible.
But we have to accept that there will be, for some protracted period of time, this combination of distance learning, and for those who can’t do that at home, no child should be turned away.
Continue reading...In a deeply ingrained reflex, Australians have looked to government in this crisis. Will it prove its worth?
We are all off balance. From the moment I open my eyes in the morning, I feel the discomfiting sensation of being suspended between the set of propositions that existed before the pandemic and the set of propositions that exist now.
I suspect everybody is encountering this out of kilter sensation frequently in normal life. Thousands and thousands of Australians were employed last week but aren’t today. Businesses have gone bust, or teeter on the brink. Kids are not at school. Socialising is curtailed. Unless you are young and sanguine enough to believe coronavirus is either a beat-up or a “boomer remover” and therefore it’s business as usual, you are either ill or deeply anxious about getting ill and infecting others.
Continue reading...From fanning national anxiety with claims of a cyber-attack on MyGov, to a lack of empathy for the jobless, the government services minister has no grasp of the gravity of our times
“It was heartbreaking stuff yesterday Alan.”
“Alan”, naturally, is Alan Jones and our heartbreak town crier is Stuart Robert – the minister charged with rolling out government support to Australians knocked sideways courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Jobseekers can now request appointments be carried out over the phone or online, while Centrelink debt recovery continues despite Covid-19
Welfare recipients will have their mutual obligations relaxed during the coronavirus crisis, but the government has stopped short of heeding calls from Labor, the Greens and social service groups to suspend them entirely.
Facing growing pressure to ease the burden amid a looming economic downturn and increasingly strict social-distancing guidelines, the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said on Friday the government had adopted a range of measures aimed at making the system more flexible during the Covid-19 outbreak.
Continue reading...Minister’s spokesperson says arrangements ‘consistent with other employment programs’ but few require group activities
Aboriginal people who work for the dole will have to show up for group activities as usual, despite the government telling service providers that there is a “high likelihood that larger scale community outbreaks [of Covid-19] will occur in the near future”.
The National Indigenous Australians agency (NIAA) wrote to CDP (community development program) providers on Monday to tell them “mutual obligations remain in place at this stage”, meaning that Aboriginal people will still be expected to turn up for work or risk losing their welfare payments.
Continue reading...Handwritten letter found in Errol Graham’s flat, where he died after his benefits were cut
Errol Graham, a desperately ill man who died of starvation when his benefits were cut off, wrote a moving letter pleading with welfare officials to “judge me fairly” because he was overwhelmed by depression.
The handwritten letter, seen by the Guardian, was released by Graham’s family as they launched a legal attempt to prove that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) acted unlawfully and put him at risk by failing to put in place effective safeguards to protect vulnerable benefit claimants.
Continue reading...Senator says after visiting remote Indigenous communities that many there feel they have not been properly consulted over new card
Independent senator Jacquie Lambie says “the government has a problem” with the rollout of its controversial cashless debit card, after her fact-finding visit to the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Lambie visited several remote Aboriginal communities to “get a view from the ground on how the card is functioning, before voting on the government’s proposed changes for its future”, she said. Most of the people she spoke to “didn’t know any change was being proposed at all”.
Continue reading...Acoss calls on government to boost the Disaster Recovery Payment after fires destroy more than 2,000 homes
Australia’s peak welfare body is calling on the federal government to immediately boost emergency payments for those affected by bushfires, saying it is concerned the current amount is “seriously inadequate”.
The Australian Council of Social Service chief executive, Cassandra Goldie, has written to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, with a range of recommendations the organisation says are urgently needed to help provide relief to those affected by the bushfire crisis that has destroyed more than 2,000 homes.
Continue reading...Tax reform dominated debate, as ministers discussed East Timor and the 2000 Olympics – and resisted climate action
On 1 July Australia’s goods and services tax will have been in place for 20 years. It is uncontroversial in concept, with no major party advocating its abolition. Every so often there are calls for it to be increased from 10% or expanded – calls that are usually rebuffed.
But just how fraught the GST was to introduce is one of the key insights from the release of cabinet papers by the National Archives of Australia, covering the years 1998 and 1999. There were other concerns: East Timor’s independence, the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the failed republican referendum, and familiar resistance to doing anything but the minimum on climate change.
Continue reading...Automating Poverty, our year-long project about the takeover of welfare systems by algorithms and AI, was funded with reader donations raised last year
In countries across the world, algorithms and artificial intelligence are taking over welfare payments systems. Governments often make these changes quietly, with little public debate or accountability. But they affect millions, with serious – and possibly even fatal – results.
In our special project Automating Poverty, we cast a light on the way digital innovation is threatening the poor.
Continue reading...Woman challenges agency after being accused of falsely claiming a single parenting payment while in a relationship
Centrelink was wrong to issue a single mother and alleged domestic violence victim with a $50,000 welfare debt, a tribunal has ruled.
The woman, whose identity was not published, has been locked in a one-year battle with the agency after she was accused of falsely claiming the single parenting payment while in a relationship over a five-year period.
Continue reading...Panthera, being pursued by consumer watchdog, is parent of ARL, contracted to recover debt from welfare recipients
LThe parent company of a debt collector handed $3.3m in taxpayer dollars to pursue welfare recipients over robodebts and other overpayments is being sued by the consumer watchdog for alleged harassment, coercion and unconscionable conduct.
ARL Group was among three companies to share in $16.5m in contracts to carry out debt recovery services for the Department of Human Services in the 2019-20 financial year, tender documents published in July show.
Continue reading...Government accused of ‘demonising vulnerable people’ after only 100 of the 5,000 people on the program allowed to leave
Only 100 of the more than 5,000 people on the cashless welfare card trial have been allowed off the scheme, and the process for exemption has been labelled humiliating and hard to understand.
The government argues the card, which stores up to 80% of a welfare recipient’s payment for use at selected stores, leads to a reduction in violence and harm related to drinking alcohol, illegal drug use and gambling.
Continue reading...PM defends drug testing proposal, which is struggling to attract support in parliament
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, says he is “puzzled” by the widespread opposition to the idea of drug testing welfare recipients, as the government struggles to win over Senate support for the plan.
Saying he believed that drug testing those on Newstart and Youth Allowance could help people address substance abuse problems and get into the workforce, Morrison emphasised the proposal was a trial.
Continue reading...The Senate powerbroker warns if the union boss does not resign, the Coalition’s ‘ensuring integrity’ bill will pass
The Senate powerbroker Jacqui Lambie has returned to Canberra following the parliamentary break with one message.
Either union boss John Setka resigns, or the government’s controversial ‘ensuring integrity’ bill will pass, with her vote.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Coalition needs to include over 65s and other disadvantaged welfare recipients to hit $600m budget plan
The Morrison government could target thousands of pensioners and other “sensitive” welfare recipients under a proposed expansion of the controversial robodebt scheme needed to achieve a promised $2.1bn in budget savings, according to confidential documents seen by Guardian Australia.
The documents, stamped “PROTECTED CABINET”, show the scheme would fall $600m short of its required budget savings unless it is expanded to hit “sensitive” groups originally quarantined from data matching.
Continue reading...Amid debate around the low rate of Newstart, for those nearing pension age, a collision of policy adjustments is taking its toll
Marie Jentner’s husband was dying when Centrelink gave her some more bad news: she was now a jobseeker.
At 62, she had quit her job of 27 years to care for Siegfried, who had testicular cancer and couldn’t walk or look after himself. When he was moved into palliative care the following year, Jentner’s carer’s payment was cancelled and she was put on the lower Newstart allowance.
Continue reading...Couch surfing 50-year-old says welfare agency told her she wasn’t in financial hardship
A Melbourne woman battling homelessness says her entire $3,500 tax return was swiped by Centrelink last month, despite the fact she disputes the alleged robodebt.
But when Sue Prgic, 50, complained to the agency that the money had been taken without her knowledge, she said staff had asked to know what she would do with the cash if it were returned.
Continue reading...