The welfare system isn’t just on fire, it’s burning out of control

The problem with having pattern recognition is that you can always see the fires before they start.

Governments are a bit like that, too.  It’s not that they don’t see the fire before the smoke, it’s just they figure it will be someone else’s problem to deal with it by the time it’s all ablaze.

We can see this with the gas industry – Labor is now looking at a couple of cabinet proposals for an east coast gas reservation policy, which would either take the form of an exporter permit model (where exporters can’t send gas offshore unless the domestic market has been taken care of) or a market-wide model (where all producers would have to contribute to the domestic market, potentially meaning smaller gas projects would have to purchase excess gas from the major ones in order to meet their supply obligations).

Of the two, the first would mean less gas being dug up.  Which means, of course, cabinet is leaning towards the second.

But in terms of how we got here, the flames have been lingering for some time.

This is not the first government to have to consider a domestic gas reserve, but it’s the first one to do so under such undeniable pressure.  Back in 2009, the Queensland Bligh government raised the need for a gas reservation policy because the future fires were clear. 

That warning was repeated in 2010, when the reservation was rejected following a campaign by the same gas giants fighting against one now.

By 2011 it was very clear gas prices would skyrocket without a reservation policy, which of course meant it was shelved, and despite accurate predictions the gas price would triple (and this was before the gas export market really got underway) in 2013, everyone pretended they couldn’t see the flames.

Until now, where the political fire has reached such a crescendo that the government has to act or burn down with it.

So what have we learnt from all of that?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Because this week, the Commonwealth Ombudsman released a second report into the use of job-seeker mutual obligations, which was even more damning then the first.  To put it bluntly, it’s a shit show.  Which echoes the findings of the government’s own report into the system, which also concluded it was a shit show, but too embedded to actually do anything about.

Not only does our system of “mutual” obligation rely on people continuing to stigmatise welfare as the moral failing of an individual (rather than it being the failure of a state and society that insists on people to “pay back” financial help for the “sin” of being unemployed), despite unemployment being baked into economic policy, no one is ever held responsible for the harm.

A private “job network” system, which makes its billions from keeping people in unemployment (and therefore on its books), has the power to cancel payments – and destroy lives – with the flick of a button, or through the incompetence of a program or operator, but it is the victim who must try and find the solution, with no apology or reason given for the unlawful cessation of their payments.

In the time the Commonwealth Ombudsman was investigating this most recent report, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations saw a 23 per cent increase in payment suspension notices issued by private workforce providers, jumping from 504,000 in April-June to 618,000 in July-September.

That’s 618,000 people with no savings (you have to run down your savings before you can receive welfare), no fall back, in most cases no support and no recourse, having to get their payments reinstated, prove they should not have been cancelled, deal with late rent and loan payments, deal with overdraw fees on bank accounts (when every dollar is already spent) and try and meet their ongoing obligations.

We already know the system is on fire – the robodebt royal commission is still being felt, but we now have a government that can’t say for sure whether the system it continues to support is unlawful or not. Not even a mangled AI-infected report could give that answer.

And even as the Ombudsman reports that DEWR deals with unlawful cancellation decisions with “vague and incoherent” information, confuses people receiving Centrelink payments as to what it is they need to do to address the system, that there are seemingly no penalties for private providers who repeatedly and unlawfully cancel people’s payments, and that the reversal rate of these providers decisions is high enough for the Ombudsman to question the “quality, consistency and appropriateness” of the decisions being made, we are hearing… crickets.

Anyone who has ever had contact with this system could have predicted this.  Groups from across the legal and civil society spectrum have been screaming the alarm. The Antipoverty Centre spends countless hours counselling victims of the system and trying to get politicians and journalists interested in one of the biggest scandals of our time, but because there is a view the unemployed should be punished for not providing their labour, care factors are low.

It took a decade and a half for a government to just seriously think about acting on gas prices and there is a political cost to that. The judgement, when it comes to mutual obligations, is that there is a very low political cost to inaction, because it doesn’t impact enough of the public.

It was court rulings, the threat of mass compensations and deaths which made the Morrison government act on robodebt.  Most people think the issue has been solved.  But reports like the one we have seen this week and the ongoing reports from advocates, legal experts and those caught in the system prove beyond a doubt the fire isn’t just burning, it’s burning out of control.

How many more have to suffer before those with the power to enact change can no longer ignore it.

Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute.

Originally published on The New Daily