“Welfare”: Punitive measures to be extended

 

Written by: Nick G. on 12 November 2020

The federal government is set to extend the punitive net of compulsory income management (CIM) over even more Australians.

An element of secrecy surrounds details of the expansion of the cashless debit card (CDC) operated by the private company Indue.

Privatisation of public welfare is the best that capitalism can do for many Australians. 

Began with an attack on First Peoples

This the logical result of government policy development that began in 2007 in the wake of the NT Emergency Response when First Peoples who volunteered for the scheme had 50% of their welfare payments quarantined, while those forced onto the scheme by government agencies had 75% quarantined. They could only use the BasicsCard at approved stores. Thirteen years later, the BasicsCard still operates in the NT.

In 2013, Liberal PM Tony Abbott asked mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest to review Indigenous employment and training programs. The Forrest Report recommended that government payments to unemployed people, carers, people with disabilities and single parents should be 100% quarantined, and introduced the idea of the ‘Healthy Welfare Card’.

Forrest, who suffers from billionaire myopia, saw welfare as a “cash barbecue” and his solution was to “block the issue of cash” to people placed on welfare.

A four-year longitudinal study of compulsory income management in the NT recently found that the policy failed in every key performance measure and did not meet any objectives in thirteen years. It also led to the entrenchment of poverty, increased welfare dependency, and increases of incidents of suicide, domestic violence and predation on children by criminals visiting income managed areas.

At the time of the NT Intervention, we condemned the introduction of the BasicsCard, warning that First Peoples were being used as guinea pigs for a punitive measure that would be extended to all welfare recipients.

Forrest’s proposal was adopted by the government but in slightly modified form: 80% of welfare payments were quarantined. So-called “trials” of the CDC scheme were introduced in March 2016 and have been extended to five regional areas. The “trials” were a fig-leaf for the permanent introduction of CIM. Invariably, the “trials” have been extended beyond their expiry dates.

The trials are currently due to expire in December but under the Social Security Amendment Bill, which is currently before parliament, the scheme would be made permanent. 

Indue overdue for removal

In 2016 the government outsourced the operation of the CDC to Indue Ltd., a private company owned by financial institutions that are members of the Customer Owned Banking Association, the industry advocate for Australia’s customer owned banking sector. It is owned by its 72 member institutions: building societies, credit unions and mutual banks. It has 134 employees at its head office in Queensland and generates $63.84 million in sales (USD).

Indue issues its own Indue Card for people on CIM. The cards are attached to a separate account set up without consent of individuals forced onto the program. These accounts are strictly managed through different payment categories. Indue has legal ownership of the quarantined portion once it has been paid into their account. In addition, the cashless welfare card only allows users of the card to buy products at approved sellers that support electronic Visa payments.

Neither the government nor Indue have said how much Indue is paid for every person forced onto the scheme, but estimates by social welfare groups indicate that between $4000 and $10,000 has been paid to Indue to “manage” the Newstart welfare payment of $40 per week or less than $15,000 per year.  Those payments increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, but are being wound back by a government that believes, as Social Services Minister Anne Ruston said again this week, that dole payments, increased during the pandemic, are discouraging people from seeking work, despite there being 12 applicants for every job vacancy.

Neither the government nor Indue will say how much it will cost to make CDC permanent.  The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has thrown a veil of secrecy over Indue, exempting it from provisions of the Competition and Consumer (Consumer Data Right) Rules 2020, and specifically:

(a) Rule 2.4(3) of Part 2 (the obligation to disclose required product data in relation to a product data request) and all related rules; (
b) Rule 3.4(3) of Part 3 of the Rules (the obligation to disclose required consumer data in relation to a consumer data request made by an eligible consumer), and all related rules; and 
(c) Rule 4.6(4) of Part 4 (the obligation to disclose required consumer data in relation to a consumer data request made by an accredited person), and all related rules.

This exemption applies until the earlier of: a. 1 July 2023; or b. 12 months from the date the Cashless Debit Card program is no longer a trial and is implemented as a permanent policy arrangement.

A Department of Social Service spokesperson justified the secrecy, saying “The cost of making the Cashless Debit Card permanent cannot be published as it is commercial-in-confidence and could impact future procurement activities.”

Suffering set to continue

There has been no evidence in any study of CIM and its CDCs that the scheme has benefitted those whose drug and gambling addictions were used to justify such coercion. Senate inquiries from 2015, 2017 and 2018, have all shown that in the trial regions, there has been no change in crime rates (in some areas such as Kununnura and Wyndham, there was actually an increase in crime statistics, as well as an increase in self-harm and suicide). Despite its claim to high-tech management of people’s compulsorily-acquired incomes, many reports have been made of underpayments, repeat payments and non-payments which are all sheeted home to the Indue “customer”. To top it all off, there is the indignity of having to be seen shopping with the “druggies’ card”.

Neither the government nor Indue can conceal the harm done when welfare is transformed into a privatised, punitive and coercive “welfare”.

Compulsory income management must be abolished.

Welfare payments must be increased to a living income.

Privatised management of welfare payments must end. 

The independent agenda in practice!

Nick G.

Anti-poverty campaigners in South Australia are winning the support of local government authorities for an increase in the Newstart Allowance.

This is despite the objection of many Councils that the Newstart Allowance is a federal matter and not a proper matter for them to involve themselves with.

The Anti-Poverty Network (SA) is seeking Council support for a $50 a week increase in the Allowance.

Newstart – $269 per week, $160 per week below the poverty-line – is less than 41% of the minimum wage and less than 18% of the average wage. It has not been raised in real terms for 23 years, which is part of the reason why Australia ranks second-worst among developed nations for poverty among the unemployed.

Sky-rocketing energy bills are really hurting the poor. Two families known to a person writing on the APN’s FaceBook page, had a $1000 and $1300 quarterly power bill each. That’s about $100 a week. For a person on $269 to lose $100 leaves $167 a week. Assuming a rent of say $100 (if you’re lucky!) leaves $59 for everything else.

Neither the Labor Party nor the Liberals, both of which have been in office during the 23 years of the real term freeze in the Allowance, have covered themselves in glory. Both administer capitalism on behalf of the real rulers despite lazy newspaper talk about this or that party being “in power”.

The determined action of struggling workers to demand moral support from their local council is an important part of the independent agenda of working class Australians.  They are not waiting for a Labor government to act for them, and they know the Liberals won’t, so they are doing it by and for themselves.

So far, seven Councils have voiced support for the Newstart Allowance to be raised. They are a combination of rural councils (Streaky Bay, Kangaroo Island, Copper Coast and Clare Valley) and metropolitan (Port Adelaide Enfield, City of Onkaparinga, and the City of Playford). In each case, working class activists in each council area have written to and lobbied local councillors, carried out mass work with local residents, and attended Council meetings to advocate their cause.

Bonnie D., a resident of the Onkaparinga Council in Adelaide’s south, told her Council about her circumstances.

“Life on Newstart is a lifestyle of deprivation I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy,” she said.   “Whilst I consider myself fortunate to be born and living in Australia where we do have this public safety net available, it has become increasing aware that Newstart has failed to keep up with inflation and the cost of living upon our shores.”

She described how an increase in Newstart would help her. “Well, to start with I would be able to afford to feed myself and my 15 year old son healthier food and more of it.  I often go without as he requires being a competitive swimming athlete a high nutritional meal plan.  He is one of South Australia’s top athletes in his age group and his chosen stroke of Butterfly.  He has represented SA only recently in the National Championships and will be again next year as well.  I am very fortunate to have a family that help support my son in realising his dream to become an Olympian swimmer.  If I didn’t have this support from my family I would be finding a struggle just to send him to swim training once a week.  As the costs for him to train 7 times a week plus gym sessions are completely unattainable for me to provide at this point in time.  That’s one way that poverty affects real life people and families.  It puts road blocks in their path to success especially our most important asset the youth.”

She then described a common feature of life for people on Newstart.

“I recently was facing homelessness as many people do that live upon Newstart.  I have been living in the same small modest house for the last 6 years.   I’d like to point out that paying for my rental house cost me a fortnight over 78% of my available income.  When I received a letter from my real estate agent that my lease would not be renewed as the owners wish to renovate the property.  My little family, of myself my son and my 2 dogs were unable to acquire suitable and affordable housing.  I had the horrible decision to make by separating us all.  My son was to live with my parents along with my pets and I was to couch surf with my friends until such a time I could establish secure housing for us all.  I consider myself lucky that I have wonderful friends and family that I can turn to as a lot of people don’t.  If it wasn’t for them I honestly have no idea what would have occurred.”

Getting Council support has not been easy, and in some cases, difficulties and obstruction have had to be overcome.

A case in point is Salisbury Council which, along with Playford Council covers much of the northern working class suburbs of Adelaide. Residents of both Councils are much affected by the closure of General Motors Holden at Elizabeth. Playford, with 5,700 unemployed residents, for an unemployment rate of 14%, has the highest level of unemployment of any local government in South Australia. However, the City of Salisbury, with 6,300 unemployed people, for an unemployment rate of 9%, twice refused Anti-Poverty Network SA's request to speak at a Council meeting.

“Both times we were told that the issue was ‘outside the Council's jurisdiction’ and therefore not something it could hear about,” said Anti-Poverty Network coordinator Pas Forgione (winner of the 2014 Spirit of Eureka Award for his work in working class areas).

Things came to a dramatic head on the night of Monday 25 September. Over 30 unemployed people and other welfare recipients packed the gallery at Salisbury Council with signs and placards to watch Council pass a motion presented by Councillor Beau Brug (overruling Mayor Gillian Aldridge, who previously refused them their speaking requests), allowing local job-seekers to address the October Salisbury Council meeting.

It was a long, intense and fiery night, with the Mayor filibustering and moving the agenda item to the very end of a four-hour meeting, but the group prevailed and won its right to address the next Council meeting.

Pas Forgione believes that it is poor people fighting poverty that is the reason for the campaign’s success to date.

“The power of the campaign lies in the dedication and courage of local job-seekers, who called, emailed, and met with their mayors and councillors; who willingly shared their stories of financial and personal hardship, and job-searching in a depressed labour market, who fliered, postered, letterboxed and door-knocked; and, critically, who showed up at council meetings in large numbers, often composing over half the audience, to keep their representatives accountable.”

Local government is, in a sense, the closest to the people.  It is important that Councils represent the interests and concerns of their residents, even if their role is pretty much confined to the traditional areas of roads, rates and rubbish.

“Perhaps it a sign of how undemocratic, remote and inaccessible the other two levels of government are perceived to be – and are – their lack of responsiveness to the wishes of ordinary people, the greater extent to which big business dominates the political agenda and the deep bipartisan consensus that exists across so many issues that citizens are turning to councils to be their voice on many important matters,” said Forgione recently.

The Anti-Poverty Network is not confining its activities to winning the support of local government. 

In about two weeks’ time it will host an Attack Poverty, Not The Poor: Anti-Poverty Week Conference, just over two weeks will hold a Trek For Jobs, Justice, And Dignity, a 15km walk from Port Adelaide to the city for jobs, justice and dignity.  The latter draws on the legendary Beef March held by unemployed during the Great Depression.

This is great stuff, and is really putting some meat around the bone of an independent working class agenda. It all has our complete support! 

Welfare debt policy hits its targets

Rob M

Now that it’s “old news”, the articles about automated welfare debts (AWDs) have disappeared from the print and digital  mass media.

Not that the policy oppression is any less: it’s just that the relatively sympathetic stories of harsh and unjust impacts have run their course of shock value.
T
he trouble was that they were presented as mistakes/clumsiness/unintended consequences – very few acknowledged that the policy was working exactly as intended, though the PR was badly handled.

The sector of welfare recipients it was aimed at are not the poorest in Australian society.  The latter are not even on welfare. They are homeless people unable to register and some Indigenous people unwilling to put up with the humiliations of the “sequestered payments” system.

No, the target of AWDs is the growing group of Australians who slip in and out of Newstart due to intermittent, uncertain and variable income. This is because only that group generates real income to be brutally wrenched back by the federal government – it explicitly stated that the initial target was $4 billion.

The intention of the AWDs is both to discipline people on welfare in general, and to specifically claw back significant sums to government coffers so that corporate welfare and tax cuts to corporations can continue.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman has just released acritical report into AWDs, but again it concentrates on injustices and mistakes rather than the system’s rationale. It states that up to 20 percent (possibly $3,075,503 worth) of demands to repay debt were incorrectly issued – but that in turn means 80% (possibly $12 billion) was correctly issued.  On these figures, up to $15 billion in debt notices have already been issued. Even though some will be dropped and others reduced, this indicates that the federal government’s target of $4 billion is well on its way to being realised, if not more.

As more and more Australians have to rely on underemployment, more and more revenue can be squeezed from this large section of the working class. Under the cosh of both government and employers, only collective action can prevent ruthless and deepening exploitation of these workers.

Existing unions need to offer a better service to attract them, or new organisations must arise such as the new Retail and Fast Food Workers’ Union. Meanwhile, organisations such as the Anti-Poverty Network (South Australia) and the Unemployed Workers’ Union (national, but mainly Victoria) can help organise from the other end of the system.

How are attacks on workers and attacks on welfare recipients related?

Vanguard has received a copy of a speech given by former CFMEU (SA) State Secretary and SA Unions President Martin O'Malley (above) to a meeting of the Anti-Poverty Network (SA). The focus of the speech is the identity of interests between workers and welfare recipients.

...............................

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional lands of the Kaurna People and we respect their spiritual relationship with their country and their culture. 

I will commence with a suggestion. It appeared to me that we really do need to rethink how we portray people who rely on the State for their income. Using the term "welfare” conjures up people receiving a handout, a negative mental picture for those struggling through difficult times, rather than a positive mental picture of the State fulfilling its obligation and duty to ensure all members of society are adequately taken care of.

We must frame our arguments and our positions to reflect what we believe in and stop contributing to those who attack us through use of their terminology. So during my talk for want of a better name, I will use the term "community entitled persons".  

The attack on workers is being directed firstly through attacks against organised labour, the unions and their members. Another Royal Commission (RC) into union affairs is again trying to flush out even the most tenuous connection to anything which could be suggested as corrupt behaviour which is dished out day after day through a compliant media hoping to find the "smoking gun" to allow the Abbott Government to declare the corruption of unions is so endemic they must be fully supervised on a continuous basis or, I suspect, found to be beyond redemption and deregistered.  

At the same time connecting the ALP to any purported corruption will give the government an opportunity to argue that severing ties with the union movement should be obligatory and all union funding should cease.

Unfortunately for the government, the uncovering of full-on endemic corruption within the unions is harder and harder to find mainly because there is no evidence it exists. With the exception of already known corrupt behaviour of some individual union officials of which the courts have already looked at or are looking at, there has been nothing the Royal Commission has exposed regardless of all its propaganda. A recent Financial Review article referred to the inability of the Royal Commission to achieve the government’s aims of finding evidence of corruption on a large enough scale to achieve its goals. The article went on to say many in the government were getting frustrated and the worse that could be aimed at the unions (CFMEU in particular) was naughty boy behaviour.  

Of course more is to be heard from the Royal Commission and who knows where it will end up. But one thing is for certain, the outcome will be a further attack on organised labour and the ALP just in time to be used as propaganda for the next federal election.   

But without proof of endemic corruption, the government is very aware that it will be extremely hard to convince the public, or a majority in the Senate, or even some of its own members that such draconian measures, not normally accepted in a so-called free democratic society are warranted. 

Getting rid of unions or at least union influence is what it's all about, for the express purpose of minimising workers' wages and entitlements. Suggested changes to laws and criminalising certain union activities and introducing US style laws like the "Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organisation Act", have been raised by the Royal Commission and so it is now seeking submissions for the purpose of renewing the public’s interest in this matter. (This is to be read as opening the doors for the right wing think tanks supported by employer organisations peddling their filth and denigrating working people and unions.) This is an attempt to divorce unions from their members on the work sites and to scare both union officials and workers from standing up to the bosses.  

What has all this to do with the original question? Well, frankly everything.  

Have you noticed how the word "privilege" is being used by politicians lately? Out of work people are "privileged" to be paid a pittance, single parents are "privileged" to be paid an amount not worthy of discussing, the elderly are privileged to have a pension. We are all "privileged" to be Australian citizens until of course we support an act of terrorism or terrorists or other yet to be defined activities, and then we can be declared not Australian, because privileges can be removed. When did our birth right and/or citizenship become a privilege and not a right?

Just as an aside who will decide what terrorism and terrorist are. Will future Tory history books refer to the Eureka Stockade as a terrorist haven? What about the First People and their resistance to colonisation? Were they terrorists and can we declare them as non Australian?  

The point is this all goes to the heart of the ideology of those in power. Everything working people and community entitled persons are entitled to is seen as a privilege and not an entitlement or a right. Earning a wage is seen as a privilege given by the boss, that is why the boss should have the final say to sack someone, lower their wages, force more work hours from them, not pay penalty rates etc. etc. Receiving assistance through the bad times and bad luck must be limited because disadvantaged people have to be discouraged, it's their problem to resolve, not the government’s. And their favourite activity, pitting different sections of society against each other to outbid and argue who should get more or less of the "cake". The winners and the losers, or as Joe Hockey so inelegantly stated, "the lifters and the leaners".  

We are an extremely wealthy country, the workers make and baked the "cake" yet we are all expected to fight over the crumbs. The first thing we must do is work together because there is more than enough for everyone who needs it.  

Now back to the question. Whatever happens to workers also impacts on those not working at any particular time, and vice versa. The only difference between these two groups is the timing. A wage worker today - unemployed tomorrow. A single parent today - back to work tomorrow. A worker today - disabled tomorrow and so the comparisons can go on and on. Some people remain in one group or the other for longer times, others for shorter periods. But finally we all end up, like me, on the old age pension, if we live that long. 

It is the same ideologically-driven needs of the ruling class to force down the unit costs of labour to increase their profits. As we know, lower wages will then determine lower rates of income for community entitled persons and keeping a pool of hungry unemployed is always a good idea to encourage those working to moderate their claims.

The attacks on community entitled persons and workers are therefore intimately related. Throughout our lives we all weave and dodge through the myriad of issues we face on a day to day existence, feeding our families, paying rent or mortgages, educating our children and being ripped off by the filthy rich ruling class which controls a parliamentary system which continues to prop up their system of capitalism which continues the exploitation of the working class. Time we put an end to it. 

Bringing workers and community entitled persons together can start by recognising where we all stand. The above is my view of this issue and when people look around their workplaces, their families and their communities it becomes very clear that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Thank you.