00:00 There are probably four main reasons why it's not so easy.
00:06 First is that people are working, but it's often unpaid.
00:11 So a lot of folks that are receiving Social Security are doing huge amounts of unpaid
00:16 work, particularly unpaid care work.
00:19 Another sort of big piece to this is, of course, that a lot of folks that are receiving, particularly
00:25 job seeker, have disabilities or illnesses.
00:29 So there's been a tightening of the disability support pension eligibility.
00:34 And so that means a lot of those folks that should be on those payments are now on job
00:39 seeker payments.
00:41 But they have a partial ability to be able to work.
00:46 And so we're talking about folks with psychosocial disability.
00:50 We're talking about folks who are battling cancer being put onto the job seeker payment.
00:56 And of course, they can't.
00:59 Income matters too, of course, because particularly the biggest form of unemployment in remote
01:05 parts of the country is that there's simply just not enough jobs.
01:09 And then lastly, is about policy.
01:13 Policy is a big barrier for folks.
01:15 Mutual obligations are particularly hostile and punitive.
01:20 But also, as I'm sure people are well aware, that the payments are so low and people are
01:26 finding themselves below the poverty line.
01:29 And that's a major barrier for people to be able to go out and look for work.
01:34 Let's pick up on the second point that you mentioned there, Elise, with many of those
01:38 working in the system have a disability, but they're on job seeker, not a disability pension.
01:45 And we know that job seeker is a lot lower paid than a disability payment.
01:50 Does the classification system need changing?
01:52 How can these people be classified properly?
01:56 Without a doubt.
01:57 In 2012, there was a tightening of the eligibility criteria for the disability support pension,
02:04 which is a higher rate.
02:05 It's still a very hard amount to live on.
02:08 It's still not a huge amount of money at all, but it's more than the job seeker payment.
02:15 And the other part of being on job seeker is sometimes you're then asked and expected
02:20 to do mutual obligations, which is a whole lot of hurdles people have to do to try and
02:26 look for work and kinds of trainings.
02:30 But when you're battling cancer or have a disability, you're not looking for work.
02:36 You can't be looking for work.
02:37 You're trying to stay alive.
02:40 And so the whole sort of rationale behind the job seeker is a complete mismatch to where
02:48 people are at.
02:49 Yeah.
02:50 On mutual obligations, these are the activities that people on payment, such as job seeker
02:54 or the youth allowance need to complete to continue receiving support.
02:59 The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations wrote a submission to a parliamentary
03:03 inquiry earlier this year, and they say that there is strong international and Australian
03:08 evidence that mutual obligation requirements speed entry into employment.
03:14 Yeah, I mean, I would dispute that.
03:16 The international evidence is extremely mixed.
03:18 It's also looking at different jurisdictions.
03:25 The Australian jurisdiction is specific.
03:28 There's a huge body of Australian specific research that shows that mutual obligations
03:33 works against people.
03:35 But on top of that, folks that are actually subject to mutual obligations don't want them.
03:40 They say that they're really harmful.
03:43 They're impacting their ability, their confidence, and their ability to go look for work.
03:48 They take up people's precious time to go look for work, and they're completely at odds
03:54 with where their reality is.
03:56 So there's a big, big piece of research, a big evidence base in Australia that shows
04:02 that mutual obligations need to be either dumped or completely reworked.
04:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments