The budget and welfare
By Peter Boyle
With unemployment at a postwar record high, the federal budget offers more bad than good news for welfare recipients, according to Jenny Blakey of Melbourne's Welfare Rights Unit.
"It offers a few small increases to some people and restricts the access of others to welfare", she told Green Left Weekly. Old age pensioners and the longer term unemployed will get a token $5-6 per week increase in January. Some welfare recipients will have a small increase in their rental assistance, while others face a cut because the threshold at which rental assistance can be claimed will be raised. Younger unemployed and those unemployed for less than a year will gain little, she said.
"Migrants will be discriminated against because they will not be eligible for unemployment or sickness benefits for their first six months in the country. This will hit non-English speaking migrants the hardest." This move was expected to save the government $27 million in the 1993-94 financial year. It is poorly compensated for by $900,000 for pilot schemes on English training for migrants.
"It is not their fault if migrants find that they may be retrenched or a promised job does not materialise. Migrants also have accidents. So it is unfair to deprive them of these benefits", she added.
The Department of Social Security will increase its surveillance and checking on welfare recipients through more interviews, stronger activity tests, greater collection and matching of data on people. "This will save relatively little money, and the effort would be better spent chasing up people on high incomes who are evading taxes rather than focusing on the poorest sections of the community", she said.
Blakey added that more stringent activity testing for the unemployed was ridiculous in the context of the low number of jobs available. The unemployed would be forced to go through the motions of seeking help from the Commonwealth Employment Service for jobs that are simply not there.
The government announced in the budget statement that it would seek to repeal the "sunset clause" in the 1990 Data Matching Program, Assessment and Tax Act, which gave the government power to match information held by the tax office, banks and other government departments. A spokesperson of the Privacy Commissioner told Green Left that repealing the sunset clause could mean that the power to match data would not have to be brought before parliament every two years, as was originally intended in the act.