Graham Matthews
From July 1, the Howard government's "Welfare to Work" program will force many disabled people deemed fit to work 15 hours a week or more from the Disability Support Pension onto unemployment benefits and made to look for work. The same will apply to single parents, who will be expected to work at least 15 hours per week when their youngest child turns six.
Welfare to Work also contains more penalties and make-work provisions for the long-term unemployed, who could find themselves in a full-time work-for-the-dole program. From July 1, unemployed people aged 50 to 64 will be expected to jump through the same job-search hoops as younger unemployed
people. Penalties have also been increased, with any person failing to fulfil all Centrelink's requirements facing a possible eight-week loss of their entire payment.
Combined with the provisions of the anti-worker Work Choices laws, the disabled, single parents, and the long-term and older unemployed will be severely disadvantaged after July 1.
According to Linda Seaborn, a member of the Council of Single Mothers and their Children, and the Socialist Alliance, this will allow employers to get "an instant supply of desperate people who have no choice but to take the low-waged, unsafe and insecure jobs that Work Choices allows employers to create". Seaborn told Green Left Weekly that the new laws will mean that "workers currently on a decent, union-negotiated wage can be sacked and replaced by vulnerable people forced to work for 15 hours a week for just $25 extra income when losses in benefits are factored in".
Under Work Choices, employers can now offer prospective employees individual contracts (AWAs) that must meet only five criteria: minimum wage, 10 day's sick leave, annual leave, parental leave and a 38-hour work week. Centrelink has been empowered to breach any person who refuses a job, meaning that from July 1, the unemployed, disabled and single parents will face low-wage poverty or lose their income for up to eight weeks.
The federal government expects to breech some 18,000 people a year — up from the current level of 3800, according to the June 5 Sydney Morning Herald. It also wants charities to "case manage" 4000 of these people.
Under the government's plan, those who are breeched with children or deemed to be "exceptionally vulnerable", owing to an illness or disability, would be case-managed to determine their "essential" expenses. Centrelink would then decide whether to pay these expenses, thus helping the government avoid the embarrassment of unemployed people with children or disabled people being evicted, or worse.
But many charities are refusing to cooperate with this latest government scheme, including the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and other church-based charities.
"The whole breaching regime is no way to enable or encourage people to move from welfare to work. We have always strenuously opposed the notion of breeching", Dr John Falzon, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society CEO, told Green Left Weekly. "This is unconscionable and immoral, and we will have no part of any regime that attempts to legitimise breaching. That's why we have decided not to assist referred people who have been breached to be case managed by charities."
"What is at stake here is justice", Falzon continued, "and while we will offer charity, we will not cease to clamour for justice". Falzon predicted that the impact of Welfare to Work, combined with the deregulation of the labour market
under Work Choices, would force a layer of people receiving government benefits into "the very low-end of the labour market".
According to Seaborn, industrial relations and welfare "reforms" are two sides of the same coin. "If they are not resisted together they will produce a downward spiral in the living conditions of all welfare recipients and all waged
workers." She said that resisting the government's attacks will require the welfare rights sector and the trade union movement to campaign together, and pointed to the ACTU-called national day of action on June 28 as the next step.
From Green Left Weekly, June 14, 2006.
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