Basic Income, Disability Pensions and the Australian Political Economy by Jennifer Mays

Author:Jennifer Mays
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030323493
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Therefore, in following the previous government’s policy trajectory, the 1990s heralded further significant reforms to unemployment benefits, seen in the introduction of mutual obligation requirements for people of working age, comprising new tighter training and work activity tests (Watts, 2016). The social security system was again subject to major reconfiguration of institutional arrangements in which the Department of Social Security was ‘rebranded’ as Centrelink in 1996, to reflect the New Public Management neoliberal logic. The New Public Management paradigm emphasized economic objectives over social aims. The restructuring meant that “Centrelink became an organisation delivering services on behalf of the government, while policy functions remained in the Department of Social Services” (Marston Zhang, 2019, p. 145). As Marston and Zhang (2019) pointed out, “as a consequence, it became much more difficult to ensure a critically important feedback loop between those delivering and implementing policy and those involved in formulating social security policy” (p. 145).

The Howard government introduced the Work for the Dole Scheme (1997), which initially targeted disadvantaged jobseekers (specific unemployment benefits of Youth Allowance and Newstart). Young people, aged between 18 and 24 who were unemployed were compelled to undertake additional work activities (such as training, voluntary work or education) while also looking for work (Marston & Zhang, 2019). Any failure to participate in the scheme led to breaching with a corresponding reduction or loss of the payment (Marston & Zhang, 2019). The most significant shift in this era was the further reforms demonstrated in the welfare to work programmes introduced in 2006 by the Howard government. These reforms were directed at parents, people with disabilities, mature-age jobseekers and the long-term unemployed. Thus, the targeted payments comprised, Newstart Allowance, Single Parents Pension and the Disability Support Pension (Mays, 2016). The shift led to social security being considered an earned right, whereby recipients were expected to contribute productively by ‘giving something back’ to the community and broader society (Marston & Zhang, 2019; Ziguras, 2014). Mutual obligation became the key mechanism that reframed citizenship status (from social to productive) and normalized welfare conditionality, Commonwealth authority and new forms of social control and surveillance (Marston & Zhang, 2019). Alongside the introduction of welfare-to-work measures in July 2006, the government introduced changes to the legibility criteria and payment rate schedules of Centrelink’s income support provisions (Marston & Zhang, 2019). The new sanctions and penalties attached to work activities were more stringent and ‘punitive’ than the earlier mutual obligation system of ‘breaching’ implemented in 1997 (Marston & Zhang, 2019). Any breaches and compliance failures potentially led to the full termination or suspension of the payment for eight weeks (Marston & Zhang, 2019). As Marston and Zhang (2019) argued, “this main function of social security law under the new welfare-to-work changes was to create a space within which market forces could set the terms and conditions of work and establish the disciplinary framework to coerce people into compliance” (p. 149).

The later Rudd and Gillard Labor governments further extended stringent controls and included all sole parents with a young child over the age of eight years.

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