A federal Liberal MP has criticised the Coalition’s ramp-up of Centrelink mutual obligations requirements, labelling them “very unhelpful” and an “increasingly meaningless burden” on jobseekers and employers.
Bridget Archer made the comments on Tuesday night during a parliamentary debate about the government’s jobseeker bill, which will permanently raise the base rate of unemployment, student and parenting payments by $50 a fortnight but end the more generous coronavirus supplement from 1 April.
The government will also reintroduce a requirement for welfare recipients to apply for up to 20 jobs a month, introduce a hotline for businesses to dob in people who turn down “suitable work” and increase the auditing of the applications that beneficiaries submit to employers.
Archer told parliament she supported the bill, though acknowledging that the boost to payments was “modest”, but indicated she was unhappy with the changes to mutual obligations that accompany the increase.
“The consequent changes to mutual obligation are, in my view, very unhelpful,” she said.
“There is an opportunity to ensure that we look at how mutual obligation can be a more useful tool for those seeking work, rather than the increasingly meaningless burden it puts on both the potential employer and the potential employee.
“I fail to see how encouraging jobseekers to apply for jobs that they are in no way able to fill is helping anyone.”
Archer said only an “incredibly small minority of jobseekers” did not want to engage, arguing that the more significant problem in her northern Tasmanian electorate was a mismatch between jobseekers and the jobs available.
Many jobseekers faced other barriers to work, Archer said, such as reliable transport, mental and physical health challenges, trauma and disadvantage.
Jobseekers she had met in her electorate had raised the issue of mandated appointments with job agencies, which were “seemingly nothing more than a box-ticking exercise”.
She said it was “acceptable” for people to be asked to be available for phone appointments with services providers but that the obligations presented a “challenge” for people who could not always afford phone or internet services.
“Perhaps this is an area where we could look to be more flexible or offer more flexibility,” she said. “It also sends a message to jobseekers that their time is not valued.”
Archer’s electorate of Bass has a large number of people receiving welfare benefits, analysis by Guardian Australia has shown.
The MP has previously lashed the government’s cashless debit card program as “punitive” .
Meanwhile, the jobseeker bill looks certain to pass parliament with the support of Labor, which says it will not support amendments seeking to further boost the $50-a-fortnight increase indicated in the legislation.
Labor’s social services spokesperson, Linda Burney, told parliament on Tuesday the opposition would approach the issue “differently” if it were in government, but could not amend the bill to increase spending without the support of the Coalition.
She said amendments “cruelly offer false hope” to vulnerable people and risked “playing chicken” by delaying the bill, meaning payments would go back to the pre-pandemic rate.
But the Greens senator Rachel Siewert, who will move an amendment seeking to boost welfare payments to the Henderson poverty line, said people on unemployment benefits wanted politicians to “use their power and their voices to campaign for their communities”.
“People living in poverty in this cruel punitive income support system feel isolated, they feel abandoned and want people to be vocal in their condemnation of this joke of an increase in the rate of jobseeker,” Siewert said.
Kristin O’Connell, a spokesperson for the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union, told a rally outside parliament on Tuesday that the cut to welfare payments from next month would cause “harm and distress” to more than 1 million people.
“The government knows the consequences of their choices because the people who live in this system, as well as advocates and researchers, have been telling them for decades,” she said.
