Daniel’s chest tightened, his stomach dropped. The Centrelink worker at the end of the line told him his jobseeker payment had been cancelled. But he knew it wasn’t right.
Daniel is one of an estimated 310,000 Centrelink recipients who had their payments unlawfully cancelled between 2020 and 2024 because they were incorrectly told they had not met their mutual obligations under the scheme.
“I felt like necking myself,” he says. “It was that hard just to hold it together.”
So Daniel fought back. And after three years of being ignored, passed around, put through internal reviews, the 50-year-old from South Australia has finally been vindicated. He took on the system, and won.
Daniel took his case to the administrative review tribunal. Centrelink is now paying him back $53,000 in jobseeker, after Services Australia illegally cancelled his payment in November 2022.
‘I was getting suspended every month’
It began in 2002. Daniel was on jobseeker and was exempt from mutual obligations, but every month the system would suspend him.
“I had no obligations to report,” he says. “But because I didn’t go into their computer system and type in 100 points [a monthly mutual obligation target], I was getting suspended every month.
“[Then] Centrelink sent me a letter on the 21st of November 2022, saying, ‘you’ve got 29 days to reconnect or you’re going to be cancelled’. And then they cancelled my payment on 16 December, not even 29 days later.”
With no income, he ended up living off whatever money his family could spare.
“I’ve been sleeping on the street, homeless,” he says. “Basically, I travelled around Canberra for a bit, then Melbourne. I’ve been back in Adelaide for about two years.
“I’ve been staying in the shed in my dad’s back yard, he’s been helping me out with $50 bucks a week. You know, it’s been costing me $37 a fortnight for my medication. He’s been paying that for like, two years.”
When he was cut off, Daniel contacted Services Australia and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), and tried to explain. He says they palmed him off, or told him to just apply for jobseeker again – but if he did that, he would not get backpay.
In August, when the Ombudsman announced it was investigating the targeted compliance framework, the automated system used to enforce mutual obligation requirements for illegally cancelling around 1000 payments, Daniel contacted the government again.
“I rang up Services Australia, and I’m like, hey, look, I’m one of these cancelled people. What are you going to do about it? [They just told me] go and apply for a new payment.”
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His payments were turned back on, but Daniel knew they had done the wrong thing. He says he rang DEWR, who had someone working on illegal cancellations look over his case – but the answer was similar – ‘your payments have been put back on, the issue is rectified’.
“And that’s when I lost my shit and went into the Modbury office [in South Australia] and said, ‘Look, I need this reviewed’.”
Taking the complaint to the tribunal
That review found his payments were cancelled legally. So, he decided to take his case to the administrative review tribunal.
“Then, it was only once got it into the administrative review tribunal, they’ve suddenly backflipped.”
In a letter sent in September 2025, seen by Guardian Australia, a customer service adviser informed him the review decision was actually wrong, and “the correct decision is to restore your jobseeker payment from 17 November”.
He has been backpaid just over $53,000, but Daniel wants to fight it further. He knows there are others like him who would not have received anything. He’s made a complaint with the commonwealth ombudsman, which is now investigating Centrelink.
“They just totally mugged me off and ignored me,” he said. “They just kept ignoring me for years.”
Since July last year, DEWR has been slowly turning off different payment cancellations as they’ve found issues with the system. Since March, the entire cancellation system has been shut off, but payment suspensions continue.
Asked in Senate Estimates last week how many payments had been illegally cancelled, deputy secretary of DEWR Tania Rishniw said they were “working through those numbers”.
“As I said earlier, each cancellation or reduction, under the legislation that’s been caused or suspended, was paused for a different reason,” she said.
“The total number of people impacted, we’re still working through.”
Far from an isolated case
Just a week ago, DEWR announced it had found a further 8,546 people who had their payments cancelled by decisions that “may not have been validly made” about “payments cancelled or had a non-payment period for unemployment failures”.
But the analysis from Economic Justice Australia shows the number could be in the hundreds and thousands.
A spokesperson for the Antipoverty Centre, Kristin O’Connell, said DEWR had been working to “hide the scale of this problem and how many people have been harmed, and we have seen them quietly turn off little bits of this system, drip feeding information to the public and never being fully transparent”.
While cancellations are paused, there have been a total of 321,995 payment suspensions for 205,870 jobseekers between May and July this year. O’Connell called for the whole system to be overhauled.
“Welfare recipients have been fighting for a long time to stop this system, and advocates are now joining us in saying that the whole targeted compliance framework must be stopped and we will not stop fighting until all compulsory activities are abolished,” she said.
“Compensation for people who have been affected by these systems must be paid quickly, and it must be generous, and it must not require people to jump through hoops to prove how much harm they have been caused by yet another unlawful welfare program.”
DEWR would not respond to questions from Guardian Australia, but a spokesperson from Services Australia, Hank Jongen said it “apologised” to Daniel.
“Services Australia is committed to ensuring people get the right support for their circumstances and we encourage people to contact us if they don’t understand or disagree with a decision we’ve made,” Jongen said.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
