Just 3,000 Australians have accessed a federal grant to help them move for permanent work in the nearly seven years since the Coalition created the scheme.
New figures released to Guardian Australia show one-third of those recipients relocated to cities, despite the government’s repeated public calls for jobseekers to consider moving to fill labour shortages in regional areas.
The lacklustre take-up rates have prompted Labor to accuse the Coalition of failing to have a plan for jobs in regional Australia, even after the government made several recent tweaks to the rules of the scheme in a bid to expand access over the past few months.
The Coalition has stepped up its efforts to promote the grants, which are paid at the rate of $6,000 for people who move to regional areas. Last week Scott Morrison said there were currently “54,000 jobs going in regional Australia” but he lamented that jobseekers were “regrettably not filling these jobs”.
The parliamentary library has found at least 24 examples, since 2013, of the Coalition promoting relocation incentives, its broader decentralisation agenda, encouragement for private businesses to relocate, and a new push to encourage new migrants to move to regional areas.
In response to Guardian Australia’s request for figures, the office of the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said: “From 1 July 2014 to 26 February 2021 Relocation Assistance to Take Up a Job has assisted 3,088 people to relocate for ongoing work.”
Cash’s spokesman noted that the amount available for participants depended on their circumstances, ranging from $3,000 when relocating to a capital city up to $6,000 when relocating to a regional area. An extra $3,000 is available if a person is relocating with a dependant.
“Of the 3,088 people who have relocated to take up ongoing work since 2014, there have been 959 people who have moved to a capital city and 2,129 who have moved to a regional area,” the spokesman said.
But this figure did not include the number of people who had relocated for short-term agricultural work, he added.
While the government encouraged jobseekers to consider the opportunities available in regional and other areas to find work, it also acknowledged there were “a range of considerations for people to make before they move to a new location”.
That included family and support networks, the type of work, the suitability of their skills for that work, and the cost of living in the new location.
Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, said the relocation scheme had been meant to assist those who needed to move for work to do so without the financial burden.
Marles said Morrison had argued there were 54,000 jobs going in regional Australia, “yet his own relocation program has helped only a fraction of that number since the Liberals came to government”.
“If relaxing the eligibility requirement to access this payment was the Morrison government’s answer to fill the jobs hole in the regions – caused by the Covid-19 pandemic – they have got it all wrong,” Marles said.
“This tired, eight-year-old government doesn’t have a plan for jobs in regional Australia.”
The government’s most recent budget, unveiled in October, flagged changes to the relocation assistance scheme.
It allocated $17.4m over two years to temporarily modify the existing program “to make it available to all jobseekers participating in employment services, and to those who temporarily relocate to take up agriculture work”.
From 1 November, the relocation assistance was made available to people moving to harvest regions to take up short-term agricultural work. That help was available for Australians as well as visa holders with the right to work in Australia, Cash’s spokesman said.
A further change on 1 December provided immediate access for people to relocate for ongoing work. It had previously only been available for people who had been unemployed for 12 months or more.
“Since these changes commenced, there have been 739 relocation agreements for people relocating to take up short-term agricultural work, and 261 relocation agreements for people moving to take up ongoing work,” Cash’s spokesman said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education, Skills and Employment said the current average amount received by participants who relocated to take up a job in a new location was “around $3,000”.
Analysis by the parliamentary library, compiled in response to a request from Marles’ office, noted the relocation incentive was included in a Coalition pre-election policy document in 2013 and formally announced in a budget update by Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann later that year.
When the legislation passed the parliament in 2014, a junior minister said the incentive would “help to get more young job seekers off welfare and into work” – even though a previous parliamentary library paper predicted there was likely to be “low take-up”.
Last month the finance minister, Simon Birmingham, said there were “hundreds of thousands of people … who could manage to relocate to take a job where it is on offer, particularly in areas of regional Australia”.
The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, has taken up that cause enthusiastically, telling parliament on Wednesday “there are many, many jobs out in regional Australia right now”.
This week, parliament is debating the government’s legislation to set a new rate for jobseeker payment at the end of March. The government has portrayed it as a $50-a-fortnight permanent boost to jobseeker, student and parenting payments.
But the coronavirus supplement – currently paid at $150 a fortnight – will be scrapped at the same time, meaning many see the change as a cut to the incomes of about 2 million people.
