The social services minister, Scott Morrison, has vowed to reintroduce legislation that would force jobseekers under 25 to wait an extra four weeks before accessing unemployment benefits, after the measure were shot down by the Senate.
Five crossbenchers sided with Labor and the Greens in opposing the measure in the Senate on Wednesday. The government had needed the support of six of the eight crossbenchers to get the bill through.
Morrison remained undeterred, pledging to reintroduce the bill. “I am going to put the measure up again and I am going to argue my case again,” he said on Thursday.
The minister said that there was an ideological opposition to the measures.
“[To] the Labor party and the Greens, it wouldn’t matter how we changed this bill. We changed it from six months to one month; we increased the investment in youth employment programs by $330m dollars,” Morrison said. “What is clear is the Labor party thinks that job-ready young people who are in a position to go out and seek and be in work shouldn’t have to wait more than 30 minutes let alone 30 days to have access to the dole.”
Labor’s employment spokesman, Brendan O’Connor, said the government did not have a plan for dealing with the 290,000 jobless young people in Australia.
“We believe in mutual obligation. All job seekers have an obligation to look for work and if they don’t they shouldn’t be in receipt of income,” O’Connor said. “We don’t believe in tearing away at all of the support provided to job seekers when looking for work.”
The government originally wanted to cut off dole payments for jobseekers under 30 for six months. The budget savings measure would have netted $1.2bn, but public outcry over the harshness of the measures forced the government to water the policy down to a four week freeze for under 25s.
“This measure is heartless and completely without vision, and out of touch with the realities of unemployment for young people,” the chief executive officer of St Vincent de Paul Society, John Falzon, said. “The government should walk away from this ill-conceived and punitive measure which blames young people for being excluded from the workforce.”
The rejected bill also includes provisions to raise the age of eligibility for the Newstart allowance from 22 to 24, at a cost to jobseekers of about $48 a week – the difference between Youth Allowance and the higher Newstart payments.
“Community agencies have been warning the harsh measure would drive more young people into poverty and make it harder for them to find paid work,” the acting chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss), Peter Davidson, said.
Crossbenchers have told Guardian Australia that the second iteration of the bill will need to be substantially different to the original before they consider supporting it.
“I feel like this could be groundhog day,” the independent senator Nick Xenophon said, adding that he’d look at fresh proposals but would only consider supporting them if they have greater provisions for job creation.
The Palmer United party senator, Dio Wang, also has concerns about the lack of job creation measures. A spokesman said the senator would consider supporting new proposals, but not if they took the same form as the original measures.
“There’s not a mood in the Senate for these sorts of punitive approaches,” the Greens senator, Rachel Siewert, told Guardian Australia. “We’ve rejected it pretty comprehensively this time, and I think we’ll reject it next time.”
“The will of the Senate is pretty clear, and it reflects the will of the community,” Siewert said.
Community groups said they would fight any plans to bring on the bill again. “We’ll continue to talk to the crossbench on this,” the president of the National Welfare Rights Network, Kate Beaumont, said.
