Labor backbenchers have joined hundreds of politicians, academics, business leaders and advocates in calling for the Albanese government to substantially increase the jobseeker rate.
The MPs Alicia Payne, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Kate Thwaites and Louise Miller-Frost have added their names to an open letter calling on their party leader, Anthony Albanese, to stop leaving “people with the least behind”.
In a sign of growing discontent in the Labor caucus, MPs Mike Freelander and Carina Garland also called for an increase jobseeker on Wednesday.
Albanese went to the election promising “no one held back, no one left behind”.
The signatories to the open letter, which was co-organised by the Australian Council of Social Service and includes the support of the Liberal MP Bridget Archer, teal independents and members of the Senate crossbench say it’s time Labor fulfilled its vow and addressed the “increased deprivation” faced by welfare recipients.
“The rate of income support is so low that people are being forced to choose between paying their rent or buying enough food and medicine,” the letter to the prime minister reads.
“As a result, people experience chronic mental and physical health issues, they’re forced into homelessness and insecure housing, trapped with abusive partners, and locked out of paid work because they don’t have the money they need to retrain and re-enter the workforce.”
The government’s economic inclusion advisory committee proposed lifting the jobseeker rate to 90% of the aged pension, which would mean an additional $90 a week for participants. It found the current rate was so low it was a barrier to finding work, with jobseekers unable to afford “the essentials of life”.
Almost as soon as the report became public last week, the government ruled out any substantial increase to the unemployment benefit, citing budget pressures.
But economists, First Nations leaders, academics and business and community leaders, including the chair of the economic inclusion advisory panel, the former Gillard government minister Jenny Macklin, said the jobseeker rate was a “structural injustice”.
On Wednesday, Freelander said he “had a longstanding belief we need to bring people into society because at the present time jobseeker isolates them”.
“It’s not enough to live on, certainly not in Sydney,” he told Guardian Australia.
“I’ve previously said that stage three tax cuts should stay because we campaigned on keeping them. But if there’s no other way, I’d rather they go and we increase jobseeker. Clearly people are quite desperate at the moment.”
Garland, the member for Chisholm, said: “I do want us to do more to support people who need support.”
“I acknowledge there are difficulties with the budget … I have spoken to the treasurer about what my constituents tell me, which is that they want more income support for people.”
Research by Acoss found seven in 10 people on income support were eating less or reporting difficulties obtaining their medications because of the payment’s inadequacy. Increasing numbers of jobseeker recipients have chronic illness or disabilities which make full-time work impossible but are unable to meet the disability support pension’s strict criteria.
The majority of people living on the unemployment or parenting payments are in poverty, including 761,000 children. That number is thought to have increased as the cost-of-living crisis, compounded by a housing affordability crisis, continues to bite.
Australians trying to live on welfare were temporarily lifted out of poverty at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when the Morrison government doubled the rate of jobseeker as a safety net for people who lost their job due to the lockdowns.
But the Covid subsidy was later cancelled. While the Albanese government has offered some hope it plans to raise the threshold when the single parenting payment stops, it is yet to make any commitment to increasing the unemployment payment.
On Wednesday, the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, rebuffed calls for a jobseeker increasing, arguing “we’re not able to fund every single good idea”.
The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, suggested the government would make “a lot more announcements about how we look after the most vulnerable Australians” before and in the budget.
Plibersek told ABC News Breakfast at a time “when unemployment is relatively low, this is the time to invest to make sure that people have the opportunity to move particularly from long term unemployment into employment”.
