Australia’s unemployment payments are hundreds of dollars a week below the poverty line and were not increased in the federal budget.
The government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee recently recommended that jobseeker payments should be lifted to 90% of the age pension. Experts say that without change the gap between jobseeker and pension payments is only going to widen.
The budget did increase commonwealth rent assistance by 10% and extended the eligibility for the highest rate of jobseeker payments for about 4,700 people. All Australians will also receive a $300 energy bill rebate.
Jobseeker payments for a single person are currently about $220 a week lower than the Henderson poverty line, and about $170 lower than the age pension, when supplements are included.
The jobseeker rate briefly went above the poverty line after a $550-a-fortnight temporary supplement was added. But it has since fallen below the poverty line again.
There isn’t an official poverty line in Australia and various measures are often used, such as 50% or 60% of household disposable incomes. Many measures have serious limitations, such as arbitrary thresholds, not accounting for high housing costs in Australia, or ignoring the effect of household wealth.
This chart uses the the Henderson poverty line, which was created for Australian conditions, and some poverty researchers consider it the “least bad”. The measure came out of the 1973 Henderson poverty inquiry and is based on the disposable income required to support the basic needs of a family of two adults and two dependent children in 1973. It is now regularly updated by the Melbourne Institute.
A coalition of social services organisations were campaigning for an increase to income support payments ahead of the budget. These included Homelessness Australia, the Salvation Army and Domestic Violence NSW.
The campaign asked for jobseeker payments to be raised to the same level as the age pension, for income support to be indexed to wages as well as prices, and for supplementary payments for people with disability and illness, and for single parents.
