As a resume writer and employment expert, many of my clients are battlers, fighting to get ahead. Increasing dole payments is out of economic necessity rather than compassion. This boost to the dole is long over due but how long will it last? This story is from the ABC.
Unemployed Australians have welcomed a coronavirus-led boost to payments, but despair that it has taken a pandemic to increase their income to a level that lets them eat three times a day.
Key points:
- The JobSeeker supplement has been called the biggest single increase in unemployment benefits since the 1940s.
- Previously $550 a fortnight, it has risen to $1,100 a fortnight, which is above the poverty line.
- More than a million people are believed to have become unemployed in the past two weeks due to public health measures.
“I’m absolutely furious,” said Avery Howard, 18, who has been part of a broad coalition of business leaders, union bosses and peak bodies who spent years campaigning to raise the Newstart rate from about $40 a day. “There’s been so much talk about how the payments are not liveable, and the big thing it took to change it was a major public health crisis.”
The Newstart allowance of around $550 a fortnight, re-named “JobSeeker”, has effectively been doubled from today by a temporary Coronavirus Supplement.
It takes the baseline payment to $1,100 a fortnight — above the poverty line — and will also be automatically paid to people who receive the Sickness Allowance, Youth Allowance, Austudy and Parenting Payments.
Mr Howard has not been financially supported by his parents since the age of 15. He has spent three years surviving on Youth Allowance. “I said it to a friend the other day and it struck me how crazy it is, but I told them: ‘I’ve just gotten used to not having as many meals as I’m supposed to’,” Mr Howard said.
“It’s been astoundingly difficult. I spend all my time watching every cent I have. I have to make sure I’m not [missing] a bill and going into debt.”
Jeremy Poxon of the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union calls the supplement the biggest single increase in unemployment benefits since the 1940s.
“Before the rate was doubled we knew a majority of Newstart recipients were starving themselves to survive on the entitlement,” he said.
Jeremy Poxon says the previous benefit rate was, “brutally low that people just couldn’t afford three square meals a day.”
More than a million people are estimated to have become unemployed in the past month because of public health measures to stop the spread of coronavirus, such as preventing large gatherings and shuttering bars and restaurants. From today many of those people should receive the JobSeeker payment and the Coronavirus Supplement.
The long-term unemployed and those already registered for Newstart will receive it too.
“The minute the COVID-19 crisis hit people realised very, very quickly,” said chief executive of the Victorian Council of Social Services, Emma King.
Emma King says the unemployed have been living with low benefit rates for the past 25 years.
“We had people saying ‘Well, we can’t have people living on $40 a day’, even though that’s what had been happening to people who are finding themselves on unemployment benefits for the last 25 years.”
The way social distancing required the rapid shutdown of industries — and caused huge queues outside Centrelink overnight — had changed views, she noted.
“I think what we’ve seen before is real commentary around the ‘deserving’ and the ‘non-deserving’,” she observed. “Instead we’re seeing that anyone can find themselves out of a job and anyone knows that they simply cannot get by on $40 a day.”
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