Big little victories: changes to payments suspension in employment services

Dr Simone Casey (@simonecasey) reminds us today that it’s important to celebrate the small wins as well as aim for large-scale reforms. She describes the work that went into the recent decision to give welcare program participants a 48-hour ‘grace period’ between missing a mutual obligation appointment or activity and having their payments suspended.

Last week The Guardian reported that the Department of Employment will be introducing a change in December this year so that payment suspensions do not kick in for 48 hours. This will give participants a chance to contact their job agencies and resolve the problem. While this might seem like a small change, for people like me who have been advocating for change to payment suspensions for over two years, it is a big deal. We could see this a sad indictment of the openness of policy making agencies, but it is actually an indication that with the right amount of persuasion, and a whole lot of sustained advocacy, change can come through the power of civil society.

A screenshot from a video introducing the Targeted Compliance Framework (source: YouTube)

For those new to this issue, I am talking about the automatic suspensions of ‘job seeker’ and ‘parenting payment’ participant payments, for people seeking work who are required to participate in employment services like jobactive, Disability Employment Services, ParentsNext and the Community Development program.

These payment suspensions really began to bite when the Targeted Compliance Framework was introduced in July 2018. In its first year of operation 1 million more payment suspension were recorded over the old model it replaced. Under the old Job Seeker Compliance Framework, workers in employment services recorded attendances at appointments onto the computer system, where they had some discretion about these. Although payment suspensions had already been used in jobactive and DES, they had not existed in ParentsNext.

The key difference between payment suspensions before and after the Targeted Compliance Framework was the fact that that job seekers/participants were responsible for reporting their attendance at activities, while under the old system jobactive providers only reported attendance at appointments. A suspension was only triggered because of human intervention, and there were options for providers to use discretion not to report non-attendance and use the ‘contact’ report or Did not Attend – discretion applied option.

The advocacy began early

In my former employment I had been able to attend the training given to employment service providers, and ran a series of webinars and information sessions to alert a range of advocacy organisations to the way in which the TCF worked. As I identified in articles published in the NSSRN Rights Review, the TCF has shifted reporting responsibility in a number of ways that problematised social security law decision making.

While in the initial inquiry into the Welfare Reform Bill 2017 that legislated the TCF (i.e. amended the Social Security Act) automatic payment suspensions were identified as a concern in some submissions (e.g. ACOSS, NSSRN), no-one knew the extent to which these concerns would be realised until some time after the TCF was implemented.

In fact, it was the application of the TCF to ParentsNext where the issue began to draw public interest, and then again when the TCF was suspending people’s payments over the Christmas Holidays. As always it was Luke Henriques-Gomes at the Guardian whose journalistic interest meant that the problem of payment suspensions continued to remain in the spotlight. This was particularly true of the coverage of the payment suspensions in ParentsNext, which was a central concern of the Senate Inquiry in early 2019. Then further attention was drawn to the concentration of payment suspensions on groups identified as vulnerable, and further again on the level of overturn of automated payment suspension decisions that were subjected to human review (i.e. when an employment service worker assessed if there had been a reasonable excuse); and even suspensions that occurred because of errors in the requirements set in job plans, and an even older bugbear, failure to provide adequate notification of rescheduled of appointments.

While some of these issues can be attributed to mishandling of requirements by employment services providers, many of them are a result of the hard-wiring of decisions into the TCF and the job seeker calendar appointments, not helped in the least by excessive jobactive worker caseloads, and imposts of dealing with massive policy changes like the TCF in short timeframes.

The ‘bedding down’ of problems

In the parlance of policy making agencies, these kinds of issues are sometimes referred to euphemistically as ‘bedding down’ problems. It is true that no massive public administration implementation involving close to a million citizens can be expected to occur without some problems, but I will never forget a story about some of these harms I heard at a TCF implementation forum. This story told by a jobactive provider CEO was to advise the Department of their concern about the responsiveness of the Customer Service Line, which had been inundated with calls following the implementation of the TCF. The provider told the Department that a mother had called them desperate about a payment suspension and had threatened to kill her children if they did not do something about it.

After hearing this I became incensed about the harms that payment suspensions could cause vulnerable people, surviving on meagre income support payments. I reported these concerns to the Department of Employment in a number of meetings about the TCF, and then continued to advocate on this position once the problem of payment suspensions in ParentsNext emerged.

After leaving Jobs Australia I continued to publish my concerns about automated payment suspensions, and during a period of volunteering at the Australian Unemployed Workers Union met with the Department of Employment to continue to relay these concerns about the TCF. We banded with ACOSS and NSSRN to maintain communication with the Department on this and related ‘mutual obligation’ matters including advocating for the suspension of mutual obligation during the bushfires and the pandemic.

So the point of this story - which has involved sustained advocacy from a range of actors, including Shadow Ministers and Senators, advocacy organisations, unemployed worker representatives, human rights advocates and social security law experts - is to show that it is possible to get change to happen. While the 48-hour postponement of payments suspensions does not solve all the problems in employment services, it is important to note something good when it does happen. It is also important to maintain belief that the public servants who advise Government on policy like this are listening to how they can make this system fairer.