Rethinking mutual obligation in 2022
This week, Power to Persuade is featuring articles by experts involved in a recent workshop, Rethinking Welfare and Conditionality in Australia, convened by the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network - a group of people from universities, advocacy organisations, and community services providers who are focused on achieving a social security system that affords people dignity and economic security. The workshop brought some of Australia’s leading social policy scholars and advocates working at the coalface of social security reform together to examine the impacts of recent policy and service delivery reforms on single parents and their children, unemployed workers, and others subject to mutual obligations and conditionality. More information about the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network, and links to videos from the workshop, are provided below this article.
In today’s post, Dr Simone Casey (RMIT & ACOSS) discusses an encouraging shift in political discourse about welfare conditionality driven by years of evidence-informed advocacy, but flags ways in which models underpinning Australia’s old mutual obligation framework could still hamper reform.
An Australian network of welfare conditionality academics, advocates, policy workers and service providers came together for the first time at a welfare conditionality event in York in the UK in July 2018. Since then, through its various forms of influence, this network has played a significant role in shifting political discourse about conditionality that is starting to bear fruit today.
I tried to capture this shift at the recent Rethinking Conditionality event where I focused on the views expressed by the new Labor government’s Minister for Employment, Tony Burke MP and the Chair of the Workforce Australia Select Committee, Julian Hill, MP.
I began by reflecting on remarks made by Minister Burke in July amid a media furore over the new Points Based Activation model in Workforce Australia. I noticed that he said that mutual obligations were punitive under the previous government and that this was related to the pejorative portrayal of unemployed people.
I don't like the concept where the whole lens of ‘it’s punitive’ and you'll never find me bashing the table and deriding people who are looking for work or unemployed. Like, that's not something, you'll find previous ministers of a different government running that sort of game. You'll never find me doing that.
These views reflect two parallel interests of the welfare conditionality research community which are broadly 1) that stigma and pejorative portrayals justify punitive conditionality and are used to reinforce maintain legitimacy and social divisions and 2) the way that ‘austere’ welfare regimes have led to forms of conditionality that are punitive. My own research has focused on the second of these, that is, the way mutual obligations in employment services are coercive and punitive.
In my view, and those of many other researchers who’ve studied these phenomena, this is because they are based on both on Workfirst and Workfare ideology. Workfirst is associated with the set of conditionality rules that mean people are pushed into the first available job, rather than having services invest in their human capital development. Workfare is associated with the idea of making people work for welfare, like work for the dole, and/or provide a high level of proof of actively seeking work, such as 20 job applications per month.
So it is interesting to see that Julian Hill’s speech to the employment services peak body NESA’s conference, addressed both Workfirst and Workfare. He said:
For years we have heard the chant of “work-first” and “any job’s a good job” from politicians playing to the crowd. But most people want to work, and we need to be careful not to torture the 95% to find the 5% who are doing the wrong thing..
I ask people “Is any job really a good job?”
On Workfare he said:
we’ve ended up in a pretty weird place where the Government contracts companies to be, far too often, glorified Centrelink compliance officers. Forced to make people do Work for the Dole stunts that don’t help them get a job, or suspend or cancel their payments if they’re confused and push them further into poverty
Hill made similar remarks at the first public hearing of the Workforce Australia committee on November 3. This time he reflects also on the lack of choice that people have their job plan, a document that has been described as an instrument of rule.
The job plan sounds nice but it isn't really a plan to get a job; it is a set of activities that you have to do to get your payment, isn't it? So we've invented nice language but it is just mutual obligation. …I suppose from the outside I'd imagined guiding someone through actually constructing a plan which might help them get a job.
Again, Julian Hill challenged the benefits of Workfirst:
…the insanity of just keep applying for 20 jobs a month and somehow, after five years of long-term unemployed with no long-term investment in skills, that will get you a job…so much of it has been built on this issue of conditioning the supply: beating unemployed people; work for the dole…
It is important to note also that the new Secretary of Employment, Natalie James, broadly supported these views, reflecting change permeating the bureaucracy as well.
But the system is full of, in my observation, a lot of blunt instruments. I feel like Workforce Australia has more nuance in it, like the points as opposed to 20 jobs a month. But it is still a system designed to get people who are on income support off income support by getting into work.
While these changes in perspective are encouraging, it is important that we don’t lose sight of the hazards that might get in the way of significant reform.
Rick Morton reported in the Saturday Paper that there’s already been mention of Workforce Australia providers threatening legal action if contracts are broken. There is a real threat the providers will resist further changes, because providers appear to be dependent on using the coercive elements of conditionality to get people into jobs quickly. Although the Workforce Australia contract is supposed to be a shift away from Workfirst, it is still uses outcome payments and conditionality to get people into jobs quickly.
It is therefore critical that viable alternatives to the existing Workfirst and Workfare forms of mutual obligation are developed and promoted to counter these threats. While there have been several examples already promoted in relation to ParentsNext, and based on the COVID-19 period, we need models that we can show will work.
The time it takes to implement these changes will also mean that there remain risks of harms from the Workfirst and Workfare models inherited from the old mutual obligation framework. There is still a need to reduce the harms of excessive requirements, threats of payment suspensions and penalties and Work for the Dole, in the short-term.
Social policy reform proceeds on the back of broader transformations in the social and political fabric of our societies and at times can occur at a demoralizingly slow pace. The welfare conditionality network has played a role in the struggle that’s led to the present opening and the change that might now finally be underway.
About the author:
Dr Simone Casey is a Research Associate at RMIT and a Senior Policy Advisor – Employment at the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). She has previously held a variety of roles in policy advocacy, research and communications in the employment services and welfare sectors.
Links to videos from the Rethinking Welfare and Conditionality in Australia workshop:
· Opening and panel on welfare-care-nexus - https://youtu.be/anHNZfzLV6U
· Stigma in welfare policy and practice - https://youtu.be/r0MuLc4gyqo
· Panel on employment services and welfare-to-work - https://youtu.be/cLbY50m5JRM
· Closing discussion - https://youtu.be/7JyAHjN0DMA
About the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network:
The Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network is a group of over 30 people from universities, advocacy organisations, and community services providers who are focused on achieving a social security system that affords people dignity and economic security. Its members include representatives from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Australian Council of Social Services, Family Care, and the Anti-Poverty Centre as well as researchers from the University of Melbourne, Monash University, RMIT, Swinburne University, the Australian National University, Sydney University, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Queensland – all of whom work on the impacts of welfare conditionality on people’s lives and the frontline delivery of programs. The network formed in 2018 following the visit of Prof Sharon Wright (University of Glasgow) from the UK Welfare Conditionality project to Australia, and it has previously organised streams of the Australian Social Policy Conference.
Content moderator Dr Sue Olney