CPA - The Guardian

The federal election was notable not only for the blending of the policies of the two major parties, but also for the public’s disillusion with those policies. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the Gillard government’s recent attempted revival of a discredited Coalition welfare policy.

Shortly before the election, the Gillard government announced its intention to reintroduce a modified version of the Howard government’s policy of paying job seekers to relocate for work, particularly to Western Australia, which was an obvious ploy to provide extra labour for the booming minerals industry in that state.

The new Labor scheme involved paying job seekers $6,000 if they took a job in a regional area or $3,000 for a job in a city. That sounds fine. The money would certainly help to meet the costs of relocation for people who were prepared to move. However, the sting was in the tail.

In many cases a job that involves relocation may fall through, for example if the work poses health risks to the employee, or if they simply can’t meet the demands of the work. Nevertheless, under the Gillard scheme, if the employee left the job “without good reasons” (whatever that might mean for Centrelink or the government) he or she would lose entitlement to welfare payments for three months.

The scheme also provided for a $2,500 payment to employers who employed a welfare recipient. For some employers this could have provided an incentive for a high turnover of welfare employees, but there appears to have been no allowance for penalising employers who abuse the scheme.

The Coalition had been hatching its own plans to revive the Howard government’s relocation policy, and after the government announced the new scheme the Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey declared indignantly that the government had pinched Liberal policies. However, neither of the two major parties took into consideration the fact that the previous relocation scheme had failed for very good reasons, or that the vindictiveness of their policies would alienate them from the public.

Firstly, most unemployed people were unwilling to relocate, not only because of the enormous readjustment involved, but also because of the risks of being stranded (in some cases with their families), perhaps thousands of kilometres from home and without any means of support. The Howard government’s trial scheme resulted in the filling of only 87 out of 150 positions. The former Labor government of Kevin Rudd wisely dumped the scheme in 2008, but then Rudd himself was dumped by Gillard, who decided unwisely to revive it.

Secondly, both parties increased the penalties for breaches of rules by recipients of welfare or other support, under the assumption that this would increase their party’s appeal for conservative voters. They ignored or overlooked the possibility that the more vindictive their policies became, the more they would alienate voters, even including some who have until now supported very conservative policies.

This was also evident with respect to the treatment of asylum seekers, particularly regarding off-shore processing of applications for asylum. The government’s position would not have been helped by its announcement that welfare recipients who missed a Centrelink appointment would have a payment suspended, and that if they missed another they would forfeit payment altogether.

Despite its failings, the Rudd government at least took some initiatives, for example the apology for the stolen generations, which differentiated its policies from those of the conservatives. In contrast, Gillard’s tactic of moving ever closer to the position of the conservatives, while both the major parties competed to appear the most hard-line, may well have contributed to the poll result, in which both parties scored a roughly equal number of votes while votes for progressive and left-wing parties and candidates increased remarkably.

The vote of the August 21 federal election has heralded a markedly different political situation, which has the potential to usher in greatly improved policies regarding welfare and a number of other issues. The Greens have now joined the ranks of the major parties, and the situation will never be the same for the other two. And that’s a particularly good thing.

Next article – Workers maintain resolve over job security at Bluescope

Back to index page