Albanese: Put your money where your mouth is for poor people in second term

It’s time for Labor to end the shameful welfare policies that leave millions in poverty and despair

The Albanese government has no excuse for continuing cruel policies that force people to live in poverty in its second term.

Included below: comments from Antipoverty Centre spokesperson Jay Coonan and crisis line contact information

Welfare recipients are in crisis. This is a system that leads to people on just two payments – JobSeeker and the Disability Support Pension – making up a third of adult suicide deaths. ¹

As the Treasurer admitted on Saturday night, Labor’s prospects were dim just a few months ago, having lost public support. It’s clear that this election result was not an endorsement of irresponsible choices that leave people in poverty and subject welfare recipients to punitive rules – it was merely a rejection of Peter Dutton.

It’s time for the Labor government to take seriously its duty of care for poor people and show compassion for us:

Directly invest in buying and building high quality public homes at scale, and abandon the turbocharging of privatisation through “social and affordable” housing policies.

Urgently increase payments to the Henderson poverty line as a triage measure, and work with welfare recipients to develop a sophisticated measure of poverty.

Deliver on the 2022 promise to abolish compulsory cashless welfare programs such as the BasicsCard and rebranded Cashless Debit Card, now known as the SmartCard.

Immediately pause all Centrelink payment suspensions imposed on people with “mutual” obligations requirements and remove all compulsion from (un)employment services.

Quotes attributable to Antipoverty Centre spokesperson and JobSeeker recipient Jay Coonan

The first term of the Albanese government was filled with disappointment and despair for poor people.

The pain has been harder to bear for those of us who were desperate for relief after a decade of Coalition rule and believed his false promise to ‘leave no one behind’.

Following three years of increasing hardship for many people on Centrelink payments, it felt as if the prime minister was mocking us when he repeated the empty slogan ‘no one held back and no one left behind’ on Saturday night.

What we got in 2022 was an Albanese government that changed the JobSeeker rate by less then Scott Morrison in its first term – just $20 a week – and left people on the Disability Support Pension and other Centrelink payments living in poverty without any rate increase at all. A government that continued “mutual” obligations policies that costs $4 billion a year and funnels public money to unemployment cops who unlawfully punish people they do not deem to be submissive enough.

At the same time, private rents have skyrocketed alongside other essentials, with meagre indexation falling far behind the real increase in living costs so many of us have suffered.

In 2022, the only concrete promise Labor made to welfare recipients was to abolish compulsory cashless welfare programs. Instead, they betrayed the 30,000 people, more than 80% of whom are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, who still have their income controlled through the BasicsCard and Smart Card that represent nothing more than modern day rations programs.

If the prime minister believes that people voted for “fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all… For the strength to show courage in adversity and kindness to those in need,” as he said on Saturday night, he must use the power he has been handed to show that these are more than empty words.

It’s time for Albanese to live up to the rhetoric – increase Centrelink payments to at least the poverty line, end “mutual” obligations and abolish compulsory cashless welfare to deliver real relief for those of us he is holding back.

Media contact: email media at antipovertycentre.org or call/message 0413 261 362 via Signal