Welfare focus on neediest areas

JENNY Macklin has told an OECD conference that Australia needs targeted solutions.

WELFARE reform in next week's budget could be targeted at areas with high levels of unemployment, homelessness, disability and indigenous populations.

Families and Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin has told an Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development conference in Paris that some areas in Australia have concentrated levels of multiple intergenerational disadvantage that need "intensive, targeted solutions".

The disadvantages in these areas compound to produce multiple barriers to employment and community participation, and this leads to dysfunctional communities and families, she told the conference. The minister's analysis suggests the government is poised to extend the geographically-based approach to solving welfare problems it has adopted in the Northern Territory intervention as it moves to shift people off welfare into work in the budget.

Australia had the fourth-highest proportion of children under the age of 15 living in jobless families in the OECD, Ms Macklin said. "There are many places in our suburbs and towns where unemployment is in double digits, and significant numbers of the working-age population are on income-support payments.

"Our government views welfare reform as another key driver of breaking the cycle of disadvantage and dysfunction."

The latest statistics on welfare payments for March support Ms Macklin's argument about the geographical nature of disadvantage. They show Cairns in north Queensland has the nation's highest levels of people receiving jobseeker payments, followed by Bankstown and Liverpool in southwestern Sydney.

Mt Druitt and Campbelltown, Fairfield in Sydney, Werribee, Sunshine and Watergardens in Victoria, Townsville, Bundaberg and Ipswich in Queensland also have high levels of jobseekers.

The government has applied a geographic approach to solving indigenous disadvantage, applying its welfare quarantining rules that direct welfare payments towards rent, food and clothing on this basis. The minister has suggested this quarantining could be extended outside the NT, also on the same basis.

The National Welfare Rights Network wants the government to extend a geographically-based program that is delivering a one-stop shop of welfare and employment assistance in areas with high long-term unemployment.