Nation weaning itself off welfare, AIHW report finds

Australia is making significant inroads in the number of people on welfare.

Ethan Gersbach, shopfitting apprentice at Inline Aluminium in Sydney’s Milperra. Picture: John Feder

Australia’s welfare bill has plateaued at $160 billion a year over the past three years, helped by the shelving of family tax benefit payments and the schoolkids’ bonus, but per-person expenditure on welfare still sits at $6482 a year, up from $5287 a year two decades ago.

There has also been a significant fall in the proportion of working-age Australians receiving income support, from 22 per cent in 1999 to 15 per cent in 2018.

But long-term unemployment remains an intractable problem, with 25 per cent of unemployed people aged 15 and over looking for work for more than a year, up from 15 per cent in 2009.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2019 welfare report to be published on Wednesday, a snapshot of the nation’s wellbeing, paints a generally positive picture of Australia.

People are more satisfied with their lives and more socially connected than most of the developed world, and enjoy record employment levels and educational attainment. However, housing stress remains a challenge for more than a million low-income households.

The AIHW finds a nation increasingly civic-minded, with 97 per cent of people enrolled to vote, up from 90 per cent in 2010, and civic-hearted, with Australians now contributing 743 million hours of volunteering each year. But it is also lonely, with one in four Australians currently experiencing an episode of loneliness.

Indigenous people have experienced some improvements in home ownership and a fall in household overcrowding but continue to record significantly lower rates of school attendance and employment.

AIHW spokesman Dinesh Indraharan said there was much good news in the welfare data, which is designed to help policymakers understand Australians and their diverse needs.

“Australia is in the top third of OECD countries for a range of measures, including life satisfaction and social connectedness,” he said. “In 2018, 74 per cent of people aged 15-64 were employed — the highest annual employment rate recorded in Australia.” He noted the latest figures from July this year continued to show record female and total employment rates.

The nation’s welfare payments haven’t increased since 2014 primarily due to policy changes reducing parenting payments, the report says. The proportion of working-age Australians receiving parenting payments in 2018 was just 2.1 per cent, compared with 5.1 per cent in 1999.

Social Services Minister Anne Ruston said the report “recognises the Australian social security system as the most highly targeted towards low-income earners compared with other high-income countries”. “Under our watch the level of welfare dependency for working-age Australians is at its lowest in 30 years,” she said.

It also examines work-life balance. The proportion of people working more than 50 hours a week has fallen from 16 per cent in 2009 to 14 per cent last year.

Revealing the difficulty of moving people from welfare to work, one in nine families with children under 15 have no one in the household working, a proportion unchanged in almost a decade.

Crime rates are down from a decade ago, the report notes, with the proportion of people who experienced physical assault dropping from 3.1 per cent to 2.4 per cent. The proportion of households that experienced malicious property damage also reduced, from 11 per cent in 2008-09 to 5.1 per cent in 2017-18. But Australians are fearful when walking alone at night, which put us 27th out of 35 OECD countries for which data was available.

Australians also report very high life satisfaction, with a score of 7.3 (on a scale of 0 to 10). This placed Australia 10th in the OECD.