Labor’s persistent refusal to fix the JobSeeker payment is shameful

Remarks by Treasurer Jim Chalmers seem to say there’ll be no one-off increase in the pitifully inadequate rate of unemployment benefits in Tuesday night’s budget. If this is wrong, I’ll be delighted to offer an abject apology. If it’s right, Anthony Albanese and his ministers should hang their heads in shame. They claim to be the good guys, but they aren’t.

And the unions – which, as recent changes in industry policy reveal, have great behind-the-scenes influence over Labor governments – should be ashamed of themselves as well, for their failure to get Albo and co. up to the mark. They claim to represent the interest of the workers, but it turns only those who have jobs. Those still looking for one are on their own.

Remarks by Treasurer Jim Chalmers seem to say there’ll be no one-off increase to the pitifully inadequate rate of unemployment benefits in Tuesday night’s budget.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Do you realise Australia has the lowest benefits for the short-term unemployed among 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development?

The lowest? Really? Does that make us the poorest of all those countries? No, of course not. We’d be comfortably among the richest.

So how’s it explained? Well, perhaps we don’t mind if people in other countries think of us as among the stingiest of the rich countries. The kind of person who’d walk past someone in trouble without offering them help. The kind who thinks anyone without much money must be lazy.

Australians tend to think of people on the age pension as poor, but a single pensioner gets $556 a week, which is $170 a week more than the single adult rate of the JobSeeker payment.

So the real question is why the government doesn’t want to fix JobSeeker. Well, it’s no secret. It might be the right thing to do, but there are no votes in it.

In 1996, the dole was about 90 per cent of the age pension, but it’s been allowed to fall steadily and now, despite two small one-off increases in recent years, is little more than two-thirds of what the oldies get.

To cut a long story short, this is because, since the early days of the Howard government, the pension has been indexed to wage growth, while unemployment benefits remain indexed to the consumer price index.

By now, the dole is 26 per cent below the OECD’s poverty line, set at 50 per cent of median (dead middle) income. There are other ways to measure poverty, but the dole’s below all of them.

A common argument for keeping unemployment benefits low is that we don’t want to discourage the jobless from going to the bother of doing a paid job. Talk about treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.

But this is self-justifying nonsense. The single dole is now just 43 per cent of the full-time minimum wage.

A better argument is that benefits are so low people can be left unable to afford the fares and other costs involved in seeking a job.

Chalmers’ excuse for not increasing JobSeeker is that “we can’t afford to do everything”. But if you believe that, you haven’t thought about it.

Of course we can’t afford to do everything, but a rich country like ours, with a federal budget that will spend more than $700 billion next financial year, can certainly afford to do any particular thing it really wants to.

That’s the point: you can include it among all the things you’ll do if you really want to. Economists are great believers in “revealed preference”: judge people not by what they say, but by what they do.

Budgets reveal a government’s true priorities. What it spends on is what it most wants to do; what it “can’t afford” is something it doesn’t really want.

So the real question is why the government doesn’t want to fix JobSeeker. Well, it’s no secret. It might be the right thing to do, but there are no votes in it. Indeed, there may be votes to be lost.

It’s normal to envy those doing better than we are. But Australians suffer from the strange illness of “downward envy”. “I have to go out to work, while those lazy blighters sit around at home with their feet up, enjoying daytime television.”

And, of course, any money Labor spends helping one of the most deserving groups in society is money it can’t spend trying to buy the votes of the less deserving.

So, terribly sorry, love to help, but just can’t afford it.

If you’re looking for evidence that neither side of politics is up to much, you’ve just found some. I fear you’ll get more on Tuesday night.

Ross Gittins is the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor.

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