AUWU calls on senate to demand social security payments be at the poverty line
The parliament is being asked to pass a bill that will bring the number of people thrown in to poverty to 1.16 million people since September
The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union today appeared at the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee inquiry into the Social Services And Other Legislation Amendment (Extension Of Coronavirus Support) Bill 2020. The AUWU was represented by policy officer Jay Coonan and acting communications coordinator Kristin O’Connell. The full text of our statement to the senate is below.
We reject the government’s tactics of threatening to throw people into even deeper poverty if this utterly inadequate bill passes. We've been placed in this position by the government and their failure to present us with a viable option.
It is disgraceful that the government is attempting to slash unemployment payments and describe it as an “extension”. The rate must be at the Henderson poverty line, which is where it was when the Coronavirus supplement was initially introduced, and it must be enshrined in law.
We are being asked to support something that effectively cuts income support – which has already been pushed $300 per fortnight below the poverty line – by $100 per fortnight. This will have horrific consequences for the millions of people who are trying to survive on unemployment payments and more than 1 million kids who are affected by these cuts.
This bill is not up to scratch and the parliament has both the ability and the duty to change it.
The AUWU calls upon the senate to stand up and say no and send the bill back to the lower house with substantive amendments that help move us towards a welfare system that is sustainable for those forced to depend upon it.
Media contact: 0413 261 362 / media at auwu.org.au
Full text of AUWU’s statement to the senate
The AUWU represents the interests of millions people on unemployment payments and all unwaged, underemployed and insecure workers. We believe everyone is entitled to fairly paid, stable work and access to shelter, healthcare, enough to eat and basic necessities. Our union is run by the unemployed, for the unemployed, and we’re the most important stakeholder group in decisions about the rate of income support payments.
We are talking directly to the prime minister and his cabinet. We are exhausted. We shouldn’t have to keep coming here and telling you what you already know.
For too long you have been allowed to wield fear as a weapon against vulnerable people. You have relied on fear to stop us standing up for ourselves and calling out the inhumanity of this system. Enough is enough.
The parliament is being asked to pass a bill that will bring the number of people thrown in to poverty to 1.16 million people since September.
Each one who will experience their own unique pain as a consequence of your decision and be deprived of the opportunity to equip themselves to find work and contribute to their community.
Cutting the coronavirus supplement puts barriers in our way and makes it harder and harder to escape joblessness.
People are terrified about what is going to happen to them.
Australia's welfare system has been undermining the rights of people who need income support for decades now. And every single piece of it contributes to the distress and to the harm that people experience; it all works together to create a perfect system for destroying us. Enough is enough.
Living in poverty hurts people. It destroys our mental and physical health. It exacerbates existing problems and creates new ones.
People who have already suffered the most at the hands of successive governments are those worst hit by your callous plan. First Nations families starve in remote areas because of food poverty. Refugees fleeing violence are subjected to further state violence in a country that is more than able to support them. Disabled people are persistently denied the recognition and support they need. Migrant workers are exploited by unethical employers who you refuse to rein in. You have excluded people from support and denied their rights throughout the pandemic simply because of their visa status. Enough is enough.
14% of suicides in 2019 were connected with unemployment or financial hardship. In response to the Productivity Commission report on mental health, the prime minister acknowledged that financial hardship contributes to anxiety and depression, which people on unemployment payments experience at three times the rate of the wider community. Prime minister, why is there such a gap between your words and your actions?
You could put a stop to this overnight.
It’s sickening that we are forced to continually submit reams of evidence showing the need to increase payments while you string people along with changes to the supplement, causing uncertainty and distress when you purport to care about mental health.
Every politician who has brought us to this point over decades is culpable for what is happening.
People are living in their cars while you acquire more investment properties, making housing harder and harder for the rest of us to access.
The further away the daily lives of politicians have gotten from the lives of people in the community, the worse things have become.
You assert that individual rights and freedoms are sacred, but you crush, disenfranchise and take away the freedoms and agency of every single person who needs your support.
None of these decisions about welfare are ever about helping the people you subject to poverty, only the optics. Even doubling the rate was a political decision. That’s why it’s so easy for you to slash it again, because you have no interest in or concept of the human cost of what you do.
You use us as pawns in an electoral strategy to try and maintain your grip on power without compunction for the human cost on millions of people’s lives. Instead of doing your job all you’re thinking about is the next election. You're trying to make political capital out of everything that hurts us. Enough is enough.
All of these choices you have made to hurt people are even more repugnant when we know that trying to exist in the welfare system, specifically because of the way you have designed it, means we have little hope of escaping poverty.
You’re making the wrong decisions and making this crisis worse than it needs to be.
Toying with the supplement without a plan to reform the welfare system will perpetuate and make worse the complex problems that face people who are locked out of waged work.
We hear again from the government that the reason people struggle with their mental health is because they don’t have a job. But the government has failed to invest in communities and fairly reward volunteering or unpaid work.
This economic crisis presents a unique opportunity to fix injustice and dysfunction in the welfare system.
The supplement should be retained at its full rate of $550 per fortnight and extended to those who were excluded, but this is a stopgap measure. We must reimagine the social security system to stop this systematic brutalisation of people who need help. The culture of brutality must be swept away. Enough is enough.
You decided to spend $130 billion on JobKeeper. You later found out that your calculations were off by $60 billion, which is enough to fully fund income support above the poverty line for every person on an unemployment payment over the forward estimates.
We know you have the money. But caring for people isn’t about how much it will cost, it’s about respecting our rights and our dignity and supporting us to participate in the community.
You are making the choice to put people into poverty when you have a better option and you are making it willingly, seemingly without pause.
Something you proved this year is that things don’t need to be the way they were before the crisis. There is no other way to interpret this decision to reduce the payment other than you simply don’t care what happens to us.
There is no benefit to cruelly keeping people in crushing poverty. Enough is enough.
We know people will respond to this statement by accusing us of hyperbole. We invite those people to identify an exaggeration – you will find none. We are simply stating the facts as they are, but we refuse to do so in the polite tone you demand of us.
There can be no pretending that you do not know the human cost of your actions. As we have said, we are in despair. We are exhausted. But we’re the people who suffer because of your decisions, and that’s why we persist.
All we ask of you is that you connect with your humanity, and treat us with dignity by ensuring that social security in this country means no one lives below the poverty line.
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