We aren't quitting.

We are gutted by the decision to starve unemployed workers in this budget. But, we'll keep fighting until there's a meaningful raise for all.

The Budget has been released and we are gutted.

The Henderson Poverty Line (which is calculated on the actual cost of things like groceries and bills) for a single person is $610.60 a week.

The budget’s increase to Jobseeker will raise it to $366.45 a week.

It costs a minimum of $600 a week for people to feed themselves, keep a roof over their head, and pay for essentials. And the Labor government believes that people on Jobseeker can somehow ignore this inescapable reality.

This isn’t “doing it tough”. This is a level of poverty that kills people.

Their death certificate might say “pneumonia acquired while sleeping rough” or “brake failure on a car that couldn’t be serviced” or “intimate partner violence” or “complications from malnutrition”. But the true cause is the same: poverty.

The Labor government knows this. They’ve said so, over and over:

Their own experts said JobSeeker needs a “substantial increase”. $2.85 a day is not substantial — it doesn’t even buy a loaf of bread in most shops.

Labor chose a surplus over the hundreds of thousands of people — including children — who are suffering and starving.

Labor chose tax cuts for the rich over raising students, carers and disabled people out of poverty.

Labor chose to ignore their own experts and their own former selves for short-term “fiscal responsibility”. They are choosing to ensure that the 5% of the working-age population that economists carefully engineer to be unemployed will live absolutely miserable existences.

Labor could easily have used some of the surplus to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians by making it possible for them to pay rent, buy medications, heat their houses. They chose not to do so.

Media contact: Catherine Caine
0431 869 469 / catherine@auwu.org.au