An advisory panel of experts has warned the federal government that it needs to increase the amount that people on JobSeeker are paid each day as a “first priority” in the upcoming budget.
The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee (EIAC), which is chaired by ex-Labour minister Jenny Macklin, provides a report to the government each year before the federal budget is delivered which outlines necessary changes.
This year it highlighted that JobSeeker and related working age payments need to have their base rates increased by $17 per day.
The amount that people on JobSeeker and welfare payments receive is always a hot topic of every budget. Currently, the payments sit at around $54 a day for a single person with no dependants, which experts argue is not enough to live on.
An increase in JobSeeker as advised by the EIAC would see the amount reach approximately $72 a day and would mean that those living on it would not need to cut back on essentials.
The EIAC’s report made a total of four recommendations for the 2024-2025 budget:
- Increase the base rate of JobSeeker and related working age payments as a first priority.
- Commit to a timeframe for the full increases of JobSeeker and related payments to be implemented.
- Improve the adequacy of indexation of working-age payments immediately.
- Fund independent research into the impacts of the cost of living in remote areas.
As well as the 2024 report highlighting the need for an increase in welfare payments, it also researched the practicality of and side-effects of these increases.
In particular, the EIAC looked into how increasing JobSeeker’s base rate by $17 a day would impact that dreaded economic curse: inflation.
And what the committee found was that such an increase would have a “negligible” impact on inflation. So ya know, there goes that excuse if the government doesn’t increase it.
“Ultimately the Committee was advised that any impact would likely be small to negligible. This is primarily because the increases represent a small share of overall expenditure in the economy,” read the report.
“An increase in the rate of JobSeeker and related payments to 90% of the Age Pension would cost approximately $4.6 billion per annum and represent around 0.43% of total household consumption and 0.16% of GDP.”
Last year, after the same continued calls to increase JobSeeker, the government raised the payment amount by $40 a fortnight.
This equated to just $2.85 extra a day, and even that small amount had the Coalition wanting to cut it back down because of the same reason people always argue: “If we give poor people money then they’ll want to stay poor.”
Which is amazing logical gymnastics, because nobody wants to ‘stay poor’. People just want to stay alive, and that alone is pretty bloody hard due to the cost of living crisis.
[Image: Jenny Evans/Getty Images]
