What does Australia owe Racheal Wellman, just 23? What are her chances in this country now, and as Australia begins to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic? Wellman worked as a barista 25 to 30 hours a week in a St Kilda cafe. It was a casual job, so no paid holidays, no sick pay, no job security. But it was “fantastic”, she says, especially after being unemployed for a time, couchsurfing at friends’ houses and sometimes sleeping rough at Flinders Street station. Wellman lost her job when the cafe – Dear Liza – was forced to offer only takeaways at the end of March. Right now, there is a safety net for her and about a million people like her. Because she had not worked at the cafe for 12 months, she was ineligible for the higher wage subsidy, known as jobkeeper. She can claim unemployment benefits, or jobseeker, and with it comes the government’s $550 a fortnight coronavirus supplement. She is eligible for a maximum of $1,115.70 a fortnight, roughly double the amount of the pre-corona benefit – but only until 24 September. She can live off that while she looks for work. She can pay her $225 a week rent, dropped temporarily to $185 by her landlord (she will have to pay that back later). She can eat and pay bills. But could she live on half of that – around $280 a week – if the government keeps its word and abolishes the “emergency response measure”, as prime minister Scott Morrison has called the supplement, in a few months? The government says its priority is to get a million Australians back to work, but what if Wellman struggles to find a job during what is expected to be a prolonged recession, with 10% unemployment or higher? If she does return to hospitality – an industry decimated by coronavirus restrictions – should it be on the same terms as before, or would that leave her vulnerable again to the next economic shock? “In my life, in everyone’s life,” Wellman says, “I feel like now’s a great time to almost click the reset button. We shouldn’t go back to the way we were. We should be a better version of the way we were.” So far, the federal government is resisting calls, even from within its own ranks, for the jobseeker payment to be kept at higher levels than previously, even if it is wound back somewhat from where it is today. Labor and the Greens also want a higher level of jobseeker when the crisis is over. The temporary doubling at a cost of $14bn was “not a change in the government’s view about the broader role of the social safety net in Australia”, Morrison has said. But he also wants “fresh eyes” on options for institutions and the economy, without the weight of ideology. On Tuesday, treasurer Josh Frydenberg told the National Press Club that the principles guiding the government had not changed: personal responsibility, choice, rewarding effort, “whilst ensuring a safety net which is underpinned by a sense of decency and fairness”. If ideology was absent, say many economists, social welfare academics and organisations that work to alleviate poverty, Australia would rethink a social security system they say was far from decent and fair, but instead punitive, trapping people in poverty rather than assisting them to find work. Australia’s peak body for community services, the Australian Council for Social Service (Acoss), has long argued that jobseeker – previously known as Newstart – was, at about $40 a day for an individual, impossible for people to live on and was bad for the economy. The sector was not alone, with major business groups such as the Business Council of Australia, economists and even former prime minister John Howard suggesting the low rate had become counterproductive. Acoss welcomed the doubling of the payment as the best way to both quickly alleviate the suffering of the newly unemployed and to stimulate the economy. The use of social security payments to boost demand seems to be working – a study found that the $5bn announcement to give six million pensioners and other social security recipients a one-off $750 payment from 31 March had offset a plunge in consumer spending. A similar payment is due in July. Now Acoss wants a thorough look at the social security system, including family payments, rental assistance, social housing and support for people with disabilities. It is working to model options but overall seeks broader reform, with the increased jobseeker payment retained until a system is in place that protects people from poverty. “There’s obviously a clear need to fix the social safety net,” says Acoss’s chief executive Dr Cassandra Goldie. It had become “toxic and brutal” before the pandemic upended the economy. Goldie and others in the sector praise the government for its fast and smart use of the social security system to channel payments. The coronavirus supplement will also be available to those on youth allowance, Austudy and parenting payments. It is not available for the more than one million temporary visa holders in the workforce, a gap that has been criticised as inhumane. Prof Peter Whiteford, of the Austraian National University’s Crawford School, analysed Australia’s unemployment benefits before the crisis and found them to be well below the OECD average. The doubling of jobseeker was the most significant change to social security Australia had seen since the dole was introduced in the 1940s. “It’s remarkable really, even if it’s only temporary,” he says. For Goldie, it was a signal that the government “listened to the experts”. It needed to continue to do so rather than see the payments as a short-term, one-off, fix. Acoss had been arguing for a $95 a week increase to jobseeker, far less than the government’s coronavirus supplement. It won’t put a figure on the increase it now wants to be permanent, but its aim is to prevent people living in poverty, and the OECD poverty line for Australia is $500 a week for a single person with no dependants. That’s not much less than the temporary jobseeker payment. Some of the increased spending could also potentially be retargeted to other areas. “People have a variety of needs,” Goldie says. “If you have children, we haven’t had a real increase in family payments for a very long time. It’s nowhere near adequate to what it needs to be now. “We shouldn’t be withdrawing any of this income support. We need to be fixing the level of payments for families and individuals so they are protected from poverty. We need to move forwards not backwards.” Goldie thinks the community is ready for the discussion. “The country came together, and I believe was proud to have your back. That’s what we need to stick with – to leave behind the old politics, of lifters and leaners, divisive stuff. Whenever you lose your job, which is always awful, we need a social security system to protect people from poverty if it happens to you.” Ideology has weaved its way through Australia’s welfare system for at least a generation. Since the 1990s, the system has been tightened, particularly for the unemployed, with ever-more hoops to jump through, and rules and penalties for the smallest transgression. The idea of “mutual obligation” has been a mantra of all major parties. It has always been a requirement to look for work if you receive benefits, but the rules had become deliberately cruel, according to critics, dividing people into the “deserving” and “underserving” poor, with the unemployed undeserving. For 25 years, there was no real increase in Newstart beyond inflation, while aged pensions kept up with average living standards. Social security can’t be isolated from the rest of the economy, including the workforce, housing, education and training. The rising cost of housing, for instance, meant that a person on unemployment benefits found it almost impossible to find an affordable place to live. Anglicare’s annual rental affordability snapshot found that the supplement meant that of the houses it surveyed, 1,000 of the nearly 70,000 homes would be affordable for a single jobseeker. If the supplement was scrapped, only nine would be. If we returned to the previous approach to social security, says economist Nicki Hutley from Deloitte Access Economics, “we are once again condemning a large section of our society to living below the poverty line for no good reason. It’s purely based on ideology, that some people are unemployed simply because they are lazy.” The government’s rhetoric hints that its philosophy has not changed. When announcing the supplement, Morrison stressed that thousands of Australians had become unemployed “through no fault of their own”, which is true, but is true for the vast majority of those unemployed before the crisis. In February, the unemployment rate was 5.1%, and in March, just before the social distancing restrictions, 713,000 were receiving unemployment benefits. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicate that job losses equated to 975,000 in the five weeks to 18 April, or an unemployment rate of around 12%. We are not all in this together, at least as far as unemployment is concerned. The biggest hit to jobs was in the accommodation and food services industry, down 33.4% in the five-week period. Arts and recreation services were down 27%. Nearly a fifth of jobs held by people aged under 20 have vanished. Official job figures for April will be released on 14 May. About a quarter of all Australian workers are casuals, but it’s uneven. The jobs with highest prevalence of casual employees are hospitality workers (79%) and food preparation assistants (75%). Hutley says that while casual work suits some people such as students and gives flexibility to employers to scale their workforces up and down, employees had little real choice. These workers have been exposed as especially vulnerable to any shock in the economy. “There should be some way of protecting those workers and giving them greater power to be able to report people who are not doing the right thing without fear of losing their job,” she says. Others are arguing that the crisis is an opportunity to open a broader and deeper debate, beyond what is an acceptable level of social security support. Tim Kennedy, the head of the 156,000-member United Workers Union, says despite Australia congratulating itself for 20 years of economic growth before the pandemic, “the last few weeks show that a large proportion of Australians are on the bones of their arse. It didn’t take much to knock us down.” The union, which represents workers in hospitality, hotels, casinos, warehouses and health, argues for a government “jobs guarantee” backed by a government subsidy, which would mean employers could not put off people during the crisis. It wants an “emergency income guarantee” for everyone else at the minimum wage of $740 a week. “The system is broken and it’s not good enough to patch it up and sail on through,” he told Jacobin recently. “We’ve seen these crises keep coming; after 2008–9, they said it was a once in 50-year thing. Ten years later, a pandemic knocked capitalism over very quickly. Just look at the way it is unfolding in the United States. And on top of it all, we’ve got a climate crisis that keeps ratcheting up every year, which also threatens the system.” An income guarantee such as this – whether temporary or not – comes close to the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), increasingly debated since the global financial crisis. The difference overall is that a UBI is paid to all without conditions, even to the wealthy (which is clawed back though taxes), whereas an income guarantee is paid to those without paid work. The idea is that the economic system now is incapable of providing all workers with a reasonably paid job. The shocks to come with technology replacing jobs, as well as the upheaval of climate change, will exacerbate structural weaknesses in the workplace. In Spain, with devastating numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths, the governing coalition of the Socialist party and the left movement Podemos has signalled it will introduce some form of regular payments for its poorest citizens. A guaranteed payment would address poverty better, the argument goes, compared with “targeted transfer” as we have in Australia, particularly if it has a punitive underpinning. Professor John Quiggin, an economist from the University of Queensland, advocates some form of income guarantee for those not in the workforce. He says the coronavirus pandemic is the right time to debate it. “We need to accept that we have a system that isn’t going to reliably generate full employment and that we need both government action to ensure that jobs are available, but also to replace punitive Newstart with something that guarantees people support on the basis that they make a contribution which need not necessarily be paid employment,” he says. The guarantee could recognise caring responsibilities, for instance, or volunteering. Quiggin says the new rate of jobseeker, if maintained, begins to look something like an income guarantee, and could be kept when the crisis is over, possibly replacing existing benefits. It would be expensive – somewhere between 5 and 10% of national income – “but not something impossible”. Goldie is interested in the concept, but she does not support a universal basic income for all. “Our top priority should be to secure an adequate basic income for everybody who needs it,” she says. “At this time, we want the efforts of government and the country to focus on the people who are most at risk.” Racheal Wellman is one of those people. She would prefer a permanent job rather than casual work but will take just about anything. She applies for work every day, but “there’s only so much rejection you can take”. An application for a full-time checkout position at Aldi was rejected. She loves working in hospitality because helping someone have a great meal, or a birthday “means the world because I’ve just made this person’s day”. But in previous jobs in hospitality, she says she was sexually harassed. She accepted below-minimum wages because “it’s still better than Centrelink payments”. That bind is built into some hospitality jobs, she says – accept poor conditions or go on benefits, and you won’t be able to live on benefits. Wellman worries that if jobseeker reverts to its old level, she’ll find herself homeless again. “I would hate to be anyone in in the same situation as I was, because being homeless is honestly the worst thing that could happen to people,” she says. “If Australia can be more sympathetic to people in less desirable positions, then we can become better as an entire nation.”