Simon Castles June 6, 2014
Tony Abbott needs to answer some questions. Photo: Andrew Meares
In May 1999, Tony Abbott responded to me directly in this newspaper. "Simon Castles should feel very angry indeed about being unemployed and idle for 18 months," he wrote, "and not having the opportunities that work for the dole provides."
At the time, Abbott was minister for employment services, and was responding to a piece I'd written a few days earlier in which I reflected on my own experience of unemployment and generally got stuck into him for his comments about the unemployed being "job snobs".
(By the way, Mr Abbott, if by chance you're reading this, I never said I was "idle", I said I was unemployed; these are not the same thing. They tend to be equated only in the minds of those who know nothing about unemployment beyond that story they saw on A Current Affair that time.)
Anyway, 15 years later and the employment services minister is now Prime Minister. And props where they're due, Mr Abbott, your career trajectory has certainly been more stellar than mine. But I have remained employed these 15 years, paying my taxes and, in so doing, giving something back I hope for the help I received when I was young and unemployed and needed it most.
The safety net, in other words, worked for me, just as it has worked for countless thousands of Australians for generations (including, interestingly, Clive Palmer, who last week defended the dole, saying it had helped him when he was an out-of-work teenager).
But what of the young unemployed today? Well, if the government gets its way – the battle in the Senate is set to begin in earnest – the young unemployed will get no help at all. Or so little help that the word "help" begins to look perilously like its opposite.
Under the government's plan, from next year, unemployed people under 30 will have to wait six months before receiving benefits. They will then be put on work-for-the-dole for six months, before the money is again taken away for half a year. And so on it will go. This policy manages a rare feat in being both astoundingly cruel and incredibly dumb.
Work for the dole is the least-worst part of the plan, but that is no endorsement. Introduced by John Howard in the late-'90s, work for the dole has always been a piece of populism masked as policy. Its aim has never really been to help the jobless, but rather to win the support of those who believe the unemployed have it easy. ("Easy" on the dole, by the way, is $255 a week, or about half what a single person needs to reach the poverty line.)
A study of work for the dole, by Jeff Borland and Yi-Ping Tseng of the University of Melbourne, found that participation in the program is "associated with a large and significant adverse effect on the likelihood of exiting unemployment payments". In other words, those in work for the dole end up stuck on welfare longer than those not in the program. It is believed this is because those in the program have less time to look and prepare for real work.
Then there is the other part of the government's policy for the young unemployed – the six months without any payment at all. Here is how they sell this in the budget spin document: "Because we want new jobseekers, especially those leaving school and university, to actually look for work, income support will only be provided once a six-month period of job hunting has been completed."
It's worth reading that sentence again. First, nice use of the word "actually", guys. Way to patronise everyone who's struggled to find work ever. But secondly and more importantly, just how is the average jobseeker supposed to hunt for jobs for six months without any money? Are they meant to draw on their trust fund during this time? Or perhaps sell off shares in the portfolio they built up while completing year 12?
Sorry for the snark. But Abbott and Joe Hockey really need to answer this question of how. They can't be let off the hook on this. Even if we leave aside for a moment the need a person has for food and shelter – a rather big thing to put aside – looking for a job itself costs money. Anyone who has ever chased work knows this and yet somehow it has escaped the notice or understanding of our Prime Minister and Treasurer.
More than 100,000 people a year are expected to be hit by these changes. A packed MCG of the young and desperate. Even government officials told a Senate hearing this week that they expect half a million people to be pushed into crisis and seek emergency relief over the coming years as a result of the welfare changes.
And to reiterate: the young jobless will get no money for six months, and then be moved for six months into a program that doesn't work. So for half the year they will have time but no money, and for the other half they will have money but no time. The policy actually appears designed to hinder efforts to escape unemployment.
I look back on my period of unemployment in the mid-'90s as an awful time. As a spirit-crushing fog in which day-to-day life was shadowed constantly by feelings of frustration, worthlessness and worry. But if the government gets these changes through, I'll know I was truly one of the lucky ones. I'll know I was part of one of the last generations of young unemployed to be given a chance before the dismantling of the safety net began.
Simon Castles is an Age producer and a former editor of The Big Issue.
