Mutual obligation makes difficult lives doubly hard

However, the Government's statement on welfare reform released last week gives little confidence in any of these areas.

There is no funding package, no guarantee of effective employment assistance for all long-term jobless people, and no reduction in the harsh penalties for people who infringe minor rules.

Positive moves

There are, nonetheless, some positive moves announced in Minister Newman's welfare reform statement.

ACOSS welcomes the commitments to a 'transition bank'; improved access to employment assistance for mature-aged retrenched workers, some long-term unemployed people and people with disabilities; extra funds for the JET program for sole parents; and extra financial help for people engaged in literacy and numeracy training.

However there is a serious disparity between the definite new obligations to be imposed on low-income parents and unemployed people over 35, and the still very vague information about the nature and quantum of supports they will get.

Any extension of obligations to more welfare recipients is unacceptable while the present harsh penalty system remains, and while better strategies and supports to generate more jobs and open the doors to work are not in place.

There is also no justification for the Government's failure to reveal the size of the investment it is prepared to make. It was willing to commit an extra $1.6 billion to roads without knowing exactly how and where it will be spent.

ACOSS will work with the Consultative Forum and the Government to make sure welfare reform is fair and effective, and backed by substantial new investment.

Employment support needed

In particular, we will be pressing the Government to commit to an Employment Support Package for unemployed people as well as jobless sole parents and people with a disability.

It is increasingly clear that the decision to reduce the growth of employment assistance as soon as jobs growth strengthened in the mid 1990s was a short-sighted one.

The number of long-term recipients of unemployment benefits has scarcely fallen since 1995, despite large overall reductions in unemployment over the past two years. There are now 385,000 people who have been receiving unemployment benefits for more than 12 months, and the number of people on unemployment benefits for more than 5 years has actually increased in the past year and is now 10 per cent of the total on benefits.

The official evaluation of the Job Network shows that, in its first phase of operation, only 50 per cent of all long-term unemployed people on social security benefits actually received "Intensive Assistance". This is part of the legacy of the $1 billion cut from planned expenditure on employment services in 1996.