Pressure to increase welfare payment rates is ramping up ahead of the federal budget as more than 300 advocates, politicians and notable Australians pen an open letter to the prime minister.
Current and former MPs from across the political aisle along with economists, business and union heads have called on Anthony Albanese to listen to the government’s economic inclusion advisory committee.
Last week, the inclusion committee recommended a substantial increase to the JobSeeker payment and related working age payments as a top priority.
Four government backbenchers Alicia Payne, Kate Thwaites, Louise Miller-Frost and Michelle Ananda-Rajah are among the signatories along with Liberal MP Bridget Archer, independents and Greens MPs on the cross bench.
Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood, Australia Institute executive director Richard Denniss and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry were among the prominent economists who backed the call.
Dr Henry said the inclusion committee’s findings should not be a surprise, given several reports over the past decade had recommended a welfare increase.
He said it would be cruel not to increase JobSeeker in the upcoming budget, which will be handed down in the second week of May.
“Being cruel to people doesn’t work. It’s not what is going to get them into a job,” he told ABC News on Wednesday.
“The people we’re talking about here need to have some respect shown to them during the period in which they are out of work and they need help to find a job.”
ACTU secretary Sally McManus, human rights activist Craig Foster, Indigenous academic Megan Davis and Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes a Court also signed the open letter.
The letter, written by the Australian Council of Social Service and addressed to Mr Albanese, said it was long past time to address the structural injustice of welfare payments.
“The rate of income support is so low that people are being forced to choose between paying their rent or buying enough food and medicine,” ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie said in the letter.
“Even before the cost-of-living crisis, income support payments weren’t nearly enough to cover basic expenses, but now people struggling to get by on $50 a day face increased deprivation.”
Dr Goldie said Australians with the least could not be left behind in the budget.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said fiscal pressures meant the government could not fund every good idea but was focused on cost-of-living relief.
“The budget will be fiscally responsible …ย and we will have an eye to our most vulnerable in the decisions that we announce on budget night,” he told ABC Radio.
Byย Maeve Bannisterย in Canberra
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