“Single JobSeeker [payment] just hit $400 a week. Let me know how you’d go if you were getting that little and were randomly not paid.”

This comment, from the people behind Nobody Deserves Poverty, points to the ignored cruelty at the heart of one of Australia’s most shameful open secrets.

The mutual obligations system – the system by which we set (through privatised “job providers”) mostly demeaning and useless tasks for unemployed people to meet in order to receive their welfare benefits – is documented to cause harm, with little evidence it actually does anything to meet its main objective: get people into work.

The system is so convoluted and already stacked against people that even without the issue of lawfulness, it would still be not just harmful, but useless. In terms of punishing people, it is working as intended. But governments tend to pay attention when harm can also be considered unlawful, and that’s the issue here.

When the Coalition introduced the Targeted Compliance Framework (TCF) in 2017-18, it gave private job agencies the power to punish “non-compliant” job-seeker behaviour without the checks and balances of government.

If a job agency decides that one of their “clients” hasn’t met their mutual obligations – or just screws up and doesn’t report that they have – welfare recipients literally pay the price. Their payments can be suspended, or they can be forced into menial work-for-the-dole programs, without any consideration of their suitability. Concerns were raised almost immediately.

By 2020, the alarm bells really started ringing, when “bugs” in the system were discovered to be wrongly penalising welfare recipients, or suspending payments. COVID stopped any immediate call to action. Then, in 2023, those bugs were re-discovered and 10 people were found to have died before they received their backpay/restitutions.

This is well after the issues with Robodebt had been revealed, and it became crystal clear that automated decisions that led to cancelled payments or debt notices were not only having devastating impact on those on the recipient end, but that the government had a duty of care to stop it.

Groups like the Antipoverty Centre and the Australian Unemployed Workers Union had been consistently raising the TCF as an issue, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the department started quietly pausing the cancellations. Since then, the government has continued to “pause” parts of the system, but no one seems to be able to answer the question of why it is still in place.

An estimates hearing last week heard 321,995 payment suspensions for 205,870 job seekers had been inflicted between May and July this year alone.

Economic Justice Australia estimates at least 310,000 welfare recipients may have been impacted. So why hasn’t it been turned off completely?  We don’t know. That advice to the department is being kept secret.

Which again, brings us back to the question which opened this week’s column: If $400 was all the money you could count on every week and it didn’t get paid, how do you think that would impact your life? How well do you think you could cope?

Because it isn’t only the delay in payment which causes the harm – it is all the fees that add up for missed payments. The overdraw fees, the bounced direct debits, the late fees. It’s the work that has to be done to try and reinstate that payment. It’s the panic about who you could possibly borrow $20 from.

People on welfare don’t have savings, because we don’t let them. You have to draw down on any savings before you are eligible for welfare and then you are paid below the poverty line, so every dollar is already spent before you get it.

All of this has been in the news again, because consulting firm Deloitte was tasked with carrying out an independent assurance review into the targeted compliance framework and determining whether it was consistent with the law. The report could not assure the government of that. In fact, the report concluded there were some very big issues with the TCF.

But the report is in the news because of the Deloitte AI slop it included (as revealed by the AFR’s Paul Karp), which included made up academic work. That made international news, and righty so, given the continued reliance governments have on big-budget consultants.

But lost in all of that was the reason for the report itself. And its conclusions are not the result of AI slop, but the ongoing harm Australia inflicts upon the unemployed.

Privately, Labor MPs acknowledge there is a need to scrap the entire system. It doesn’t need more reviews – the entire punitive job-seeker system is broken, and has been consistently revealed to be such, which is not because it is corrupted but because it was established that way.

Australia’s politicians have found easy political currency in punishing those judged not to be productive, and even those who may be opposed to it in principle allow it to continue because they don’t care enough to defend dismantling it.

Anyone who has spent the barest time examining it, knows it is wrong. As recently as this week, the government has been unable to explain why it remains in place.

Robodebt was a slowburn, too. It was years of work by activists and the harmed that led to what we all acknowledge now was a national shame. And when this, too, becomes unavoidable to ignore, the Albanese government cannot say it didn’t know.

This article was originally published in The New Daily.