With such a majority so early on from am election, this would be the perfect time to do something politically unpopular like fix our welfare system. Too bad nothing ever happens
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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There will be no change. Punching down at welfare recipients is so ingrained in Australian politics it'll never go away. If Albo tries it'll be the perfect campaign basis for the Libs, your tax money given free, to blue haired dole bludgers that want to turn your kids trans.
It's neoliberal politics. Basically after WWII it was obvious people didn't like fascism and politicians couldn't openly embrace it. But it was too useful for protecting capitalist interests, so a bunch of neoliberal experiments were run in south america to figure out the best way to use fascism to oppress workers without creating that world-war style blowback.
And one of the techniques they landed on was to keep scapegoating the vulnerable, but to use sanitised language. So it's not "dirty n-----s, g-----s and k----s polluting our precious blood and soil", it's "immigrants taking our jobs". It's not "useless eaters withering the soul of our nation" it's "welfare recipients mustn't be allowed to freeload."
It's the same ideas dressed up to sound a bit more respectable and not trip the fascism alarm, but they work nearly as well to strip the social safety net, which lowers wages.
Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.
That's a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don't do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?
And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.
I've worked as a developer in government software and it is a fucking shitshow from top to bottom. I would not trust any piece of government built software with anything remotely important. Which is terrifying.
100%. There's so many people who want to "touch" the project so they can get some credit for it, making things take easily four times as long as it should and in the end you have an unmanageable, noncompliant mess.
The online self-management and points system is waaaaaay better than the forced meetings and obligations with private providers and Labor did streamline the claims system a lot too. So maybe there is potential for further improvement, though I don't want to get my hopes up. Like a lot of other areas, my trust in Labor to actually take some political risks to conduct serious reform is very low.
Private providers in a public system is ridiculous in my opinion. Here's an idea, hire them directly instead of paying for a profit margin. :O (this opinion extends to Medicare providers, also)
What I recall being ridiculous was the wait on Centrelink applications. (It's been a number of years since being off Centrelink so don't haven't paid attention recently)
Waiting 3 months was an option for me, but Christ, I can't imagine how shit that must be who need immediate stability.
I also very much hope Labor update payment rates. Where are you gonna find a place anywhere near services and public transport to rent cheaply enough in order to actually get by?
If only we heavily invested in public housing, I'd wager we'd either end up saving a bunch of money not going to private landlords, or otherwise massively increase the amount in the pockets of people on Centrelink, because it wouldn't be going to landlords...
Alas.
What I recall being ridiculous was the wait on Centrelink applications. (It’s been a number of years since being off Centrelink so don’t haven’t paid attention recently)
Waiting 3 months was an option for me, but Christ, I can’t imagine how shit that must be who need immediate stability.
It is much faster now. The wait times are down, but the actual claim process has also been streamlined. They've been instructed to wave more stuff through to keep the system moving and perform less checks on information that is likely to be correct anyway. For example, where you might have needed to provide bank statements previously to prove your updated account figures were accurate, now they just take your word that the information you've provided is correct.
Not the first time they've done that, lives were lost, and business as usual. The system is designed to penalize those who they claim to help, all while they vilify them as bludgers.