Australian Social Security System Research Articles

Automating activation in Australia: a critical policy discourse analysis of the new employment services model

ABSTRACT This article critically analyses the policy discourse that accompanied the introduction of the ‘New Employment Services Model’ (NESM) into the Australian social security system. Critical policy discourse analysis of documents presenting reforms to employment services provision shows that the NESM embeds a logic of activation that construes job seekers both as passive units requiring external motivation (through ‘employment support’ and ‘mutual obligation’), and as active agents responsible for their own situation. This contradictory logic results in inconsistencies between the espoused aims of the reforms and the experience of those subject to the policy mechanisms. Analysis of departmental outcomes data illustrates the inconsistent operational consequences of the conflation of ‘targeted compliance’ and ‘support.’ Due to the technological automation of activation processes, the real discursive innovation of the NESM is one of ‘digital depoliticization,’ whereby the moralizing assumptions that inform punitive activation are embedded and therefore concealed in the policy technology. The operational effect is to subordinate the achievement of employment to compliance with mutual obligation requirements as a structured aim of employment services provision.

Using Machine Learning to Create an Early Warning System for Welfare Recipients*

AbstractUsing high‐quality nationwide social security data combined with machine learning tools, we develop predictive models of income support receipt intensities for any payment enrolee in the Australian social security system between 2014 and 2018. We show that machine learning algorithms can significantly improve predictive accuracy compared to simpler heuristic models or early warning systems currently in use. Specifically, the former predicts the proportion of time individuals are on income support in the subsequent 4 years with greater accuracy, by a magnitude of at least 22% (14 percentage points increase in the R‐squared), compared to the latter. This gain can be achieved at no extra cost to practitioners since the algorithms use administrative data currently available to caseworkers. Consequently, our machine learning algorithms can improve the detection of long‐term income support recipients, which can potentially enable governments and institutions to offer timely support to these at‐risk individuals.

Using Machine Learning to Create an Early Warning System for Welfare Recipients

Using high-quality nation-wide social security data combined with machine learning tools, we develop predictive models of income support receipt intensities for any payment enrolee in the Australian social security system between 2014 and 2018. We show that off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms can significantly improve predictive accuracy compared to simpler heuristic models or early warning systems currently in use. Specifically, the former predicts the proportion of time individuals are on income support in the subsequent four years with greater accuracy, by a magnitude of at least 22% (14 percentage points increase in the R2), compared to the latter. This gain can be achieved at no extra cost to practitioners since the algorithms use administrative data currently available to caseworkers. Consequently, our machine learning algorithms can improve the detection of long-term income support recipients, which can potentially provide governments with large savings in accrued welfare costs.

Social Assistance Payments and Food Insecurity inAustralia: Evidence from the HouseholdExpenditure Survey.

It is widely understood that households with low economic resources and poor labour market attachment are at considerable risk of food insecurity in Australia. However, little is known about variations in food insecurity by receipt of specific classes of social assistance payments that are made through the social security system. Using newly released data from the 2016 Household Expenditure Survey, this paper reports on variations in food insecurity prevalence across a range of payment types. We further investigated measures of financial wellbeing reported by food-insecure households in receipt of social assistance payments. Results showed that individuals in receipt of Newstart allowance (11%), Austudy/Abstudy (14%), the Disability Support Pension (12%), the Carer Payment (11%) and the Parenting Payment (9%) were at significantly higher risk of food insecurity compared to those in receipt of the Age Pension (<1%) or no payment at all (1.3%). Results further indicated that food-insecure households in receipt of social assistance payments endured significant financial stress, with a large proportion co-currently experiencing “fuel” or “energy” poverty. Our results support calls by a range of Australian non-government organisations, politicians, and academics for a comprehensive review of the Australian social security system.

Intergenerational Disadvantage: Learning about Equal Opportunity from Social Assistance Receipt

We use variation in the extent of generational persistence across social assistance payments to shed light on the factors leading to intergenerational disadvantage. Our administrative data come from the Australian social security system and provide us with detailed social assistance trajectories – across the entire social safety net – for a birth cohort of young people and their families over an 18-year period. We find that young people are 1.8 times more likely to need social assistance if their parents have a history of receiving social assistance themselves. These young people also receive more intensive support; an additional $12,000 over an 8-year period. The intergenerational correlation is particularly strong in the case of disability payments, payments for those with caring responsibilities, and parenting payments for single parents. Disadvantage stemming from parents’ poor labor market outcomes seems to be easier for young people to overcome. This suggests that parental disadvantage may be more harmful to children’s later life outcomes if it is more strongly driven by circumstances rather than personal choice.

Intergenerational Disadvantage: Learning About Equal Opportunity from Social Assistance Receipt

We use variation in the extent of generational persistence across social assistance payments to shed light on the factors leading to intergenerational disadvantage. Our administrative data come from the Australian social security system and provide us with detailed social assistance trajectories – across the entire social safety net – for a birth cohort of young people and their families over an 18-year period. We find that young people are 1.8 times more likely to need social assistance if their parents have a history of receiving social assistance themselves. These young people also receive more intensive support; an additional $12,000 over an 8-year period. The intergenerational correlation is particularly strong in the case of disability payments, payments for those with caring responsibilities, and parenting payments for single parents. Disadvantage stemming from parents’ poor labor market outcomes seems to be easier for young people to overcome. This suggests that parental disadvantage may be more harmful to children’s later life outcomes if it is more strongly driven by circumstances rather than personal choice.

The Economic Consequences of Divorce in Australia

Divorce has become a key life-course risk that can have significant economic impacts. This article uses a new Australian data source that follows families over a 10-year period to estimate the impact of divorce on income and assets. There have been few longitudinal studies of the impact of divorce on assets and relatively few such studies of its impact on income. The article finds that divorce has a substantial negative impact upon the household income of women in the short term, but by 6 years after divorce income had largely recovered to what it would have been had they remained married. In contrast, men who divorce experience a substantially faster rate of increase in income post-divorce than had they remain married. The analysis of asset data reveals that while the gap between the value of assets of the divorced and non-divorced grows post-divorce, it appears that the growing disparity in assets largely reflects pre-divorce differences in assets. The results in this article clearly demonstrate the critical importance of using longitudinal data to estimate the economic and labour market consequences of divorce. While the economic effects of divorce on Australian women appear to be, on average, relatively short-run, the Australian social security system plays a crucial role in protecting the incomes of women post-divorce, particularly those with children.

Access to justice: a new approach using human rights standards

This article details a trial of a new approach to measuring access to justice that utilises human rights instruments as the reference point. It involves an examination of people's actual experience of the justice system using human rights standards as the benchmark. The research project selected the right to income security. The project trialled a range of methods gathering data about how people have been treated in the Australian social security system and how they would expect to be treated if there was a human right to social security in Australia. This data is assessed against the set of standards developed to measure the enjoyment of the right to social security. The trial suggests that without knowledge about human rights and legal rights, without the confidence to exercise those rights and without the capacity or capability to seek or find help it is unlikely that people will realise their rights and accordingly access to justice is placed in question. The research methodology has the potential to be a useful model to conduct further access to justice research.

New Paradigms of Disability in Social Security Law and Policy in Australia: Implications for Exclusion or Participation

This paper explores transformations in the form, purpose and administration of income support law and policies for people with disabilities in the Australian social security system. It identifies a paradigm change which has reinforced a medicalized model of the concept and measurement of disability within social security law, effectively removing from policy discourse and practice recognition of the social and economic factors that influence the capacity for labor force participation. We examine the ways in which the current welfare reform agenda of the Federal Government has developed a disability discourse which constructs the individual as the 'problem' within the welfare system. Changes to eligibility criteria and assessment procedures for disability income support are increasingly based on conceptions of an impaired body, while, paradoxically, welfare reform is increasingly focused on the necessity to meet 'mutual obligation' through market participation (the key-words of the 'new welfare'). We explore the extent to which these policy transformations in Australia are likely to facilitate or impede market participation for people of working age with a disability. Wherever appropriate, comparisons are made with disability income support and employment programs in the USA.

Compensation for Loss of an Economic Nature : An Australian Perspective

This paper first describes briefly the scope of the no-fault motor accident schemes which operate in Australia. It then sets out and evaluates the benefits payable under each for losses of an economic nature. These are benefits for hospital, medical, nursing, rehabilitation and like needs created by injuries in a motor accident ; for informal nursing services and assistance in the home, the need for which is similarly created ; for loss of earning capacity resulting from such accidents ; and for death so resulting. It does not deal with benefits for loss of a non-economic nature, such as pain and suffering (for which, as such, compensation is not generally payable under the schemes) and impairment. It nevertheless concludes that most benefits for loss of an economic nature should be integrated with the Australian social security system and that the true role of a no-fault scheme is to compensate for permanent impairment, since there is no general disability benefit payable under the social security system.

Sole parent families in Australia

This paper provides a descriptive account of sole parent families in Australia. Its aim is essentially to provide data on the numbers and circumstances of sole parent families, describe how they are treated within the Australian social security system, explain some recent income support reforms for sole parents, and consider how sole parents fare in the labour market. First, the circumstances of sole parent families are explored, specifically those relating to their number and type, income levels and composition and poverty status. The following section briefly describes income support arrangements for sole parent families in Australia and how these have been reformed in recent years in order to meet the challenges posed by the growth in numbers and expenditures. There follows an outline of the employment and labour force status of sole parents and how these have been changing as the labour market has evolved over the last two decades. The main conclusions of the paper are briefly summarized in the final section.

HOW RELIABLE ARE ESTIMATES OF POVERTY IN AUSTRALIA? SOME SENSITIVITY TESTS FOR THE PERIOD 1981–82 to 1985–86*

The alleviation of poverty is one of the most important objectives of the Australian social security system. Estimates of poverty across different groups and over time are thus in principle a significant indicator of the effectivenss of social security programs. This paper investigates the reliability of Australian Poverty estimates for 1981-82 and 1985-86 by assessing their sensitivity to changes in the assumptions used to construct a poverty line. The exercise utilizes data from the 1981-82 Income and Housing Survey and the 1986 Income Distribution Survey. The results indicate that many broad conclusions about poverty incidence and trends are robust over the period studied. However, poverty estimates exhibit considerable sensitivity for those groups heavily reliant on the social security system for their income. Copyright 1990 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University of South Australia

Poverty Traps in the Australian Social Security System

The term "poverty traps" refers lo circumstances where the income tests in the Australian social security system trap social security recipients into dependence on Government income support. This paper describes the ways in which the income test interacts with the income tax rate scalc and Medicare levy to produce high effective marginal tax rates, and provides evidence on the number of persons actually and potentially in the poverty trap. The paper also discusses factors other than income tests that may affect the decisions of social security recipients to engage in part-time work, and canvasses a range of policy options that may alleviate poverty traps for those of working age.

THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY'S TREATMENT OF ABORIGINAL POLYGYNY AND TRIBAL MARRIAGE: A SAGA OF ADMINISTRATIVE DEBATE

Abstract: Since the inclusion of Aborigines in the Australian social security system, the treatment of Aboriginal polygyny and tribal marriage by the Department of Social Security (DSS) has been a recurring minor issue of departmental, and at times extra‐departmental, debate. This article traces the history of that debate from the early 1960s to the present day. Although the article is primarily historical, there is also some attempt made to analyse both the nature of the administrative processes involved and the types of administrative argument deployed in the debate.

Income Tests in the Australian Social Security System

Income Tests in the Australian Social Security System