Paperback edition ISBN 978-0-6489571-1-9
Epub ISBN 978-0-6489571-0-2
Mobipocket ISBN 978-0-6489571-2-6
Printed by Griffin Press, Adelaide
An AIR publication
Adelaide Independent Reporter 2021
The author, Brian Donaghy, is a journalist who has covered finance, industrial relations, the European Union and education, in the UK, Ireland, Europe and Australia. He is now a freelance journalist based in Adelaide.
Preface
T HIS is a revised and updated edition of the book first published in 2014 under the title of Cents and Sensibility: A fair go for all. It outlines the benefits of a Universal Basic Income and how it could be financed in Australia. This edition also provides a brief summary of some of the more interesting Universal Basic Income developments overseas.
Cents was written for the general reader. It deliberately avoided footnotes, endnotes or lists of sources at the end of every chapter. The most common criticism, however, was that it did not have enough figures, footnotes or references for readers to follow up.
This edition therefore includes references as endnotes, as well as appendices with figures for what it would cost and how it could be financed.
T HE ECONOMIC disruption caused by Covid-19, and the sudden and dramatic increase in social welfare that has resulted, has highlighted the need, and created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to reform our dysfunctional welfare system.
In response to the crisis, the Australian Federal Government, to its credit, initially shelved ideology and acted quickly and decisively to stop the spread of the virus and to minimise the economic impact of the shut down.
The governments previous determination to achieve a budget surplus was tossed out the window. The dole, formerly known as Newstart, was renamed Jobseeker and doubled overnight. The government pledged up to $130 billion for firms to keep their employees on their books during the lockdown.
It was a dramatic acknowledgement that the existing system was woefully inadequate.
But the assistance was still targeted because, in the words of the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, We have to draw the line somewhere.
The virus has highlighted the weaknesses of targeted assistance like never before.
More than a million people casuals, seasonal workers, legitimate migrants, (some of whom have been living and working in Australia for years) were excluded. Overseas students, who had paid tens of thousands of dollars up front in university fees, were left stranded with no means of support. The federal government just told them to go home, but there were no flights.
Foodbank Australia chief executive Brianna Casey told The Guardian newspaper in early May 2020 that demand for emergency food has risen about 50 per cent since the virus emergency began. Foodbank distributes food to 2,400 charities.
Theres an unprecedented spike in demand for food relief, Casey said, with much of that new demand coming from temporary migrant workers and international students.
The Jobkeeper scheme undoubtedly saved many small businesses, but it was something of a bureaucratic nightmare. Certain sectors, such as the major universities and local councils, were excluded. Applications for the $130 billion fund fell short by a whopping $60 billion, so the scheme supported only around 3.5 million employees, not the 6.5 million the government expected.
Only about half the firms that were expected to benefit from Jobkeeper were able to access the scheme, not just because the application form was badly designed, but allegedly because databases in different government departments did not communicate with each other.
Targeting is difficult, and inevitably involves arbitrary rules and omissions which treat some people unfairly.
Spain, meanwhile, has become the first country in the world to take a major step towards a Universal Basic Income. The scheme was introduced early in direct response to the virus, and began on June 1, 2020.
Even before the Covid-19 crisis, in Europe, north and south America, Canada, Africa and even in Australia, political parties have been flirting seriously with the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Its a serious discussion across the internet. Nations and even individual cities are commissioning research and conducting trials of different versions of Basic Income.
There has been growing dissatisfaction for a long time with the shortcomings of traditional social welfare systems but the unemployed and disadvantaged have little or no political voice.
Suddenly millions of people in Australia who had never been in a Centrelink queue are directly affected.
That shifts the politics. The times they are a-changing.
O VER THE YEARS, Australias taxation and welfare systems have become an absolute shambles.
They dont have to be.
There is an alternative which has been sitting on the shelf in various reports around the world for years.
It is a solution which will be strongly opposed by most in the Coalition, the Australian Labor Party and in the Canberra bureaucracy.
But anything with the sort of international support that the Basic Income idea has generated deserves serious consideration from the rest of us.
Look at our social security system.
Benefits, subsidies and allowances are administered by the Department of Social Services, the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, the Department of Jobs and Small Business and the Department of Education. The Federal Governments compact summary of the various benefits and allowances applicable in the year up to September 2019 ran to forty-four A4 pages!
And that does not include various tax reliefs and allowances administered by the Australian Tax Office or the scores of subsidies provided by state governments.
Some of these benefits are overlapping, some are mutually exclusive, all with different amounts, cut-off points, means tests and eligibility rules. And every year the rules change, payment rates change, new allowances are invented or renamed and old ones are phased out or scrapped.
Then there are the subsidies. For rent, for telephone, for travel, for education, for medicines, for different age groups, different regions, different income groups the list goes on and on.
This targeting of benefits amounts to micro-managing individuals on a mind-boggling scale.
