A Small Victory

For some years now I've been agitating for a small but useful change to the way Centrelink relates to Australian job-seekers who draw on a combination of both welfare and casual work. My efforts included a letter to the editor published in the Australian Financial Review. I also made a submission to the Review Of The Social Security Commission Bill 2018 (even if it was a bit tangential). This had been suggested to me by someone in the Unemployed Workers Union. I had been in contact with them as well as the Australian Council Of Social Services (ACOSS). And naturally I had communicated with the then minister for social security at the federal level. Most recently I contacted that office once more because I had become aware of the following statement on the Centrelink website:

From December 2020 "the way you report employment income will change. You will need to report the... income you have been paid instead of what you earned."

What I want to be sure of is that this change involves the timing of reporting casual income, with it happening only once the job-seeker had received pay. It seemed to mean that but one can never be sure with bureaucratic communication. The website further declared that this will make it easier to report employment income but, more importantly in my opinion, it also makes it easier to budget, as described in my letter to the editor. I sent an email to Senator Anne Ruston (Minister For Families And Social Services) to seek clarification and offer provisional compliments to the government. I'm reasonably sure from the response I got that we have a small victory here:

The change "simplifies the reporting for people receiving income support, as they are able to report the... amount that appears on their payslip. It also means income will affect income support payments after it has been paid."

So who can be thanked for this and does that include me? I have faced this question before and my answer back then was that the results matter rather than whether I successfully contributed to that result. Maybe my assorted communciations made key operators aware of this non-partisan problem - few others seemed to be discussing it. On the other hand maybe some civil servant noticed it themselves and decided to fix it. The letter from Senator Ruston mentions something called Single Touch Payroll (STP) data so it could be that technological change has facilitated this reform. I also have a hunch that 2020 has made government departments more accustomed to reform and this was one thing they did to improve the lot of job-seekers (whether in the shorter or longer term).

The phenonomenon of rarely if ever knowing who to thank in politics can be observed all the time. I have often noticed that some change for the better is claimed as a win by some independents and a minor party and some pressure groups. They all could have helped chip away at inertia but rarely do we see them acknowledge that they were part of something bigger (or indeed recognize that the very government that overcame its own recalcitrance played a part too).

And in these fractious times we even see groups deny the role of others working towards the same result. Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the US Presidential election and this involved both the activation of new voters and the swinging of existing ones. His campaigners included moderate Republicans vigorously opposed to Donald Trump but some more radical Democrat campaigners (radical by US standards) deny that those had any part to play. This is partly self-serving - those who helped the winner can help set his new agenda - however it also involves succumbing to simplistic models of how politics works. But I digress.

I may never be sure I had an impact on this Centrelink procedural change. But what if I did? Even that possibility tells me that I can only have had an impact because I did something constructive. This is all the motive I need to continue to find such small projects to work on as they occur to me. For now I am chuffed.