Workforce Australia Online, Enhanced Services, and the Points Based Activation System
With the digital failures of Robodebt and MyHealthRecord barely behind us, newly appointed Minister for the NDIS and Government Services, The Honorable Bill Shorten has this week announced an inquiry into MyGov, the online portal to Centrelink, Medicare and the ATO.
Commenting on the state of Australia’s digital governance, Shorten mused that past governments have “created digital workhouses, basically. You know, workhouses were a 19th century place where the kind-hearted burghers of Victorian England and Australia said, ‘Well, if we’ve got to pay you for three meals a day, you can go and work in a workhouse.’ And I think that we’ve used, in some cases, digital technology to create two classes of Australians.”
Shorten however failed to mention the looming Points Based Activation System (PBAS) slated for roll out by Centrelink on the 4th of July 2022 — perhaps because it amounts to a form of gamified dystopian mutual obligations. Most Australians remain unaware of the digital hell about to descend on them, because governments past and present have kept steadfastly quiet about it all.
The PBAS will require Centrelink recipients to scavenge for 100 points of ‘activities’ every month, including arrangements set by Job Providers such as job searches, training, education, Work For The Dole or even stints with the Australian Army Reserves. Each welfare recipient will be assigned their own personal monthly number of points to achieve each month or risk losing their payment, unless otherwise agreed by Services Australia’s Digital Services Contact Centre.
The Department expects Job Providers to set the exact number of points an individual is supposed to achieve each month, as well as “identify and promote a diverse range of tasks and activities tailored to the job seeker and local labour market”.
The model splits recipients into two streams: Workforce Australia Online and Enhanced Services. The first stream will encompass most Australians in receipt of a payment while unemployed. As the name suggests, Workforce Australia Online is… online.
Each month, participants will be required to engage in massive amounts of digital bureaucracy to fulfil system demands. This is a problematic starting point given that around 28% of the population is excluded from steady internet access, many of whom are unemployed (data: Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2021.)
Then there’s the second stream known as ‘Enhanced Services’, which will be run through Specialist Provider Services and are explicitly targeted at people who are Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD), refugees and ex-offenders. People who lack digital literacy skills will be removed from the Workforce Australia Online stream and also placed into ‘Enhanced Services.’ Two streams; one for some — and another for the rest. Enhanced Services immediately risks becoming a hyper-surveillance stream.
People in remote areas with fewer opportunities to apply for work in their region will likely have higher PBAS obligations for activities unrelated to job seeking. This places greater pressure on those living in remote communities — often Indigenous — to complete multiple monthly activities, move away from community and/or family for job opportunities, or lose access to payments. Blanket applications of governance affects different people differently and can amount to discrimination for some segments of the population. Governance policies with the potential to split families must be viewed as a risk, given colonial Australia’s history of genocidal welfare policies.
Massive bureaucracy means massive surveillance. How else can the state be certain people are complying with government mandated activities? The PBAS ensures a massive number of people will be referred for “optical surveillance”, creating abundant profits for surveillance contractors.
The PBAS model is adversarial. It’s a digital stick that will force people to scramble to meet the demands of their Job Provider overseers. The PBAS will undoubtably create a dichotomy of fear and need, in direct opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which promotes “freedom from fear and want” as the highest aspiration of the common people.
The Department of Education, Skills and Employment could have engineered an incentive-led system that rewards voluntary engagement in extra activities by offering extra payments as carrot. Instead, they decided to put in motion a Squid Gamesque competition for survival.
The Department argues that the PBAS is a “good change in the way providers engage with job seekers by rewarding participation and activation rather than focusing on compliance.” But social security is not a reward. It’s not meant to be conditional on doing government-mandated activities. It is not meant to be earned. It is a civic and human right, explicit in both domestic and international law.
Article 9 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), ratified by Australia in 1975, recognizes “the right of everyone to social security, including social insurance.” Article 4 of ICESCR provides that countries may subject economic social and cultural rights only to such limitations “as are determined by law only in so far as this may be compatible with the nature of these rights and solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society”.
Neither the Australian Social Security Act 1991 nor the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 suggest social security payments be “earned.” The Acts as they are written are not intended to force recipients into a never-ending nightmare of hustling for points on a government’s digital hamster wheel.
Social security support is an entitlement by virtue of the nature of a person’s condition: poor and unemployed or unable to work. The legality of PBAS must be questioned, given it is merely a bureaucratic demand and not a legislative requirement.
When PBAS comes into force, Job Providers will be able to impose any employment demand the government deems necessary, undermining the right for unemployed people to choose how they live their lives. Want to study? Too bad, a minister’s mate needs his strawberries picked. Want to write the next award-winning novel or play? Nope, the government wants you to re-train as a chef for the hospo lobby. Want to work as a medical scientist using the qualifications you just spent four years and went into thousands of dollars of student debt to achieve? Soz mate, these chickens need plucking. Or maybe you just want to slide off the grid and run a llama farm? Government says no.
PBAS must be resisted. Unemployed people should not have to live in terror of authoritarian demands that threaten homelessness and starvation for non-compliance.
While the PBAS concept may have been a dystopian brain-fart of the past Coalition government, it is now the ALP’s hot potato to gingerly toss from hand to hand. As we learned from Robodebt, people living in poverty do not have the luxury of hoping for good intentions from governments.
So how do we fight back?
- Join. The easiest thing everyone can do right now is join the Australian Unemployed Workers Union, who advocate for and with people living in poverty. Even if you’re employed, you can donate as an ally. Join online now at https://auwu.org.au
- Be heard. Tell everyone about how PBAS will affect you and your loved ones. You can get your message out there right now. Write to your local MP. You can find their details here: https://aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Guidelines_for_Contacting_Senators_and_Members. Write to newspapers — yes, letters to editors are still a thing! Put it on your socials, make a TikTok, add it to your blog. Departments pay good dollar to monitor this stuff. Give them something to worry about.
- Focus. The ALP can choose to shut down PBAS right now. Keep the focus centred on what the new government can do. Talk to your friends and neighbours and make sure everyone knows that digital governance doesn’t have to be a punishment. A better world is possible.
