Transcriber: Vivien Wang Reviewer: Michele Gianella
COVID 19 has been awful.
People have lost their lives,
people been sick, been isolated,
lost their jobs and economic security.
This is on the back of some of the worst bushfires in living memory.
And now with COVID, we've got face masks,
we've got social distancing, closed borders and lockdowns
and thinking of everyone in lockdown right now.
COVID has been a nightmare.
But not for everyone.
Here’re some quotes on the screen
from people in Australia talking about during COVID.
"Less stress and anxiety";
"It made everything better";
"I felt human again".
Not really your average COVID experience.
Who are these people, you might be wondering?
Are they the millionaires and billionaires
that are able to continue to fly around the place
even to outer space,
while the rest of us are locked down?
Don't blame me for thinking that
because in Australia, the wealth of billionaires
has increased by 50 percent in the last 12 months.
But no, it’s not them.
I’m going to tell you a different story
about something that happened in lockdown number one last year.
Imagine for a moment,
you’re a single parent with two kids,
and it’s hard to hold down any decent job
because it often doesn’t fit
around your kid’s needs or the school pickups,
when they get sick:
it's really, really hard.
And Social Security payments put you under the poverty line
because it hasn't been increased in real terms since 1994.
That is the year when the Hyundai Excel X3 model was released,
and Christopher Skase was arrested.
Ages ago.
And so here you are, struggling along, struggling making ends meet,
and COVID hits.
And all of a sudden,
your mutual obligations, you know,
those work for the dole requirements
and the mandatory job applications every month
they get suspended, and you get an extra $550 a fortnight.
Your life changes.
For example, I bought comfortable shoes.
And no longer had to wear thongs the whole winter.
I didn't have to ration my baby's milk.
[We could eat fruit and vegetables daily]
[I didn't have to ration milk
for my child's bottles, or water them down]
The government did something unthinkable, when lockdown number one hit.
It implemented a basic income.
You heard me right, a basic income.
It was a regular payment, enough to meet basic needs
with no mutual obligations.
This is the government
that forever has been going on for about debt and deficit.
But basically overnight it found cash.
A lot of it.
And it implemented a massive wage subsidy program,
so a lot of people got to keep their jobs.
Free childcare and a basic income.
For people on Social Security, not for everybody.
Some people missed out: but for a lot of people.
And people's lives changed.
They went from struggling on $40 a day
to being able to make ends meet.
Sure, it wasn’t a universal basic income,
but it was a regular payment with no mutual obligations.
Basic income is quite a hot topic:
everybody likes to talk about it.
But we never, or very rarely, especially in Australia,
get to see it in practice.
And that's why, when these measures came in,
colleagues and I conducted a research project,
when were asking people about the impacts of the basic income,
and I'm showing with you, on the quotes on the screen,
what people said, in their own words.
It made a massive difference in people's lives.
"I didn't live every day
worrying how I was going to support my children
and my own health,
or worry what I'd need to sell next to survive"
And it's not just our research that was finding this,
either the researchers here at the ANU
found that people on payments poverty levels
went from 67 percent to seven percent.
Wow, what a drop.
The people working in this space, tirelessly working in this space
would probably just dream of such a drop,
which just happened with a change of policy.
You might be thinking, yeah, but surely there's a downside.
Surely, it’s just not that straightforward.
But maybe old thinking needs updating.
For example, we’ve been told for a long time
about all these stereotypes on people who find themselves unemployed.
All these stereotypes that get weaponized against people.
Things about, you know, being lazy
and that you need to use mutual obligations
to compel people into work,
or that you can’t just give people cash because, well, they’ll waste it.
But our research showed something different.
That people who got the basic income were able to afford basic needs.
For example, I was able to afford -
new glasses and a mass tutor, or a tutor for my son.
["He has learning difficulties, and this difference has been substantial"]
And, people use this payment for basic needs.
Things like medicine, food, paying rent.
And it wasn’t just us, either.
The statistic,
the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
were also tracking what people were using money for;
and also found that they were using it
on basic needs - groceries, rent, medicine.
And how about the story
of people worried about people being lazy
and they need to be compelled into work,
that Social Security payments need to be low, and hostile enough,
to push people into work.
This was a problem
that the Prime Minister, last year, was worried about.
And in our interview, a radio interview last year,
he was talking about this basic income
and saying and worried that it'd become an impediment to work.
But he was wrong.
People in our research
talked about how this payment, this basic income,
really helped them.
Being able to look for work and to get ready for it.
More time to live properly and actually look for work.
And also this:
instead of doing busy ticking off boxes,
I could really focus on study and where I want it to go.
And these people not necessarily new to Social Security, either.
A lot of these people had been receiving payments
for five years, and even over in some cases.
People who are accused of being welfare dependent.
But you know, our research, but also others’ research
was also pointing out
that these payments were not an impediment
for people finding work.
Leading economists were showing this.
More recent research has just come out
showing that Australian mutual obligation programs
actually make it longer for people to find employment.
And that's because unemployment is structural,
it's not a choice.
There's just simply not enough jobs,
so it doesn’t matter how many forms you fill in
and how many trainings you attend;
if there's not enough jobs, there's not enough jobs.
Got to remember that when COVID hit
that for every one job advertised, 13 people were looking,
and it’s not just about COVID.
Before that, for every job advertised, there were about eight people looking.
And then on top of that, not all of us can work.
That some of us may have illness or disability,
that makes it really hard or impossible.
And then on top of that, there's even more of us
that do all sorts of work, but it's unpaid.
The hugely important work, the unpaid care work that people do,
caring for elderly, for our kids, for community,
and that’s what people in our research said too,
that the payment helped them do this work also.
For example, I was able to help other people out.
Work for the collective good, do something for the collective good,
being able to give a little to people in need,
rather than feeling helpless.
And also, I was..
it helped people being able to do their childcare
and looking after kids that they were wholly responsible for raising.
And that’s not a small thing, because unpaid care work
is hugely valuable to society and the economy.
it’s been valued at about the equivalent of 50 percent of the Australian GDP.
So much for lazy people.
Other people say about basic income
and that we can't afford it, it's too expensive.
But it's worth noting how quickly the government found money for this
and how the economy did not fall apart.
Actually, it was seen as an important part of a stimulus to keep us all going
and basic income, you know, different models cost different amounts.
But we've got to remember
about how expensive, and inefficient, the current system is.
And also the cost of being cheap.
The many years being wasted, dreams being wasted
of people on Social Security:
but not just the people themselves, but also their kids.
We also asked people
what was the negative about the basic income
and people overwhelmingly said, Nothing!
Nothing followed by that it would end.
And that's what happened.
That the government reduced it dramatically
and then finished it altogether earlier this year.
And all of these people
who had all of these things happen for them,
that was good,
were put back on payments
that put many of them back under the poverty line.
Did it have to be like this?
Probably not.
A recent YouGov survey
asked Australians if they would support a universal basic income,
or a guaranteed livable wage,
and 58 percent of us said yes.
Only 19 percent opposed it.
Perhaps that could mean
that we could live in a society
where you could get support and not be made feel bad about.
Imagine when we live in a society
where government doesn't use the lives of the disadvantaged
as a political plaything,
and that a basic income could just be
that simple basic payment, regular payment
based on need or a rightful share.
Imagine that.
Because if COVID’s taught us anything,
it is that at any point, any one of us could need a little bit of help.
Little bit of support.
We’ve got to do better.
So where to from here?
Well, the government introduced a basic income.
We let them take it away.
Let's get it back.
Thank you.
(Applause)