Greens, Coalition wanted the same for JobSeeker but voted against each other

This week the Greens and the Coalition had a common goal: to amend a Labor welfare bill so that recipients could earn twice as much — $300, instead of $150 — in a fortnight without their JobSeeker payments being affected.

Both sides put up amendments that would have done so, and with their combined Senate 42 votes, they would have been able to easily beat the government’s 26 votes. Yet neither side would allow the other’s amendment to pass.

The Greens framed their proposal as part of a progressive agenda that would ideally also have included much higher JobSeeker payments. They said they were unable to support Liberal Senator Anne Ruston’s amendment because it had a cut in JobSeeker payments baked in.

The Liberal amendment, which was the subject of a story in The Australian on Monday headlined “Albanese, Dutton declare war over long-term jobless”, would have reversed a $40-a-fortnight rise in the payments announced by the government in its May budget.

“What has been Greens policy for a very long time, as well as increasing the rate of income support above the poverty line, is to allow jobseekers to earn more,” Greens Senator Janet Rice told the Senate. “It’s not a case of one or the other, which is the appalling and cruel position that the opposition is proposing.” 

The Coalition, meanwhile, said it wouldn’t support the Greens amendment because the opposition’s version was “superior”. 

Ruston told the chamber: “[The Greens proposal] does not recognise the nuance that’s already in our system to incentivise different people on different payments in different ways and recognise their particular circumstances.

“We philosophically believe that increasing the income-free area and taking away the barriers for people to actually enter the workforce … is a much more effective way of getting people back into the workforce than merely increasing payments.” 

Both sides ended up voting against the other’s amendment, and both amendments were defeated. 

When Crikey spoke to Rice ahead of the vote, she clarified that the Greens would have opposed the Coalition amendment even if the other side had agreed to split it off so that it wasn’t paired with the cut to JobSeeker payments. 

She said the Greens’ opposition to the Coalition amendment had nothing to do with denying the other side a victory. Rather it was about avoiding “reinforcing [the Liberal] agenda”. In Rice’s view, those are not the same thing. 

“It would have reinforced an agenda and a narrative that people who are living on JobSeeker shouldn’t get more money,” she said. “If it got back down to the House as a Liberal amendment, that would have been the agenda we’ll be running with. Whereas if it came down to the house as a Greens amendment, it would be saying, ‘This is a measure that would be helping people on income support to lift them out of poverty.’ ” 

The government opposed both amendments and thanks to the battlelines drawn up between the Coalition and the Greens, there was never a risk Labor would have had to deal with either of the proposals in the House of Representatives. 

Either way, the Greens had vowed not to block the government’s efforts to increase JobSeeker payments, despite believing $40 a fortnight is “woefully inadequate”. 

“We will definitely not stand in the way of these efforts, but we know that it’s not enough,” acting party leader Mehreen Faruqi said earlier in the week. 

That means the Greens would have had no leverage to fight the government over the threshold increase, even if it had passed the Senate and caused a debate in the house.

At least none of the parties allowed their opponents a victory. The question is, did anyone win, or did everyone lose?