Jeremy Poxon
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jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Jeremy Poxon
@jeremypoxon.bsky.social
650 followers 290 following 90 posts
i've been bullied to go on here by @maximumwelfare to post about the mutual obligations scandal

contact me if you have MOs issues or questions: [email protected]
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jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Sadly, they cut a deal with the Libs to indeed rush this through
"Labor and Liberals have just voted to give police the powers to recommend cancelling Centrelink payments. The Crossbench and the Greens attempted to have the power removed, but failed because Liberals backed Labor."
November 26, 2025 at 1:31 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
When pushed on a potential circumstance like this, Minister Gallagher said: don't worry, Centrelink engages with women like this and can protect them bsky.app/profile/jere...
jeremypoxon.bsky.social Jeremy Poxon @jeremypoxon.bsky.social · 5d
Many legal & welfare groups fear this amendment will punish victims of domestic violence, particularly First Nations women

Gallagher says Centrelink has "a history of engagement" w/ these victims & will provide info to prevent them being harmed by these new powers

My goodness
November 24, 2025 at 9:34 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Many legal & welfare groups fear this amendment will punish victims of domestic violence, particularly First Nations women

Gallagher says Centrelink has "a history of engagement" w/ these victims & will provide info to prevent them being harmed by these new powers

My goodness
November 24, 2025 at 3:07 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Minister Gallagher refuses to answer basic questions from @davidpocock.bsky.social about whether they got legal advice that giving cops these powers to cancel welfare payments is constitutional

"This is extraordinary that the government won't even confirm"
November 24, 2025 at 2:19 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Absolutely rocks there are all these proposals like: hey Minister, here's a way to do employment services that doesn't break the law & basic human rights principles. And she cannot be arsed responding
www.sbs.com.au/news/article...
Anglicare Australia is also calling for employment services to be overhauled so people are given appropriate support to find suitable and sustainable work. "It is about talking to the person, finding out what their skills and strengths are and helping them match those to something that's available in their area, if there is something," Chambers said. The rate of income support payments like JobSeeker also needs to be lifted above the poverty line, she said, so people can afford to look after their basic needs while they look for work or undergo training. The maximum JobSeeker payment a single person without children can receive is $793.60 per fortnight, which equates to $20,633.60 a year. "We cannot keep pretending that JobSeeker is an interim payment for a couple of weeks just to get people over a bad patch," Chambers said. SBS News has contacted the federal employment minister for comment.
November 20, 2025 at 1:31 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
unfortunately down in the republic of Danistan where reading groups are outlawed
November 17, 2025 at 11:27 PM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Worth noting that First Nations people have launched a class action against the CDP

In this report the department bemoans the administrative burden of punishing First Nations' people via the CDP, & their predictive analysis shows they'll keep disproportionately punishing them via all their programs
"Under this program, eligible job seekers are required to undertake Work for the Dole activities, generally five days a week for 11 months of the year. Where a CDP participant fails to attend their activity without a good reason (as recorded through a Did Not Attend Valid result), the provider is not paid the relevant service fee for that time unless they report the non-compliance to DHS and re-engage the job seeker within 14 days. This means that as a result of this financial incentive, providers are more likely to use the compliance framework as a re-engagement tool rather than discretion. Some commentators have raised concerns about the increasing number of financial penalties imposed on remote employment services job seekers, including Indigenous job seekers in particular. However data indicates that it is participation in CDP, not the Indigeneity of the job seeker, which is driving increased penalties in remote employment services. Even with the small number of CDP participants, the rate of failure investigation required is putting considerable pressure on DHS resources. On a rough estimate, if the Participation Report submission rate for jobactive participants was the same as for CDP, DHS would have been required to process over 7.2 million participation reports in 20" Analysis also looked at job seeker characteristics in relation to future penalty frequencies. In line with other Departmental analysis (Chapter 5 Data Analysis), the age of the job seeker plays a role in their expected penalty frequency. In general, non-compliance with requirements decreases as the job seeker’s age increases. In addition to any personal characteristics or motivations, a job seeker’s age can affect the level and frequency of their required participation. Other notable findings from the predictive analysis included: • Indigenous job seekers have a penalty frequency 60 per cent higher than non-indigenous job seekers • Job seekers who have been in receipt of services for more than one year have double the penalty frequency than those who were referred to services in the last month • Stream 1 job seekers have a penalty frequency 40 per cent lower than other streams, and • Job seekers on a full rate of income support are at least 40 per cent more compliant than those on a partial rate Taylor Fry also tested the effectiveness of financial penalties on a job seeker’s future compliance, again using 2013-14 financial year compliance data. In general, the analysis found that job seekers who have incurred financial penalties in the past have a higher frequency of financial penalties in the future compared to those who have not incurred financial penalties. This essentially means that those job seekers who have been non-compliant in the past are more likely to not meet their requirements again in the future. 35 Specifically looking at eight week non-payment periods which were either waived or served, the analysis suggested that when the penalty was served (ie. the job seeker would not receive payment
November 17, 2025 at 9:07 PM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
You can read the full report I pulled out under FOI here - it starts at page 36. The intent of the unlawful mutual obligations scheme stripped bare: www.dewr.gov.au/download/171...
www.dewr.gov.au
November 17, 2025 at 1:19 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
Ultimately, the TCF is a(nother) disastrous government project to intensify surveillance & punishment of disadvantaged ppl, trample on their legal rights, & further re-frame social security as conditional on forced participation in activities - rather than a universal right
November 17, 2025 at 1:18 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
The department's focus on behavioural change, via mutual obligation punishments, is criminally deranged.

“behavioural change can be achieved quickly” through “unanticipated life-threatening events (such as surviving electrocution after touching live electrical wires"

Fuck me dead
"Rationale for requiring three months of compliant behaviour Behavioural science research and literature does not specify a rigid threshold for behavioural change to be considered permanent. The circumstances that lead to behavioural change are a significant influence on whether that change will be permanent or temporary. Common examples where permanent behavioural change can be achieved quickly include unanticipated life-threatening events (such as surviving electrocution after touching live electrical wires) where there is a strong connection between cause and effect, versus equally life-threatening behaviours such as smoking or having poor diet or exercise regimes where behavioural change can take years – arguably because the effect of that poor behaviour only manifests after a longer period, if at all. Pragmatically, three months of compliant behaviour is recommended as being adequate to demonstrate the required change in behaviour required for a job seeker to return to the personal responsibility phase. The recommendation for three months of compliant behaviour is supported by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s Behavioural Economics Team (BETA), who considered three months to be proximate enough to be perceived as an achievable goal that job seekers would strive for." "Changing job seekers’ behaviour A key goal of the proposed targeted job seeker compliance framework is to focus compliancerelated interventions on job seekers who have a pattern of persistent non-compliance, with a view to improving support where capability issues are uncovered and changing the behaviour of wilfully non-compliant job seekers so that they meet the agreed activities prescribed in their job plan. The introduction of a completely new compliance model, with associated educational material, is expected to drive a degree of underlying behavioural change in and of itself. Further changes in behaviour can reasonably be expected at various steps in the proposed targeted job seeker compliance framework, as the consequences of non-compliance loom and sanctions are imposed. The first of these step changes in behaviour is likely to result from the face-to-face capability interview with the provider and the subsequent DHS capability assessment, once three and four demerits have been accrued respectively. The impact of having a very personal discussion about errant behaviour and reminding the job seeker how close they are to receiving a significant financial sanction could reasonably be expected to result in a markedly more significant change in behaviour than introducing the new model achieved in the first place. Perhaps the largest changes in behaviour will flow from imposing financial penalties in the intensive compliance phase. There are two broadly comparable benchmarks that can be drawn on for comparison: Suspend until attend changes that were introduced in 2015 saw attendance rates at jobactive reconnection appointments rise from 65% to 88%, while the introduction of sanctions in the UK in 19962 , saw job seeker exit rates increase from 21% to 28%."
November 17, 2025 at 1:17 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
The ideological commitment to punishing welfare recipients is a true sickness

Here, the Department endorses the use of payment suspensions to get victims of domestic violence to disclose their circumstances

There is a word for using punishment to extract information out of people: torture
"Key observations from jobactive sites Non-Attendance Report (NAR) - Payment suspension All providers believe the NAR (suspending income support payments until the job seeker contacts the provider and attends a re-engagement appointment) is an extremely effective tool. Some providers used this process as a means of getting the job seeker to disclose personal issues preventing their compliance and employment (eg; domestic violence). Discretion There are varied work practices from one site to the next (even within the same organisation) regarding the use of discretion and whether it is recorded in the department’s IT system. It is common practice to exercise discretion when a job seeker misses their first appointment, as the employment consultant does not have any detailed background on the job seeker prior to meeting them. One of the larger providers visited has a company-wide policy of simply rescheduling missed appointments when exercising discretion and not recording DNAD. Case studies have also shown that the discretion is often the default when the compliance framework cannot be used. It is therefore likely that the department’s data on the use of discretion understates its true application."
November 17, 2025 at 12:50 AM
jeremypoxon.bsky.social
The Department freely admits in these docs that compliance punishments hurt welfare recipients' chances of finding work - then chose to enact harsher punishments against them.

Because that's the whole point of employment services - they can't play dumb on that intent anymore
"The data also shows that the continued use of compliance action against some individuals does not lead to improved outcomes. Job seekers who received a payment suspension were less likely to subsequently achieve short or long-term employment outcomes than those who had never had a suspension and, the more suspensions applied, the lower the outcome rate (Figure 2.2). The same relationship was observed for financial penalties, but employment outcomes were even lower (Figure 2.3). These negative relationships remain even when accounting for age, length unemployment length, education level and circumstances such as disability or homelessness. It cannot be concluded that the repeated use of payment suspensions and compliance penalties against these job seekers is the reason for their poor outcomes, since job seekers who are disengaged and non-compliant, for any reason, are clearly going to be less inclined or have less capacity to find work than generally compliant job seekers. However, it is reasonable to conclude that the repeated use of suspensions and the current range of penalties against this group does not appear to have a deterrent effect. This may be due to the fact that currently penalties generally small or are able to be waived."
November 17, 2025 at 12:38 AM