Tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness, living with disabilities or who are Indigenous are being disproportionately affected by welfare payment suspensions under the mutual obligation regime, government data shows.
The data, reported to federal parliament by the employment department, comes as a separate study by the charity Anglicare suggests most jobseekers believe mutual obligation is doing little to help them find work.
To keep their payments, jobseekers must attend appointments with privatised employment service providers and log their efforts to apply for as many as 20 jobs a month.
The system had been paused for much of the pandemic but restarted across the country last month.
Payments can be suspended if a person misses one of these requirements, or cut or cancelled altogether if a person is judged to have engaged in repeated “non-compliance”.
While the government argues the system ensures people are serious about finding work, advocates argue the system is punitive, does little to help jobseekers find employment and some businesses have complained it leaves them wading through unsuitable applications.
The system is also filled with complaints that payments can be stopped erroneously due to mistakes from employer service providers.
The new data suggests that despite new rules offering a 48-hour grace period for jobseekers to contact their provider before their payments are suspended, those considered vulnerable by Centrelink – such as the homeless, disabled and Indigenous jobseekers – are still disproportionately affected by the system, as Guardian Australia has previously reported.
It shows more than 56.4% of the 64,123 jobseekers who have been flagged as having experienced homelessness have had their payments suspended in the six months to September.
Among the 133,559 jobseekers who have a disability, 47.1% had received a payment suspension in those six months, while the same was true of 63.5% of the 70,150 Indigenous jobseekers. Some jobseekers will have been recorded across multiple or even all three measures.
The data confirms those considered vulnerable by Centrelink are more likely to face payment suspensions than the overall cohort in the jobactive system.
Overall, 43.8% of the 595,516 people in the jobactive system had a received payment suspension in the six-month period.
Under the mutual obligations system, jobseekers also receive “demerit points” when their payments are temporarily suspended for failing to meet their activities.
After five demerits, they can receive financial penalties, meaning their payments are reduced by half, or cut altogether for a fortnight. They can be kicked off welfare payments altogether for what is considered serious non-compliance.
The data shows that between September 2020 and September 2021, on 1,532 occasions people experiencing homelessness received one of these penalties.
Similarly, the employment department applied these penalties on 2,597 occasions towards Indigenous jobseekers and 1,495 times for those with a disability.
Asked what benefit there might be to cutting the payment of a person experiencing homelessness, a department spokesperson said a “core principle of mutual obligations is that requirements must be tailored to individual circumstances”.
The spokesperson said the system had a “range of protections” to “ensure that jobseekers do not face a penalty for not meeting requirements for reasons beyond their control”.
“There is clear evidence that these safeguards operate effectively at ensuring penalties are targeted at those able but unwilling to meet their requirements,” the spokesperson said.
“Exemptions from mutual obligation requirements are also available to job seekers who are unable to meet any requirements, for example due to homelessness.
“Some job seekers who face penalties are recorded in administrative systems as having experienced homelessness, however, this does not necessarily imply that their requirements are inappropriate or not tailored to their circumstances.”
Anglicare’s Asking Those Who Know report, released on Thursday, surveyed 618 jobseekers and found 79% believed their Centrelink activities were “pointless”, while 56% thought the obligations prevented them from participating in more meaningful activities.
Only 19% felt their obligations were tailored to their needs and only 13% said they were getting the support they needed to find work.
“We’ve got that hamster wheel of activities that aren’t helping people find work,” the Anglicare chief executive, Kasy Chambers, said. “They were getting in the way of voluntary work, getting in the way of them doing meaningful training, they were even getting in the way of people starting small businesses.”
A government-commissioned report, revealed by Guardian Australia in May, also found employment service providers were unsatisfied with the mutual obligations system.