William Mitchell — The so-called Inclusion Committee that recommends keeping the unemployed impoverished

It’s Wednesday and apart from music I am talking mostly about poverty – opposites indeed. The beauty of the beat against the ugliness of enforced poverty. Enforced by government policy, which if there is political will can always eliminate systemic poverty. Yesterday (April 18, 2023), a major report was released in Australia by the grand-titled Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee – 2023–24 Report to the Australian Government. It provided a series of recommendations to the new Labor government about how it should deal with poverty, disadvantage and the appalling state of income support in this country. Among its recommendations it found that “current rates of these payments are seriously inadequate, whether measured relative to the National Minimum Wage, in comparison with pensions, or against a range of income poverty measures. People on these payments face the highest levels of financial stress in Australia”. Accordingly, they recommended a “substantial increase in the base rates” for unemployment benefits and other payments. The new Labour government has already indicated it will not increase the rates in any significant way. The problem, though, is that the recommendation of the ‘Inclusion Committee’, is such that if introduced would still leave the unemployed being forced to live below the poverty line. Yet, its recommendation is now framing the ‘limit’ parameters of the debate. All sorts of so-called progressives are using the recommendation as the aspiration, which really becomes self-defeating. The ‘Inclusion Committee’ might better have been called the ‘Exclusion Committee’.

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
The so-called Inclusion Committee that recommends keeping the unemployed impoverished
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia