The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has restarted the Targeted Compliance Framework, allowing Centrelink to again suspend and cancel welfare payments for jobseekers who fail to meet mutual obligation requirements, ABC News reported. A Commonwealth Ombudsman investigation found that 964 payment cancellations between April 2022 and July 2024 were not carried out in accordance with the law.
The TCF is an automated framework that monitors whether welfare recipients comply with mutual obligations, which are conditions such as job hunting and attending interviews that must be met to keep receiving payments. The framework had been paused in stages between 2024 and 2025 after concerns emerged about unlawful administrative practices by the department. A department-identified cause of the failure was an IT change made in December 2020 that pushed some recipients' payment cancellations up to four days earlier than the law permitted.
Post-Robodebt legislation obliged agencies to take a jobseeker's circumstances into account before stopping a payment, yet that step was skipped across the 964 unlawful cancellations. The department's annual report for last financial year, released the week prior, showed $870,000 in compensation had already been paid to more than 600 people. The department has kept its estimated total compensation liability out of public view.
A man identified only as Daniel, aged 51, told ABC News his payments were suspended even though he held an exemption from mutual obligations and had no compulsory activities, and that repeated contact with Centrelink brought no resolution. He said losing income support left him unable to secure rental accommodation, caused periods of homelessness, and forced him to rely on family and friends.
The department said it had addressed the Ombudsman's findings by making changes to its IT systems, conducting system testing, improving the way it communicates with participants, and providing additional training to decision-makers. It said the most serious cancellation powers are still on hold pending further safeguards, with a return for those measures set for 2027.
Jay Coonan from the Antipoverty Centre said several advocacy organisations, among them the Australian Council of Social Service, Economic Justice Australia, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services and Inclusion Australia, are not satisfied that the compliance system's core problems have been resolved. Advocacy groups contended that the true number of people affected by unlawful cancellations is likely far above the department's own count, citing figures ranging from over 100,000 to as high as 300,000.
The weekly JobSeeker payment for a single person with no children is $416.85, while the Henderson Poverty Line for a single Australian sits at approximately $702.72 per week. Nearly a million Centrelink income support recipients are affected by the compliance framework. More than 50,000 people who had payments cancelled under the previous operation of the framework are being invited to seek compensation under the CDDA scheme, though the department has not disclosed the total amount it expects to pay out.
Reporting: ABC News, Yahoo Finance
Written by Pick & Scroll News from the reporting and documents linked above.
