“Single JobSeeker [payment] just hit $400 a week. Let me know how you’d go if you were getting that little and were randomly not paid.”

This comment, from the people behind Nobody Deserves Poverty, points to the ignored cruelty at the heart of one of Australia’s most shameful open secrets.

The mutual obligations system – the system by which we set (through privatised “job providers”) mostly demeaning and useless tasks for unemployed people to meet in order to receive their welfare benefits – is documented to cause harm, with little evidence it actually does anything to meet its main objective: get people into work.

The system is so convoluted and already stacked against people that even without the issue of lawfulness, it would still be not just harmful, but useless. In terms of punishing people, it is working as intended. But governments tend to pay attention when harm can also be considered unlawful, and that’s the issue here.

When the Coalition introduced the Targeted Compliance Framework (TCF) in 2017-18, it gave private job agencies the power to punish “non-compliant” job-seeker behaviour without the checks and balances of government.

If a job agency decides that one of their “clients” hasn’t met their mutual obligations – or just screws up and doesn’t report that they have – welfare recipients literally pay the price. Their payments can be suspended, or they can be forced into menial work-for-the-dole programs,........

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