Download the Submission to the Social Security Rewrite Bill (June 2016) (PDF, 337KB)
The Salvation Army is mindful that the Rewrite Bill is ostensibly about social security yet there is nothing in the Bill’s principles and little in its processes which offer such security
In the Army’s view this shortcoming is due to at least two factors. The first is the failure in both the Rewrite Bill and the parent legislation to address the realities of contemporary labour markets and the consequent precarious lives of perhaps hundreds of thousands of workers. The Army believes that this failure is a great injustice
The second failure is around the increasing conditionality which has crept into welfare legislation over the past five or six years. This conditionality is demonstrated both by the ever growing list of obligations on the part of recipients of benefits and by the quite onerous sanctions which might be applied against people who fail to meet these obligations regardless of how trivial they are.