The social services monster, Kevin Andrews, confirmed people could go longer than six months without receiving any income support but did not name a specific timeframe.
The changes have been criticised by the community sector. The Jobs Australia chief executive, David Thompson, said extending the time that people would be without income support for beyond six months was making a bad situation worse.
He said job providers for unemployed people in stream one receive $11 they can spend on them which could be given to assist with public transport fares to and from job interviews.
“But people still will not have enough to pay for a roof over their head, to pay for food, they do not have the resources to participate in employment search,” he said.
“It is kind of Kafkaesque, what do they do? I don’t understand, as a community, what do we say? Tough? Don’t eat? Sleep on the streets?”
Thompson said “suitable training courses” was soon going to mean “any training course” and unemployed people in regional areas where courses are limited or do not start for a couple of months would be hit even harder.
“There’s going to be a proportion of these young people who are going to have no income support and no alternative,” he said.
Jobs Australia has estimated about 110,000 people a year will have to serve the six-month waiting period for Newstart or Youth Allowance when they apply for income support.
“At the moment, those training places aren’t there and it’s not clear who will provide them or how they will be paid for," a spokesman said. "If the individuals are meant to pay for it themselves through government loans, then that’s going to create further problems because for a lot of these people, it will be a long road back from rock bottom and they might not ever earn enough income to repay their student loans.
“It’s easy to see the government could end up wasting more money on useless training than it saves from the welfare cuts in the first place.”
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