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The Impact of Breaching and Financial Penalties on Income Support Recipients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Tony Eardley
Tony Eardley*
Affiliation:
Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales
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Abstract

‘Breaching’, or the imposition of financial penalties for infringing income support rules and obligations, has been highly controversial in recent years. This is mainly because of a large increase in the number of breaches imposed between 1999 and 2002 in the context of an intensified ‘mutual obligation’ regime. Welfare advocacy groups have argued that these penalties are unnecessarily harsh and tend to fall most heavily on the more vulnerable income support recipients. However, there has been little systematic examination of the impact of breaching, either in terms of hardship or in terms of its effect on future compliance with obligations. This article discusses the results of the first large-scale study of these impacts, commissioned by the Department of Family and Community Services and carried out by the Social Policy Research Centre in 2002/03. The research involved a review of existing literature, a national telephone survey of breached income support recipients, together with in-depth interviews with a small number of survey respondents, and a national postal survey of welfare agencies.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , September 2006 , pp. 79 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2006

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on research commissioned by the Department of Family and Community Services, but any views expressed are those of the author and not of the Department.

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