The notion that Australia’s unemployment benefits are dominated by ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘battlers’ has been questioned by new academic research, which shows that nearly one quarter of Australia’s working-age population received some sort of unemployment benefit between 2001 and 2016:
We found receiving unemployment payments was much more common than previously thought during the study period.
For example, between 2013 and 2016, the number of people receiving Newstart at the end of the financial year ranged between 660,000 and 750,000. But over the course of each of those years, well over 1.1 million separate individuals received an unemployment payment.
