The last time dole payments increased, Paul Keating was Prime Minister and Coolio was number one on the ARIA charts. It was 1995, effectively the last year anyone could be unemployed and enjoy the same standard of living as someone receiving a retirement pension or working a minimum wage job.

The federal government is well aware that life has become more expensive since 1995. The national retirement pension, for example, has been increased in line with the average total weekly earnings of men (they earn more than women!) since 1997. The only major increase to Newstart payments, 2013's Clean Energy Supplement, was actually taken away when the carbon tax was abolished in 2016.

"Since 1995 the incomes of most working people have increased by about 50 percent in real terms," Peter Whiteford, a professor at ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy, explains to VICE. "Newstart recipients are getting the same real income they did more than 20 years ago but most other people have improved their income. So the gap between people on Newstart and most other people of working age has widened."

Over the past two decades, Newstart has remained the same while everything else has changed. The payment ($538.80 per fortnight, if you're lucky) has been adjusted annually in line with prices of goods and services, but crucially it hasn't been indexed to average Australian weekly earnings—which have skyrocketed since the mid-1990s. Nor has it been adjusted to compensate for greatly increased rent prices in every capital city.

They've done so for a few reasons.

THE DOLE BLUDGER MYTH

Maybe all those Melbourne dolewave bands don't help the cause, but Australians tend to either romanticise or criminalise people living off unemployment benefits (see: drug testing welfare recipients). Neither perspective makes much sense, because it's extraordinarily hard to live off dole payments alone—let alone qualify to receive them in the first place.

"The idea that people are living a life of luxury on [Newstart] doesn't make sense," Whiteford explains. "You obviously do want people to have incentives to work so that when they get a job it's clear that they're better off, and that's an issue governments have to take into account. But because the gap between having a minimum wage job and living on Newstart has widened so much, there's actually no problem with the incentive to work. If you're able to get even a minimum wage job you're much, much better off than if you were on Newstart."