A former senior policy adviser in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, a coalminer in the Latrobe Valley and a family farmer from New South Wales are among a disparate group of Australians who say a universal basic income could significantly improve their lives.

The Green Institute has released a new paper, Views of a UBI: Perspectives from Across Australia, that records the views of different Australians on universal basic income (UBI), a contentious policy idea that is slowly gaining international currency.

It comes a week after Chris Bowen, the shadow treasurer, argued forcefully against a UBI during a speech to the progressive thinktank PerCapita, calling it a “terrible idea” and urging his Labor party colleagues not to support it.



He said Labor should not give up on the principle “of ensuring dignity through work” and said he wouldn’t want to see the government providing “payments to millionaires”.

Tim Hollo, the executive director of the Green Institute, told Guardian Australia that Bowen and other senior Labor figures should not be so quick to dismiss UBI as a future policy option.

He said the economy and labour market were changing dramatically, and the labour movement may have to start seriously considering a UBI, as opposed to the idea of full employment, to counter the rise of underemployment.

“Labor needs to start grappling again with big questions about the future of work and whether full employment at full-time is where we want to be heading,” Hollo said.

“Might we not actually be better off heading towards what John Maynard Keynes was talking about almost 100 years ago, that we should, by this stage, be looking at a 15-hour working week and re-evaluating our ideas of employment and paid work?”

The Green Institute is the Greens’ equivalent of the Liberal party’s Menzies Research Centre and Labor’s Chifley Institute. It receives federal funding but its work is published independently of the Greens’ party hierarchy.

In its new paper, it asked a disparate group of Australians what their life would be like with a UBI, including: a farmer, a carer, an artist, an Indigenous woman, two people caught up in the Centrelink “robo-debt” debacle, a university student, a coalminer in the Latrobe Valley and a mother.

Tjarana Goreng-Goreng, a former senior policy adviser in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, says a UBI may be the policy idea that finally helps to close the gap for Indigenous Australians.

Lyndsey Jackson and Amy Patterson, coordinators of the #NotMyDebt campaign against Centrelink’s “robo-debt” debacle, say they support a “thorough conversation” about what a UBI may deliver and how it could be designed. But they warn of the danger of treating UBI as a “silver bullet”.

Michael Croft, a farmer from NSW, says a “no strings attached” UBI could be a liberating experience for those caught in “nets of all types” and farmers would be no exception.

“Farmers and their families in receipt of UBI would be less constrained by systemic inequities and so freer to innovate, create, adapt, care for country, feed people with good and clean food,” he said.

The Australian Greens have argued a UBI should be considered in conjunction with a four-day working week, while the Green party in the United Kingdom has also proposed a UBI and a shorter working week in their current election manifesto.



The Green Institute’s paper follows a similar paper from the organisation in December, which argued the rise of contract and casual work meant a shorter working week and UBI may have to become serious policy options in Australia.

Bowen has been battling an internal Labor Party push to beef up economic policy, including a campaign for a “Buffett rule”, which would see wealthy Australians forced to pay a minimum rate of tax.



Labor’s former treasurer Wayne Swan recently warned Bowen that the ALP needed to avoid being “trickle-down lite”, or offering voters “a sickening Davos third-way approach” at the next election.