WeRise · Policy platform
Universal Basic Income
Key findings
- 14% of Australians – roughly 1 in 7 people – were estimated to be living in poverty in 2024Australia’s statutory Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee identifies this as the highest estimated poverty level since 2001 and recommends legislated official poverty measures. Source: Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, 2025 Report to Government, 2025
- JobSeeker recipients are 14 times more likely to miss a substantial meal at least once a dayThis measure of severe material deprivation demonstrates that the existing conditional payment system often fails to secure even adequate food. Source: Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, 2025 Report to Government, 2025
- More than 200,000 Commonwealth Rent Assistance recipients paid over half their income in rent in December 2024Income support and rent assistance remain insufficient to prevent extreme housing stress for a substantial number of low-income renters. Source: Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, 2025 Report to Government, 2025
- 60% of people in JobSeeker-reliant households were living in povertyPoverty is not an incidental feature of unemployment payments; it is structurally concentrated among households whose main income is JobSeeker. Source: ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, Poverty in Australia 2023: Who Is Affected, 2023
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Part 01
The Case for Change
Why Universal Basic Income matters
A Guarantee Against Destitution
Australia’s social-security system is too conditional, too low and too brittle for modern working lives.
Australia already recognises, in principle, that no person should be excluded from economic life. Yet its income-support system routinely delivers the opposite outcome: inadequate payments, punitive conditions and complex eligibility rules that make survival contingent on proving hardship to the state.1 The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee (EIAC), established by Parliament to advise government before each Budget, again found in 2025 that JobSeeker and related working-age payments are seriously inadequate against every accepted poverty benchmark.1
The problem is not marginal. The Productivity Commission’s 2024 estimate put poverty at 14% of the population – approximately one in seven Australians and the highest estimated level since 2001.1 In a wealthy country with a sophisticated tax-transfer system, poverty at this scale is a policy outcome, not an inevitability.
The current system is especially ill-suited to lives marked by casual work, fluctuating health, care obligations, family violence, study, regional labour-market weakness and changing household circumstances. Access to income is often delayed, conditioned or withdrawn precisely when a person’s capacity to comply with administrative requirements is lowest. The EIAC reports that people receiving JobSeeker are 14 times more likely than other Australians to lack a substantial meal at least once a day; between 2011 and 2021, 6,000 JobSeeker recipients died by suicide.1 These figures do not establish simple causation, but they are a grave warning that income insecurity, health and social exclusion are deeply entangled.
Housing magnifies the failure of inadequate cash support. Even after recent increases in Commonwealth Rent Assistance and working-age payments, more than 200,000 of the 1.35 million rent-assistance recipients were paying over half their income in rent in December 2024.1 Rent assistance reduces hardship, but it is not a substitute for an adequate income floor or for building social and affordable homes.
A UBI cannot repair a housing shortage on its own; without tenancy protections and large-scale non-market housing investment, some of its benefit could be absorbed into rents. But it would ensure that people have a stable base from which to meet rent, negotiate work, leave unsafe housing and avoid crisis debt.
UBI’s central institutional advantage is simplicity. A universal payment is not means tested at the point of delivery, so it avoids the cliff effects, reporting burdens, stigma and compliance architecture that make current payments difficult to access and easy to lose. Its universality is not a claim that high-income people need public money; it is a delivery mechanism. Higher-income recipients repay more than the value of the payment through progressive income tax and other reforms. In effect, universality creates reliable entitlement; progressivity determines the final distribution.
This matters for work as well as wellbeing. The EIAC notes that JobSeeker recipients earning modest additional income can face effective marginal tax rates above 60% below annual earnings of $33,000, weakening the payoff from taking extra shifts or temporary work.1 A UBI paired with an integrated progressive tax schedule can remove abrupt payment withdrawal and make each additional dollar earned visibly worthwhile.
UBI is not payment for doing nothing; it is the material condition that lets people refuse exploitation, take up opportunity and contribute on terms compatible with dignity.
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Part 02
Evidence and Experience
Universal Basic Income: what other countries show
What Cash Security Changes
Finland, Alaska, Canada and Ireland
International evidence does not provide a ready-made template for a full Australian UBI. No trial has replicated Australia’s population, tax system, labour market, housing conditions or public-service mix, and several prominent experiments were targeted rather than universal. But the evidence is strong enough to reject simplistic claims that unconditional cash inevitably causes mass withdrawal from work.
Across different settings, regular cash payments have generally improved financial security and subjective wellbeing, while labour-market effects have been small, mixed or shaped by program design. The core lesson is not that cash alone solves poverty, housing or service gaps. It is that income security can improve health, reduce bureaucratic burden, support education and care, and enable more sustainable participation when it is paired with robust public systems and progressive financing.,,,
Finland · 2017–2018
€560 per month, paid unconditionally and without means testing in place of basic unemployment benefits. 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people aged 25–58; compared with a control group of other unemployed people.
- In the first year, recipients averaged 49.64 employment days, compared with 49.25 days for the control group: no statistically meaningful employment effect.
- In the second-year analysis period, recipients worked around six more days than controls, though the final evaluation cautioned that concurrent policy changes complicated attribution.
- 55% of recipients rated their health as good or very good, compared with 46% of the control group.
- 17% of recipients reported high or very high stress, compared with 25% of controls.
- Recipients reported less bureaucracy and stronger wellbeing than people in the conventional unemployment-benefit system.
Finland’s experiment was not a full UBI: it was limited to unemployed people and operated inside a changing benefit system. Its strongest relevance is administrative and human: unconditional income did not produce a large employment collapse, while it measurably improved perceived health, stress and trust. Australia should test whether removing conditionality and income-reporting burdens improves transitions into suitable work, education and care.
Alaska, United States · 1982–present
Annual Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, financed from returns on a public investment fund built from oil royalties; generally around US$1,000–$2,000 per eligible resident in recent decades. Near-universal among eligible Alaska residents, including children; administered annually since 1982.
- A synthetic-control study found no statistically significant effect on the aggregate employment-to-population ratio after the dividend’s introduction.
- The share of the population in part-time work increased by 1.8 percentage points, a 17% relative increase.
- The study found labour-market outcomes consistent with local spending from the dividend supporting demand, especially outside tradable sectors.
- Eligibility is based principally on residence, rather than unemployment, income or work-search compliance.
Alaska is not a sufficient-payment model and is funded by resource wealth that Australia has not socialised to the same extent. It nevertheless demonstrates that a durable, broadly universal cash dividend can coexist with employment and that public wealth can be treated as a shared social asset. A future Australian social dividend could draw on resource-rent reform, sovereign public investment and progressive tax reform.
Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada · 1974–1979; health outcomes analysed retrospectively
MINCOME, a guaranteed annual income with benefits reduced as private income increased; not a universal flat UBI, but a major negative-income-tax/guaranteed-income experiment. A “saturation site” in Dauphin, Manitoba, where all eligible residents could participate, alongside a broader provincial experiment.
- Hospital separations fell by 8.5% relative to comparison communities during the payment period.
- The reduction was concentrated in admissions related to accidents, injuries and mental health.
- Physician contacts for mental-health diagnoses also declined relative to the comparison group.
- The study found evidence that a comparatively modest guaranteed income can improve population health and potentially reduce health-system demand.
- Historical labour-supply research on MINCOME suggests reductions in paid work were concentrated among new mothers and teenagers remaining in school, rather than broad labour-force exit.
MINCOME is most relevant to the fiscal argument that income security has cross-portfolio effects. Treasury costings that count transfer expenditure but ignore preventable hospital use, crisis interventions and reduced harm are incomplete. Australian pilots should pre-register health, education, family-violence and housing-stability outcomes, not employment alone.
Ireland · 2022–2025, extended through February 2026
Basic Income for the Arts – €325 per week, paid monthly, unconditional within the eligibility cohort and treated as self-employment income for tax and social-protection purposes. Approximately 2,000 randomly selected artists and creative workers; a control group received €650 annually for survey participation.
- After two years, recipients were 6 percentage points more likely to work in the arts than the control group.
- They were 23 percentage points less likely to have difficulty making ends meet.
- Recipients’ average earnings increased by approximately €300 per month, or around 22% relative to baseline average earnings.
- The program reduced reliance on social protection, with recipients €100 per month less reliant on it on average and 38 percentage points less likely to receive Jobseeker payments.
- The cost-benefit analysis estimated total Irish Government investment at approximately €114 million in 2025 prices over the pilot’s duration.
Ireland’s scheme is targeted, not universal, but it speaks directly to Australia’s artists, freelancers, sole traders and intermittent workers. It suggests a basic income can support productive work and sectoral retention where conventional welfare systems struggle to accommodate irregular earnings. A national UBI would need to preserve this flexibility across all sectors, not only creative work.
Part 03
Costs and Trade-offs
The cost of Universal Basic Income
Count the Net Cost, Not the Headline
A UBI’s gross transfer is large by design; its real fiscal cost depends on tax recovery, replaced payments and wider savings.
The most misleading UBI costing multiplies a proposed payment by the entire population, labels the resulting gross transfer the “cost”, and stops there. A universal payment would indeed create a large gross fiscal flow because every eligible person receives it. But higher-income households would return some or all of the payment through the income-tax system; existing tax offsets and some cash transfers could be consolidated; and an integrated UBI-tax model would reduce the need for means testing at the payment stage. The relevant question is the net distributional and budgetary effect after these offsets, not the gross payment alone.
Australia does not yet have a current, independently verified microsimulation costing for a specified full UBI design. No responsible dossier should invent one. The final net figure depends critically on payment level, eligible population, residency rules, treatment of children, interaction with Age Pension, Disability Support Pension, Carer Payment, Commonwealth Rent Assistance, family payments and compensation for disability-related costs. It also depends on the tax schedule and revenue package adopted.
There is, however, clear evidence that adequate income support produces returns beyond cash consumption. Mandala’s actuarial analysis, commissioned by the EIAC, estimated that lifting JobSeeker to 90% of the Age Pension plus supplements would generate long-run health, productivity and service-spending benefits of $71.8 million for a representative cohort of 20,000 recipients – $1.24 in social return for each dollar invested. This is not a full UBI costing and should not be represented as one. It does show why costings must include avoided public costs and stronger participation, while retaining transparent uncertainty ranges.
| Item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Gross annual UBI transfer | To be modelled – depends on legislated payment rate and eligibility population | This is the visible payment flow before tax recovery; it is not the net fiscal cost and must be costed by Treasury/Parliamentary Budget Office microsimulation. |
| Progressive tax recovery from higher-income recipients | To be modelled as a major positive offset | Under a universal design, high-income recipients receive the same entitlement but repay it, in whole or part, through progressive income tax and associated revenue measures. |
| Consolidation of overlapping general cash transfers and tax offsets | To be modelled; positive offset | A UBI could replace or restructure selected base-rate payments and tax offsets, but disability, caring, housing and child-related supplements require explicit protection rather than blanket abolition. |
| Reduced means-testing, compliance and payment-administration burden | Unquantified nationally; positive offset | Universality reduces eligibility verification and income-reporting complexity at the payment stage, but Australia needs a full Services Australia administrative-cost baseline before a credible estimate can be made. |
| Long-run health, productivity and reduced-service-demand benefit from adequate income support | $71.8 million for a representative cohort of 20,000 JobSeeker recipients | EIAC-commissioned actuarial analysis estimated a social return of $1.24 for every dollar invested in lifting JobSeeker to 90% of the Age Pension plus supplements; this is indicative evidence, not a national UBI saving.1 |
| Avoided hospital use associated with guaranteed income | 8.5% reduction in hospital separations in the Manitoba study | This is international evidence rather than an Australian budget estimate; it supports including health-system effects in Australian pilot evaluation and future costings.8 |
| Net cost estimate | Not yet responsibly estimable from public evidence | WeRise should commission an independently published Treasury-grade or Parliamentary Budget Office microsimulation for at least three payment-and-financing scenarios before adopting a final fiscal claim. |
Part 04
The Australian Design
How Universal Basic Income would work in Australia
A Universal Floor, Built for Australia
Deliver a simple individual entitlement while retaining the targeted supports people need.
An Australian UBI should be designed as an individual, residency-based income entitlement paid regularly by the Commonwealth through Services Australia and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). It should be unconditional with respect to employment status, job-search activity, relationship status and private income at the point of payment. “Universal” should mean that eligibility is broad and predictable; it should not mean abandoning progressive redistribution. The tax system should recover the value progressively from people with higher taxable incomes.
The starting point is not a blank slate. Australia already delivers income support, family payments, pensions, rent assistance and tax offsets through a complex interaction of Services Australia, the ATO, the Department of Social Services, Treasury and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.
The EIAC has found that working-age payments remain inadequate relative to accepted poverty measures, and that current payment design can discourage extra work through effective marginal tax rates exceeding 60% for some JobSeeker recipients on low annual earnings.1 A UBI should therefore be implemented through tax-transfer integration: automatic payment first, fair tax recovery later, and no sudden loss of income when a person takes casual shifts, starts a microbusiness, studies or leaves an unsafe household.
A mature Australian design should include five safeguards.
First, the UBI must be additional to, rather than a substitute for, core universal services: Medicare, public education, the NDIS, aged care, legal assistance, social housing, homelessness services, public transport and employment support. Cash cannot replace accessible health care, disability support or housing supply.
Second, it must retain and strengthen targeted supplements. People with disability commonly face recurring costs that an equal flat payment cannot meet. Carers, sole parents, people in remote communities and renters in high-cost locations may require additional support. The EIAC notes that the Remote Area Allowance has lost two-thirds of its purchasing power since introduction and that essential goods can cost 15% to 40% more in some remote locations.1 A fair UBI architecture therefore includes indexed disability-cost, care, child, housing and remote-area supplements.
Third, it requires federal leadership. Social security, income tax and Medicare are Commonwealth responsibilities, so payment and financing legislation would be federal. States and territories remain essential partners because their responsibilities – housing, hospitals, schools, transport, child protection, justice and community services – determine whether cash security translates into real freedom.
Fourth, implementation should be phased. Phase one should legislate an adequacy benchmark, immediately lift JobSeeker and related payments, reform indexation, remove punitive compliance settings, improve Working Credit settings and establish official poverty measures.1 Phase two should conduct large, multi-site, independently evaluated guaranteed-income demonstrations, including metropolitan, regional, remote and First Nations-led settings. Phase three should transition to a national UBI-tax system after public release of distributional modelling, administrative testing and legislation protecting supplementary payments.
Finally, governance must include people with lived experience. The EIAC recommends embedding lived experience in economic-inclusion decision-making and renewing the social-security system around adequacy, dignity, autonomy, equity and evidence.2 A UBI designed only by fiscal modellers will miss the realities of disability, coercive control, intermittent work, homelessness and remote living. Co-design is not consultation after the fact; it is an implementation requirement.
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Part 05
People and Transition
Who Universal Basic Income affects
Security Changes the Balance of Power
UBI would benefit everyone’s security, while concentrating its greatest gains among people currently exposed to poverty and conditionality.
The immediate beneficiaries of a UBI would be people whose income is currently unstable, insufficient or administratively contingent: unemployed people, casual and gig workers, sole parents, students, carers, people with disability, people leaving family violence, artists and sole traders, people in regional and remote communities, and workers moving between jobs. It would also benefit workers with secure jobs by strengthening their ability to take leave, retrain, care for family, reduce unsafe hours or leave exploitative employment without falling directly into crisis.
The strongest distributive case concerns people already reliant on income support. ACOSS and UNSW found that 1.626 million people, or 49% of all people in poverty, were in households mainly reliant on social security; among JobSeeker-reliant households, 60% of people were living in poverty.3 The AIHW reported that 5.0 million Australians received income-support payments as at 31 March 2023 – 24% of Australians aged 16 and over.4 The current system therefore affects a large share of the population across the life course, not a small and static “welfare” minority.
Case study
A 28-year-old Brisbane hospitality worker has hours that vary week to week. During quiet months, she must report earnings, negotiate waiting periods or payment reductions, and choose between shifts that may trigger complex changes in support. Under a UBI, her base income would continue automatically while wages rise and fall; tax would recover more only when annual earnings become substantial. The policy does not eliminate the need for fair wages or secure work, but it removes the income cliff that makes every roster change a financial emergency.
Case study
A regional sole parent leaves a coercive partner with two children. Her immediate barriers are cash for transport, food, bond, rent and safety – not a lack of willingness to work. The EIAC reports that 45% of wage earners permanently leave a violent partner the first time, compared with 26% of people receiving income support.1 A guaranteed personal income would not replace specialist family-violence services or housing, but it would give the parent a predictable income stream that is not dependent on a partner’s earnings or rapid proof of eligibility.
First Nations communities, particularly in remote areas, require special care in design. The EIAC observes that the Remote Area Allowance is predominantly received by First Nations people and has eroded sharply in real value, while some remote areas face essential-goods prices 15% to 40% above metropolitan levels.1 A universal base payment without place-sensitive supplements could reproduce rather than correct this inequity. First Nations-controlled design, local service investment and indexed remote-cost payments are therefore non-negotiable.
Opposition will come from several directions. Some employers may resist because a stronger income floor gives workers more bargaining power to refuse underpaid, unsafe or unpredictable work. Some fiscal conservatives will focus on gross cost while omitting tax recovery and savings. Others will reasonably worry that UBI could be used to justify cuts to public services or disability supports.
That concern is valid. WeRise should make an explicit guarantee: UBI is a floor beneath universal services and targeted supports, never a cash-out of the welfare state. International evidence does not justify complacency about financing or inflation; it does show that the claim “unconditional income inevitably destroys work” is not supported by the strongest available comparative evidence.6,7
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Part 06
Related policies
Universal Basic Income sits within a wider set of WeRise policies.
- Foundations of Dignity: more WeRise policies in this pillar
- WeRise: all 29 policies across seven pillars
Notes
Sources and Supporting Documents
- Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. 2025 Report to Government. Department of Social Services, Australian Government. 2025. dss.gov.au
- Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. 2024 Report to Government. Department of Social Services, Australian Government. 2024. dss.gov.au
- Australian Council of Social Service and UNSW Sydney Poverty and Inequality Partnership. Poverty in Australia 2023: Who Is Affected. ACOSS. 2023. povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Australia’s Welfare 2023: Topic Summaries. AIHW. 2023. aihw.gov.au
- Department of Social Services. Annual Report 2023–24. Australian Government. 2024. dss.gov.au
- Kela and VATT Institute for Economic Research. The Basic Income Experiment: Final Results and Information Package. Government of Finland. 2020–2025. tietotarjotin.fi
- Jones, Damon, and Ioana Marinescu. The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 24312; revised 2020. nber.org
- Forget, Evelyn L. The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment. Canadian Public Policy. 2011. utppublishing.com
- Department of Culture, Communications and Sport and Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service. Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Basic Income for the Arts. Government of Ireland. 2025. assets.gov.ie
- Parliamentary Budget Officer, Canada. Costing a National Guaranteed Basic Income Using the Ontario Basic Income Model. Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. 2018. publications.gc.ca
- Treasury. 2024–25 Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement. Australian Government. 2024. treasury.gov.au
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Housing Assistance in Australia 2024. AIHW. 2024. aihw.gov.au
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