Welfare Recipient Patterns Among Migrants

Data sources

This is the first comprehensive report on welfare recipient patterns of migrants in Australia that incorporates information about time of arrival to Australia on the part of overseas-born recipients.

The only previous major work on the subject is Peter Whiteford's Immigrants and the Social Security System which was published by the Bureau of Immigration Research in 1991. Whiteford's study utilised tabulations of pensions and benefits (including those paid by the Department of Veterans' Affairs) which were matched against ABS estimates of intercensal population by birthplace for the late 1980s.

Whiteford's main achievement was to incorporate age distribution into the analysis, thus overcoming one of the deficiencies of earlier studies which had ignored this factor. However, Whiteford did not have access to information which indicated the time of arrival of overseas-born welfare recipients.

Some subsequent work, including that by Birrell [1] and Healy [2] which analysed the proportions of migrants in the workforce who were reliant on unemployment and other labour-market related benefits, used time-of-arrival data for benefit recipients obtained from the then DSS, but had difficulty matching these data with an appropriate denominator.

These two studies used estimates of the relevant workforce derived from settler arrival data. These estimates could not be adjusted for any persons leaving Australia or who died after arrival. Also the settler arrival data could not be used for any regional analysis of welfare-recipient levels because these data do not include information on the intended location of migrants.

The information used in this report overcomes these deficiencies, at least for the Census year 1996. The data base for welfare pension and benefit recipients derives from DSS files as of late 1996 (as close as could be matched to the August 1996 date for the 1996 Census). Information on country of birth, age, sex, location and date of arrival in Australia was available for all recipients for each of the major benefits (Jobstart, Sickness, Special Benefit) and pensions (Age, Sole Parent, Disability). However, no parallel data were available for pensions distributed by the Department of Veterans' Affairs.

As a consequence, care must be used in interpreting the welfare recipient rates for persons aged 65+. Since most of the Veterans' Affairs pensions went to Australia-born residents, our estimates concerning the proportion of Australia-born persons in the 65+ age group who are in receipt of a benefit or pension understate the actual level. (There were at least 300,000 Veterans' Affairs pensioners born in Australia who were aged 65+.)

The DSS data provided the numerator for the recipient patterns. The denominator was drawn from 1996 Census counts which provided information on the birthplace, age, sex and time of arrival in Australia for those born overseas. This is why the year 1996 was chosen for analysis.

The denominator is a count of all those present in Australia, and thus is the residual of all movements in and out of Australia, and of course those still alive at the time of the Census. It therefore provides an accurate and comparable base from which to calculate welfare-recipient rates.

The two sets of data comprising the numerator and denominator also make it possible to calculate welfare-recipient rates for the various birthplace groups by time-of-arrival [3] for any Statistical Local Areas (SLA) in Australia — which in practice means such rates are available for every Local Government Area. Because of the voluminous detail involved in such calculations we present only a limited amount of this data below.

Though data are available for pension and benefit recipients for the years since 1996 there are no parallel estimates of the population base. The analysis done in this report cannot be repeated until the results of the year 2001 Census become available. Thus the recipient rates reported below are all in the form of ratios of persons in receipt of a benefit or pension to the population base as of August 1996.

These data predate the extension of the waiting period for major welfare payments from six months to two years implemented by the Coalition from April 1997. This affected most migrants arriving since that time, except for those entering under the Humanitarian categories.

There is one alternative source of data which would partially rectify the absence of intercensal population base estimates, and which could be used in future work on the issue. This is DIMA's settlement database. This provides information on most settler arrivals by visa category, age, sex, birthplace, year of arrival and place of intended residence.

It could provide the basis for denominator estimates of migrants who arrived since 1996, down to region or local government level. These data, along with parallel DSS (now Centrelink) data would facilitate post-1996 estimates of settlement progress (as gauged by the need for welfare assistance) for recent arrivals.

Because neither the DSS files nor the Census counts provide information on visa type for overseas-born persons, we cannot comment on the welfare benefit needs of migrants by visa category, with the exception of older persons who are recent arrivals, most of whom would have entered as parents. Thus the research must be interpreted cautiously in reference to selection policies issues.

The welfare-recipient ratios calculated give an accurate indication of the welfare needs of migrants by age, birthplace and time of arrival in Australia. But inferences of such needs by visa category can only be made by examining particular birthplaces of origin or English language proficiency groups (defined below) where particular visa categories predominate.

[1] Bob Birrell, 1993, 'Unemployment benefit dependency amongst recently arrived migrants', People and Place, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 19-22
[2] Ernest Healy, 1994, 'Unemployment dependency rates amongst recently arrived migrants: an update', People and Place, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 47-54
[3] The time-of-arrival classifications for DSS recipients and the Census population are not identical. This means that the welfare recipient rates for 1986-90 are understated because the Department of Social Security data for arrivals 1986-1990 are for the period 1 July 1986 to 31 December 1990 whereas the population data are for 1 January 1986 to 31 December 1990. The recipient rates for pre-1986 are therefore slightly overstated.