Remember all those times you were sent letters from Centrelink and/or the Australian government kindly asking you to repay any welfare debts you may have accumulated over the years in the form of wrongfully accrued Youth Allowance payments or the like, only for you to ignore it and let “future you” worry about it?
Well good news!
In an attempt to scrape back $800 million in unpaid welfare benefits and otherwise fraudulently obtained welfare moolah, the federal government has begun issuing out travel bans to Aussies to trying to leave the country with an outstanding debt. So hooray, you literally can’t run or hide from the government at all!
These travel bans – called Departure Prohibition Orders (DPO) – have been around for over a decade and are usually slapped on deadbeat parents who fail to pay child support, but the Coalition has decided to extend its use in the name of getting some money back.
Human Services Minister Michael Keenan states that over 150,000 owe enough welfare debt to be hit with a travel ban and 20 have been issued so far, saying:
So if you go to the airport, and you owe us, say, a couple of thousand dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars, then we don’t believe that you should be able to go on an overseas holiday, for example, if you owe us money because you’ve got overpayments from the welfare system. We will stop you from doing that, and that use has already saved us significant sums of money.
That being said, he did say these travel bans are a last resort and that the government will only play this card on those who just refuse to repay their debt despite all the polite letters and emails.
It is also reported that those unfortunate people who have been targeted by Centrelink’s much-maligned “robo-call” automated debt repayment system won’t be affected by the travel ban, so that’s one crumb of comfort I guess.
So if you don’t want to be restricted to Australia or be forced to cancel that backpacking trip to Nepal you’ve been planning for months over some overdue welfare repayments, make like a Lannister and repay your debt.
