Demand for Commonwealth Rental Assistance far greater than previously reported

• Between 2000 and 2017, 11 million Australians received a Centrelink payment
• During 2016 nearly 2 million households received CRA rather than the 1.3 million households previously quoted by Government agencies
• There was a significant churn of individuals who received CRA, with 747,167 starting to receive this payment and 505,942 ceasing during 2016
• 51 per cent of recipients received CRA for less than a year and only 19.7 per cent received it for more than two years.

‘Our analysis found that between January 2000 and October 2017, 11 million Australians received a Centrelink payment—compelling evidence that welfare is as much part of mainstream life as health and education.’

Using a newly available and extremely large Government dataset, researchers have revealed that demand for Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) is far higher than commonly understood, with nearly 2 million households receiving CRA during 2016 rather than the 1.3 million households previously quoted by Government agencies.

The research, ‘The utility of new data in understanding housing insecurity’, undertaken for AHURI by researchers from University of Tasmania, RMIT University, Australian National University and The Brotherhood of St Laurence, explores the ability of the very large DOMINO dataset (maintained by the Department of Social Services) to bring new insights into the use of CRA for households that rely on Newstart Allowance, pensions and Family Tax Benefit.

‘This is the first academic study using the newly available DOMINO dataset to help understand income volatility in Australia since 2000,’ says Dr Maria Yanotti from University of Tasmania. ‘Our analysis found that between January 2000 and October 2017, 11 million Australians received a Centrelink payment—compelling evidence that welfare is as much part of mainstream life as health and education.’

DOMINO is the acronym for Data Over Multiple Individual Occurrences. Each DOMINO observation records a change that occurred in an individual’s circumstances on any particular day which may affect their social security payments or eligibility. As such, it is a very detailed assessment of the payments each individual received and when.

‘We believe that once these issues are resolved and understood by researchers, DOMINO offers a unique and powerful resource for housing and welfare research...

Some general findings from DOMINO were that there is a significant churn of individuals who receive CRA, with 747,167 households starting to receive this payment and 505,942 ceasing during 2016; and between January 2000 and October 2017, 51 per cent of most recent recipients received CRA for less than a year and fewer than one in five (19.7%) received it for more than two years.

The analysis also revealed that 54.7 per cent of recipients were women, and that most CRA recipients appear to have received at least once a one-off irregular CRA payment, suggesting a degree of income volatility within each year.

‘Our research was a scoping study into understanding how to use the DOMINO data effectively now that is has been made available by Government,’ says Dr Yanotti. ‘It revealed that a deep understanding of the database’s complex variables and values—and their historically- and policy-inscribed relationships—is required for more detailed research, including the unique confidentiality requirements needed when working with DOMINO.’

‘We believe that once these issues are resolved and understood by researchers, DOMINO offers a unique and powerful resource for housing and welfare research that moves beyond the initial descriptive statistics we’ve presented in this paper, and is likely to yield important findings for a wide range of academic disciplines.’