It's also interesting that you frame it as "jumping thru hoops" as the point seems to be to support people, but pressure them to get a job, and opposed to making people beg for an unconditional benefit. Additionally, it seems like recipients in these programs are "asset tested", whether that means for savings or income, or both, I dont know. But in any case, this definitely doesn't seem anything like UBI, which by design is just an unconditional payment give to everyone, job or no.
Exactly.
The problem is that the unemployed are essentially of two kinds: well-qualified, and unqualified. The well-qualified ones all get jobs within 3 months or so. The unqualified ones tend to be long-term unemployed. They're long-term unemployed because the jobs just don't exist for them. And the government's not channelling them towards university degrees or trade apprenticeships, but towards short technical college courses that lead generally to no work, or at best to part-time casual work - where they typically earn not much more than they got on the dole.
By engaging in free trade we have outsourced our manufacturing jobs to China. By engaging in deregulation, weakening of unions and economic rationalisation (privatising everything) we have ensured that the low-skilled jobs which do remain are part-time casual, rather than permanent full-time. So we're pressuring people to go and get jobs which don't exist, or which won't earn them much more than the dole, and which will be very insecure.
This is why I characterise it as "jumping through bureaucratic hoops." Everyone knows it's bullshit, and at the end of all the paperwork and courses there's nothing for them. But they're required to do it anyway.
Meanwhile equivalent amounts of money are given to well-off middle class people without any hoops to jump through, and without anyone in the public questioning it seriously.
But the point is that financially-speaking, here in Australia and in other strong welfare countries, we are
already spending $12,000 or more per adult citizen on welfare. Some are getting nothing (employed single childless people), but some are getting something (the dole), some are getting more (single mothers, and middle class families with children in childcare), some more still (aged pension), and some are getting shitloads (disabled, though typically not directly, but indirectly through paying for wheelchairs and physio and carers and so on).
The money's
already being spent on people. The only questions are how much we give to each person, and whether we simply give it to them or put them through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit along the way. Apart from employing a bunch of people unproductively (bureaucrats to harass the unemployed), the only reason to keep the bureaucratic hoops for this lot but not that lot is... well, moral judgement. We want to keep our moral judgements.
I don't know about you, but I have better things to do with my day than wonder which of the particular 670,000 unemployed and 820,000 disabled and 2.4 million older people getting pensions and 1 million families receiving Family Tax Benefit A or B and god knows how many getting childcare rebates
really deserve them. I just don't care. The money is being spent on them either way. Take away the bureaucracy and the judgement, make everyone's payments the same, and voila, there's your UBI.