On Friday 6 December 2024 the Australian Basic Income Lab hosted its third annual workshop program with the theme Designing a Basic Income Pilot for Australia – Ethics, Implementation & Evaluation Challenges.

Workshop discussion overview: 

Pilots, trials, and experiments have played a central role in establishing an evidence base for the potential benefits of basic income and similar concepts. While proponents of basic income often highlight the positive outcomes of these trials, critics question their effectiveness. The relationship between basic income and policy experimentation has been viewed as crucial for building public and political support for the reform, though some argue that it has been a distraction that has failed to deliver policy implementation.

In Australia, the debate around basic income pilots is still in its early stages compared to international efforts. Aside from a small-scale trial in the 1970s, there has never been a comprehensive basic income pilot, and very few detailed proposals have gained significant traction. The Third Annual Australian Basic Income Fellows Workshop seeks to move the conversation forward by focusing on the ethical, practical, and evaluation challenges involved in designing a basic income pilot for Australia.

I prepared a short presentation discussing:

1. The lack of Australian basic income trial stories
2. Typical design considerations for basic income pilots
3. Three high-level options for policy design options for Australia.

I then invited workshop participants to vote on their preferred basic income trial approach via an online poll.

Australian basic income stories are missing
Basic Income Australia’s education material regarding the amazing qualitative results from global basic income trials lacked specific Australian examples.

Australian basic income trials would be politically expedient

Typical design considerations
Basic income trial designers must make careful decisions regarding the adequacy/level of the payment amount, the sample size for evaluation robustness and whether the trial will target certain populations or take a universal approach. The level of available funding for trials will have strong implications on design configurations. Effectively all trials will feature the universal limitation of failing to study the long-run behavioural effects of providing ongoing income security because trials are by nature short-term. Typical global basic income trials are 2-3 years in duration with GiveDirectly leading the world’s longest basic income trial at 12 years.

Proposal 1 of 3: Universal randomised control trial approaches
This approach intends to mimic universality through two options:

1a – A saturation site approach where one entire small town is provided with a basic income and a comparable counterfactual town does not receive a basic income.
2a – A randomised control trial with stratified population samples within a single geolocation.

Proposal 2 of 3: Targeted basic income trials
In this section I briefly describe global examples of targeted basic income trials.

Proposal 3 of 3: Direct giving through tech
Following from my previous year’s workshop presentation “Circumnavigating politics with distributed technology approaches to Basic Income“, this year I learned of an Australian money-sharing web app called Flourish.Buzz that intends to do just that. 

60% of 28 workshop survey respondents prefer universal approaches to conducting basic income trials
39% preferred the saturation site approach followed by 21% who preferred the mid-city randomised control trial.

The overall intent of my presentation was to reiterate that we lack Australian basic income stories which hamper various pro-UBI actors’ ability to advocate for a UBI in Australia. Despite the valid criticisms that the 130+ basic income trials around the world have failed to lead to an ideal policy implementation (universal, unconditional, individualised and regular payments), I argue that pilots and experimentation are necessary to advance the UBI agenda in Australia.

Please find the link to the full presentation slides here.