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After slipping and seriously injuring her back at work, Jodie Harris never expected to still be out of work eight years later.
She says despite applying for at least eight jobs per month, she only receives rejections.
"I got another last night, I got a message back saying, oh, sorry, you're not suitable. Another thing besides having a bad back, which I've started trying not to even mention it... they don't want someone who's 55 years old."
She's one of the 557,000 people who have been receiving unemployment payments for more than a year.
That's according to a new report from the Australian Council of Social Service examining the profile of people affected by unemployment.
CEO of the ACOSS, Cassandra Goldie, told the ABC long term unemployment is increasing.
"We now have 60% of people relying on unemployment payments who have received them for more than a year, which is up from 51% over a decade ago. So it's a substantial change."
According to the report, roughly 190,000 people have been on income support for more than five years and only eight per cent of them transition off their payments.
But with Australia offering the lowest unemployment payment of all 38 OECD countries - currently just $56 a day - those dependent on them say they can barely afford to live.
Ms Harris says without the help of her family and friends she wouldn't have a roof over her head.
"I just don't even know how someone on decent wages are surviving, let alone trying to on this. It's like you just can't do it."
According to the report, one of the biggest changes in the past 10 years has been the shift of people with disability or chronic health conditions from the Disability Support Pension to unemployed payments, which are significantly lower.
Ms Goldie told the ABC it's making life harder than it should be for many people.
"We've got now large numbers of people, over half who have a disability or health condition, increasingly older - over a third or over 55 years of age - and the majority are women. So they are facing substantial barriers in the labour market and the employment services support system is failing them."
However, even those who are able to enter the labour market, aren't always getting the work they need.
According to ACOSS, unemployed people often transition back into paid employment through entry-level positions.
But many of those positions are part-time or casual which limits the ability for people to sustainably increase their income and leave unemployment payments.
Independent economist, Saul Eslake, says high inflation rates as well as an increase in immigration are some of the factors driving the rise in unemployment.
"The increase in the unemployment rate hasn't been because people in aggregate have been losing jobs as occurred, for example, during the recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and during the Covid pandemic. Rather, it's occurred because new entrants to the labour force as migrants or graduates from the education system are taking longer to find jobs."
However, Mr Eslake says that's not necessarily due to a lack of job vacancies.
"Job vacancies, though they've come down from their peaks in the year after the pandemic ended are nonetheless still high by historical standards, which when you set against the fact that people are taking longer to find jobs as well, says that there's probably some mismatch between skills that are in demand and the skills that are available."
ACOSS has also accused Workforce Australia, the government program which delivers employment services for job seekers, of failing to help people into work, with only one in 10 participants finding a job that keeps them off income support for at least six months.
In its report, the council has called on the government to increase welfare payments to at least $82 a day, end automated payment suspensions, establish an independent quality assurance body for employment service providers and more.
Changes that for people like Ms Harris would offer some much needed reprieve.
"I would like to be able to work. I honestly would... it's like the interaction, the money obviously, I don't survive, basically."
