Mentions Workforce Australia

Your regular reminder that solving every problem by creating a competitive market of private sector "service providers" does not work.

Just 11.7% of jobseekers in Australia found long-term employment through a job provider in the latest financial year, according to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ annual report.

Service providers are allowed to claim publicly funded outcome payments when clients have completed four, 12 and 26 weeks in employment – regardless of whether the client or provider found the job.

[…]

Jeremy Poxon, a welfare advocate at the Antipoverty Centre, said the system was failing “en mass” to help get people into meaningful work.

“The government knows full well that this system is failing on this basic metric to help people into work,” he said.

It came as Guardian Australia revealed Centrelink has threatened payment suspensions to jobseekers at a rate of five a minute, despite serious concerns from social security experts that they are illegal.

Poxon said the data showed the system was better at punishing people than helping them into employment.

Australia’s system has long been designed in a deficit paradigm, underpinned by two flawed theories. Firstly, that unemployment is always an individual failing (ignoring structural and major barriers like ageism, racism, a lack of suitable work and thin labour markets, health, and disability). This drives the belief that if you only beat disadvantaged people hard enough to do the same things over and over they’ll somehow magically get a job, and if they don’t they’re lazy—the pernicious myth of the ‘dole-bludger’. Secondly, that more choice and competition in human services in every place, as well as harsh performance management, will inevitably result in better services and employment outcomes—especially for vulnerable and long-term unemployed people. Both theories have been proven to be rubbish, yet we have persisted in designing the entire system around them. The system designed for the few who cheat–around the worst people in society and the worst providers.

Consistent with the findings of previous reviews, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of unemployed people want to work. But the current rigid approach to mutual obligations is killing unemployed people’s intrinsic motivations and efforts to seek work, by drowning them and those paid to help them in a mountain of red tape, compliance requirements and pointless mandatory activities. People are made to do silly things that don’t help them get a job—such as pointless training courses or applying for jobs they won’t get—and are then harshly and repeatedly sanctioned for trivial or inadvertent breaches of prescriptive rules. It is ridiculous that over 70per cent of people with providers have been subject to payment suspensions despite zero evidence that 70per cent of people are cheating the system. The Robodebt Royal Commission’s finding that fraud in the welfare system is minuscule is apt. The nature and extent of mutual obligations is like using a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito.