Australia’s system for helping job seekers into work will be overhauled for the first time in 30 years as the Albanese Government grapples with the best way to assist the country’s growing number of long-term unemployed people. Source: The Age.
Three years after a Labor-led committee said that Australia’s employment services system was like “using a nuclear bomb to kill a mosquito”, Workplace Minister Amanda Rishworth will today reveal the one-size-fits-all system will split job seekers into three streams for the first time.
It will separate people who are newly unemployed and already have skills to re-enter the job market, for example, from those who have been unemployed for long periods of time, disconnected from the labour market or face other barriers to employment.
These streams will determine which job-seeking services people can access as well as their mutual obligations – the conditions that job seekers must meet to keep receiving income support from the government.
“This is a major positive step for the over one million Australians who access this system each year, by ensuring they will get the right support at the right time,” Ms Rishworth will say.
The employment services system was privatised under the Howard Government. But it has since been criticised for prioritising profit-driven providers who do not adequately support older, disadvantaged or long-term unemployed people.
A parliamentary committee led by Labor MP Julian Hill in 2023 found the system was holding back the entire economy because it failed to properly train people while tying up employers in mountains of red tape.
The inquiry recommended the government, which spends about $2 billion a year on the scheme, be more involved than simply have a federal department oversee private service providers.
Ms Rishworth will reflect on those findings in her National Press Club address today where she will argue that a one-size-fits-all approach was failing to support people and pushing them into unsuitable jobs.
FULL STORY
Jobseeker services to get first overhaul in 30 years (By Natassia Chrysanthos, The Age)
