Employment services overhaul set to ignore legal quagmire as Rishworth prepares for NPC address
Today ahead of employment minister Amanda Rishworth’s National Press Club address, reports suggest she is expected to outline “the biggest shake-up of the employment services system in 30 years”.
What she is not expected to do is respond to the welfare compliance scandal the (un)employment services system is mired in that led to a Commonwealth Ombudsman investigation of the Targeted Compliance Framework. The Ombudsman found that the employment department had unlawfully administered the “mutual” obligations system (download backgrounder here) and raised concerns about the rate of incorrectly applied penalties. Reporting based on the minister’s speech confirms compulsory activities and compliance penalties will remain part of the system, and there is no indication they will be paused while the system is redesigned.
Quotes attributable to Antipoverty Centre spokesperson and JobSeeker recipient Jay Coonan
This is like living in Groundhog Day.
You can’t punish people into employment in an economy designed to keep at least 4 per cent of us unemployed, especially with the RBA aggressively pursuing higher unemployment.
The current system, just like the one before it, claims to offer tailored support, and Minister Rishworth now seems to be promising us the same again. Many unemployed people want exactly that, but it’s not possible to deliver in any meaningful way under a coercive system.
It’s not a major overhaul if you keep “mutual” obligations in place. That’s punishment as usual – punishment the government has continued to impose after a Commonwealth Ombudsman investigation raised significant concerns about the number of incorrect penalties applied.
There are around 2.7 million payment suspension notices issued each year and a huge percentage of them are ultimately reversed because they were incorrect, at enormous personal cost to the people subjected to these penalties. If the use of suspensions is not paused immediately, any promises of a better system will ring hollow in the ears of unemployed people.
The minister must be held accountable for her failure to respond to this welfare compliance scandal instead of distracting from the issue with announcements that fail to address the legal crisis the system is in.
The Albanese government showed it can do what’s needed when it replaced the harmful compulsory ParentsNext program with a voluntary system designed in consultation with parents. All welfare recipients are asking is that they do exactly the same with other (un)employment services.