Antipoverty Centre response to discussion paper: Shaping the future of employment services | August 2026

“If you self-identify as needing help, that should be number one”

(Un)employment services policy design is an endless merry-go-round determined to ignore
the views and priorities of unemployed people, instead seeking to box “lived experience”
into parameters that mean every program iteration is doomed to fail the people it claims to serve. As we demonstrate throughout this submission, nothing that is being proposed in these reforms is new, and none of it has stopped harm or created effective pathways to employment in the past.

The mark of a truly civil society is how it treats its poor. – anonymous

The community cannot have confidence in a process like this while the government continues to look away from strong signals of the unlawful use of penalties – including payment suspensions – in the system it is claiming can be supportive. The “lived experience” panel has been established as part of this reform process with parameters that directly contradict advice we have provided to government over many years – The government continues to shamelessly ask providers to connect them with people to share “lived experience”, which can never be a truthful representation of how the system is operating when providers are handpicking people who are mined for their stories, and those same people are in a coercive environment. Most embarrassingly, providers are being positioned as representing “lived experience”. It is as absurd as suggesting the prison guards’ union can represent the experience of incarcerated people.

You can read our submission in full below and find our related media release here.