The Albanese government has flagged a major overhaul of Australia’s employment system, with minister Amanda Rishworth on Wednesday expected to outline plans to ease Centrelink’s much-maligned mutual obligations regime.
Rishworth is expected to tell the National Press Club that mutual obligation requirements were not helping Australians find work in a system that was “ill-equipped” and wasting the time of people who use welfare.
In a scathing assessment, Rishworth will say unemployed people are “languishing” with insufficient help. She will claim the current system incentivises job providers to place applicants in jobs which may be unsuitable. Mutual obligations are also simply taking up too much time for providers and applicants, and could be replaced with a fairer system, she will say.
In a major speech, the minister will promise what she called once-in-a-generation reform of the employment system which is now ignoring too many Australians.
“For too long, our public debate has been stuck in a conversation about whether mutual obligations are too hard, or too soft. When the real question should be: are mutual obligations activities actually helping people get into work?” Rishworth will tell the press club.
“Unfortunately, all too often, the answer is clearly ‘no’.”
Mutual obligations include activities that jobseekers on welfare must agree to undertake, in order to continue receiving payments. These could include appointments with an employment services provider, undertaking study or training courses, and applying for a set number of jobs or attending interviews.
Guardian Australia has reported numerous examples of the mutual obligations system being unfair or cruel to users, or forcing people to complete menial tasks. These included people having Centrelink payments suspended while in hospital recovering from brain surgery or recovering from psychosis, and job training courses described as “condescending” where participants had to rate friends and family, describe the role God played role in their life, and discuss pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken suit.
Rishworth says the government will move away from a “one size fits all” employment services model, toward a new concept with three streams of support, depending on how much help a jobseeker needs. She will say the current model is “ill-equipped to respond to the distinct needs of the one million Australians who access it each year.”
Advance notes for Rishworth’s speech, shared by her office, do not detail exactly what changes will be made to the system. Instead Rishworth’s office said the government would engage in consultation on the new model’s design, including releasing a discussion paper, setting up an advisory group, and “targeted consultation” with jobseekers, employers and providers.
“These providers should be delivering flexible, personalised support. But the overwhelming evidence shows us that for too many people, this is simply not the case,” Rishworth will say, noting that healthy people with recent job experience are better taken care of than those with more challenging circumstances.
“The way providers are paid means they are incentivised to focus their efforts on those who fit into this narrow profile – rather than supporting everyone on their caseload. And people with more complex barriers to employment simply get put in the too-hard basket.”
Rishworth will say the payments made to job providers don’t currently incentivise agents to help jobseekers find meaningful or suitable work, leading to poor job fits and people again finding themselves unemployed or back in the job services system – a cycle she describes as “setting many people up to fail.”
One system, Workforce Australia Online, is not doing enough to help people and Rishworth said jobseekers are finding their own employment because that system only provides “limited support”.
“For many people, that could be a wasted year with no real progress towards employment, making it harder to then get a job,” she will say.
Rishworth said the mutual obligations overhaul would be finalised after consultation, but suggested people with higher skills could have their obligations eased. She said the government supports the concept, but that they need to be “fair, proportionate, and above all, effective”.
“I’ve also met with employment service providers who say that too much of their time and resources are taken up with compliance activities, rather than actually helping people get into jobs,” she will say.
