Labor to announce easing of jobseeker mutual obligations requirements in major overhaul of employment system | Unemployment
The Albanian government has signaled a major overhaul of Australia’s employment system; Minister Amanda Rishworth is expected to outline plans to ease Centrelink’s much-maligned reciprocal obligations regime on Wednesday.
Rishworth is expected to tell the National Press Club that mutual obligation requirements do not help Australians find work in an “ill-equipped” system and waste the time of people on benefits.
In a harsh assessment, Rishworth will say the unemployed are “exhausted” by inadequate benefits. He will argue that the current system encourages job providers to place applicants in jobs for which they may not be suitable. Mutual obligations also take up too much time for providers and applicants, he says, and could be replaced with a fairer system.
In a major speech, the minister will promise what he calls a once-in-a-generation reform of the employment system that currently ignores too many Australians.
“For too long our public debate has been mired in a debate about whether reciprocal obligations are too hard or too soft. The real question should be: Do reciprocal obligations really help people get started?” Rishworth will tell the press club.
“Unfortunately, most of the time the answer is clearly ‘no’.”
Reciprocal obligations include activities that job seekers receiving benefits must agree to undertake in order to continue receiving payments. These may include appointments with an employment services provider, attending work or training courses, and applying for a certain number of jobs or attending interviews.
Guardian Australia has reported numerous examples of the reciprocal obligations system being unfair or cruel to users, or forcing people to complete mundane tasks. These included people whose Centrelink payments were suspended after brain surgery in hospital or while recovering from psychosis, and job training courses described as “condescending” in which participants had to rate friends and family, describe the role God had played in their lives and discuss pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken costume.
Rishworth said the government would move from a “one size fits all” model of employment services to a new concept of three streams of support depending on how much help the job seeker needs. It will say the current model is “not equipped to meet the diverse needs of the one million Australians who access it every year”.
Preliminary notes from Rishworth’s speech, shared by his office, do not detail exactly what changes would be made to the system. Instead Rishworth’s office said the government would hold consultations on the design of the new model, including publishing a discussion paper, creating an advisory group and “targeted consultations” with job seekers, employers and providers.
“These providers should offer flexible, personalized support. But there is strong evidence that this is not the case for a large number of people,” Rishworth said, noting that healthy people with recent work experience are better cared for than those with more challenging conditions.
“The way providers are paid means that they are incentivized to focus their efforts on people who fit that narrow profile, rather than supporting everyone with their caseload. And people with more complex barriers to employment are also thrown into a very difficult basket.”
Rishworth will say that payments to job providers currently do not incentivize intermediaries to help job seekers find meaningful or suitable work, leading to poor job fits and people finding themselves unemployed again or falling back into the job services system; It’s a cycle Rishworth describes as “setting a lot of people up for failure.”
The system, called Workforce Australia Online, doesn’t do enough to help people and Rishworth said it only provides “limited support” so job seekers find their own jobs.
“For many people this can be a wasted year with no real progress in employment, making it harder to find work,” he will say.
Rishworth said a review of mutual obligations would be completed following consultation, but suggested that the obligations of those with higher skills could be eased. He said the government supported the concept but they had to be “fair, proportionate and, above all, effective”.
“I have also spoken to employment service providers who say most of their time and resources are spent on compliance activities rather than helping people get jobs,” he will say.
