Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stood last week with workers at the Mobil oil refinery in Altona—just outside of my electorate, in the electorate of Gellibrand—along with the member for Corio and the member for Gellibrand. I spoke to workers from my electorate who had learnt that day that the Mobil refinery would close despite a rescue package from this government, despite some families having worked there for two generations and despite the fact that these are what we in Melbourne's west call good jobs. They're gone. There'll be a wind-up; it could take six months. But those jobs will be gone. I've spoken to workers and to their family members, and I've heard about their anxiety and their sense of loss. But mostly it's been about their fears.

From there, I pick up this week's newspapers, and here I find this government out again with its absolute campaign against the unemployed in this country. I've been here nearly eight years, and across my time here I can't fail to note that when this government's in trouble it reaches for this stunt. It's splashed across the front page: 'Let's attack the vulnerable. Let's quote some figures about the number of people who are unemployed and imply that they are lazy or don't want to work.' It is absolutely distressing for people in my community.

On reading Monday's front pages, I was taken back to a conversation that I had with about 60 people in a local room when I asked for people to come forward to talk to me about their experiences with the jobactive program. We've spent $6 billion of taxpayers' money across the last four years on jobactive providers, and people in this House need to know what's happening in my electorate inside those jobactive providers. They need to know that I heard stories from a mother of an 18-year-old daughter and a three-year-old daughter who was told by a jobactive provider that she didn't need to bother to find work because she didn't have to get a job until her youngest daughter was eight, despite her protestations that her 18-year-old daughter would get some value from seeing her getting up every day and going to work. This was a woman ready to work. This was a woman who wanted to work. This was a woman telling a story about being actively discouraged from seeking work by the people we pay to connect her to employers.

We have spent $6 billion over four years on jobactive providers, and we're having a conversation about whether or not we can afford a rise in JobSeeker. The government has put forward a notion of that rise, and we have all had a lot to say about that. Well, I've got something to say in this place tonight about that, and that is that I will not have a conversation about how much JobSeeker should rise until we have a hard conversation about the money we're spending on jobactive providers and their efficacy. Are they meeting their outcomes of finding people good, well-paid jobs? The answer, sadly, is no. I've read about the churn, about people getting three jobs in a year, none of them permanent, and a jobactive provider being paid three times for those placements.

In my community, jobactive providers are a joke. In my community, the people want to see people paid to connect people to employers, and it's not just the general public that feel this way. In 2019, the chief executive of COSBOA said that the requirement for unemployed jobseekers to send out 20 applications a month was particularly hated by business and that the jobactive program was not communicating properly with training and skills agencies. Why aren't we having this conversation? Why aren't they tied together? Why is this government going out with baseball bats after the unemployed in an economic recession recovery? Why do the people opposite reach for this at every single opportunity? The workers in my electorate who will lose their jobs at Mobil could be on this list. They're hardworking people. This government needs to take a long, hard look at itself and the way it treats people who are seeking work in this country.