Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I also take note of the government's appalling response to the report by the Senate Education and Employment References Committee entitled Jobactive: failing those it is intended to serve. It was a very comprehensive report detailing myriad problems in the government's job services framework. We got this very flimsy reply. The report had 41 recommendations. How did the government respond to them? It said under the heading 'Recommendations 1 to 41': 'Job seekers in jobactive report they are satisfied with the quality of services.' It's a pretty arbitrary quoting of statistics. For stream A jobseekers it is but 58.7 per cent of jobseekers who say they are satisfied. That's not 'extremely satisfied' or 'you're terrific'; that's just a basic level of satisfaction.

As Senator Siewert highlighted, the kinds of complaints that dog this system go to the very core of people's lives and their wellbeing. The jobseekers I speak to overwhelmingly tell me that they are not satisfied with the quality of services. ACOSS conducted a survey and found 73 per cent of jobactive participants were dissatisfied and only eight per cent were satisfied.

These are the kinds of things jobseekers say. In cases where they've acted in good faith, trying to engage with the provider they are allocated to by Centrelink, they have been ignored and not given any help finding work. Often that's because, as one example says, providers say to them: 'We don't get any money if we place you now. We'll wait another three months until you've been out of the workforce a bit longer and then we'll help you. Our contract is structured in such a way that we'll get a payment for placing you.'

In cases where appointments have been made with agency staff, there have been occasions when no-one has actually been there. The provider made the appointment and the jobseeker, who was obliged to go, went to their appointment and found that the office was closed.

People have told me that they were offered gift cards as an inducement to produce pay slips to their provider when they had gotten a new job and they had gotten that job off their own back. The provider who wanted to take credit and claim a payment for that job induced that person by giving them a gift certificate. They also tell me that their providers hold their jobseeker payment over them—as an overt threat—to get them to sign job plans or undertake unsuitable activity. So I do not accept the government's argument that jobseekers are simply satisfied with the employment services offering.

I think it is true that the service providers bear the brunt of having to implement this government's policies and so their behaviour is contingent on the policy settings put in place by this government. You have your hands on the policy levers. You've created a system where providers' primary focus seems to be administering the targeted compliance framework, ensuring mutual obligation at the expense of providing jobseekers with meaningful assistance to get them back into the workforce.

The government should be admitting right now that that system, as flawed as it was before, is even more flawed now. In a declining employment market what is the point of spending money to get people to comply to look for a job, particularly when you want to revert back to giving them a measly $40 a day in jobseeker payments. It is simply not going to work. We need employment services to be there to reinvigorate local economies and to be engaged with local employers. It should not be the primary remit of the employment service providers to enforce mutual obligation when it comes at the expense of finding jobseekers meaningful work. Now more than ever jobseekers in this country need an employment services system that actually works. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.