Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Have no doubt, this bill will make massive changes to the social security and job search system we have in this country. You would think that changes as big as this would be supported by thought, proof, evidence and a tested road map, but as you dig into the changes you see that the detail is not forthcoming and there's very little to prove that this will actually make the job of jobseekers finding work easier.

Before considering all of those changes in this contribution to the debate, it's important that we also consider this in the broader environment in which these changes are being brought in—specifically: what does our labour market look like, what's unemployment like in this country and how will these changes have an effect? If we consider the labour market the Turnbull government is presiding over, it's a weak one. While it's ticked down slightly recently, the current unemployment rate is at about 5.6 per cent. It's worth bearing in mind that this is almost as high as the worst levels we experienced through the global financial crisis. In recent years, the link between economic growth and wages growth has been severed, which means that not everyone is sharing in the benefits of the economy.

In today's labour market, a significant portion of the workforce are stuck in temporary or casual jobs where they work like full-time employees but they don't get all the benefits of it. We have a growing and chronic problem of underemployment. Around one-third of part-time workers—1.1 million people—say they want more hours but can't get them. Groups like Anglicare Australia have undertaken the Jobs Availability Snapshot, which showed that the shortage of positions available for low-skilled jobseekers runs at six jobseekers for every position advertised—six people chasing one job. That's a significant shortage of entry-level work for jobseekers. You can't ignore these statistics, because they demonstrates how weak the labour market actually is. And the reality is that the Turnbull government doesn't have, and has never had, a plan for jobs or for putting the right supports in place to help people find jobs. It's that simple.

Everything else is spin—like, for example, what we're seeing with the government's Youth Jobs PaTH program. This is a billion-dollar program trumpeted as a solution to youth unemployment, and it's turning out to be a sham. Last week we had news of a huge breach of the system. The government only moved to correct that after it became news. One young person worked up to 58 hours in one week in an intern placement at a Melbourne cafe. This is despite the fact the government said young people wouldn't be forced to work more than 50 hours a fortnight. That was 58 hours in a week instead of the guaranteed—we were told—50 hours maximum in a fortnight. Another intern worked for a company for days without any formal, signed agreement to outline their protections and how things would operate in that firm. A program the Turnbull government says will help young people is actually seeing them work many hours above program limits, without pay—and those interns are government-subsidised within that program.

It's clear that the Turnbull government doesn't have the right protective measures in place to stop poor practices affecting young people in the program. Under PaTH, the government expects young people to police businesses for the government and blow the whistle if they are exploited. These recent cases have shown young people aren't confident enough to do so, and are worried about their Centrelink payments being affected if they do call out bad employers. This is a horrible position to put young Australian jobseekers in. Just today, we heard that 1,300 people have had their welfare payments suspended in connection with the PaTH program but only 413 have actually got a job out of it. The government has cut the payments of more people than have found a job from this program. It's typical: so far under PaTH, more people are being punished than helped.

Making matters worse, while the employment minister told a newspaper that 413 people had found a job through PaTH, her colleague in the same place, Senator James McGrath, yesterday told the Senate that 10,000 people had found jobs. The Turnbull government have no idea what they're doing; they're simply fudging the numbers to get a good headline. The headline should be about people actually getting good jobs out of good training and good skills development. That is the type of headline they should be chasing, but they won't. Senator McGrath also said the Department of Employment would be auditing employers participating in PaTH. That's the kind of monitoring the government should be doing before interns join, not after the government have been caught out and interns have been exploited by employers who are not doing the right thing. It shouldn't take an embarrassing news story to kick this government into gear. But the Turnbull government don't actually care about young people or protecting them as they search for work.

The program is looking more and more like an expensive rort. Besides failing to stop the exploitation of young people, it's consistently failing to meet its own targets. Five months into the program, 1,000 young people have been placed as interns; the program expects 30,000 in one year. This program started in April; it's now September. They've only had 1,000 so far, so they have a massively huge task ahead of them to meet their own targets.

If you look across the broader job search program, the job search tools themselves aren't working. The first example is the Employment Assistance Fund, a billion-dollar fund that should help remove any barriers that jobseekers are facing through training or skills development. When you look at how much has been spent—we confirmed back in May that only 15 per cent of this $1 billion employment fund had been spent. Jobactive kicked off in July 2015. Theoretically, 30 per cent of that fund should have been spent by now, but only 15 per cent has been spent. I keep being told that the government has made the guidelines around the fund too hard to interpret, meaning it's often left alone by employment service providers, and then the government pushes the blame for the underspend onto the providers. As with the Youth Jobs PaTH internship program, the government won't take responsibility for its own failure on the employment fund.

We can also look at the amount of money we're spending in this country on wage subsidies to help get the jobless into work. In all the cases, including the Restart wage subsidy, youth wage subsidy, parent wage subsidy, long-term unemployed and Indigenous wage subsidies—across all those categories—only 35 per cent of the forecast expenditure on wage subsidies to get people back into work has been spent. Clearly these subsidies aren't working. So when the government complains about dole bludgers or about paying welfare to people who don't deserve it, remember: this government doesn't take responsibility for its own mistakes. It doesn't take responsibility for its own failing job programs. More importantly, not only does it not take responsibility for its mistakes, it doesn't fix them so as to get people into work.

Here is a snapshot of the job network under this government and how the job programs are performing. We have 730,000 people, roughly, out of work in this country. We spend roughly $9 billion on government job programs. It's the second largest area of procurement outside of defence. We have 40,000 employment service consultants. Only 20 per cent of the people helped by the government's job programs find work that lasts longer than 26 weeks. Only 35 per cent of wage subsidies have been spent, an underspend on the employment fund. This is the state of the job network under the Turnbull government.

We have people like the Minister for Human Services, Mr Tudge, coming in here and saying that their idea is to get people off welfare and into work. Well, the Turnbull government is spectacularly successful in getting people off welfare and they're spectacularly unsuccessful in getting them into work. All they're about is driving them off the welfare roll, not getting them into a job, which should be the aim of these types of reforms. It's about hammering the jobless; it's not about helping them get work.

Let's look at some of the schedules in this legislation being considered by the House that are directly related to employment and affected by this labour market and the failures of these job programs. Schedule 15 changes the compliance framework for income support recipients to mutual obligations and participation payments. It is a two-phase framework. One phase deals out demerit points to jobseekers who fail to comply with their obligations. If a jobseeker accrues four demerit points in a six-month period, they'll be assessed to see whether they are put through what's called an intensive phase. In the intensive phase there are three escalating penalties or strikes. First strike, you lose one week's payment; second strike, you lose two weeks; and the third strike is cancellation of the payment and a four-week exclusion from reapplication.

This compliance reform was produced without employment sector consultation. It will cut more people off welfare payments than the current system, without any apparent improvement in the actual jobseeker employment outcomes. Under the current system, roughly 72,000 penalties are applied, but under the proposed system, that number will more than double to nearly 150,000 penalties applied. And despite introducing suspensions of the first four demerit points, to allow people to reform their behaviour before receiving a financial punishment, the system is going to see more people lose payments than ever before, because the waivers and discretions that are provided to the departmental secretary and delegated authorities will be largely removed from the system. We will oppose the measures, unless the government reinstates waivers and discretion for employment service providers and the departmental secretary when assessing demerits or financial penalties. There are some people under terrible circumstances, and it will actually be counterproductive to apply this compliance framework in the process of trying to get such a person into work. If it is counterproductive in getting people into work, then why apply the measure? The only reason you would do that is basically because you want to hammer those people, not help them.

The National Employment Services Association and Jobs Australia have voiced concern that the government hasn't consulted adequately how the new system would operate. For example, NESA said there's a level of discretion now, where you take into account the whole person's circumstances, that is important. But that kind of balance is being removed under this proposal. NESA pointed out that the sector had only received a few meetings with the Department of Employment about the new framework and had not received any indication about what training would be provided. Again, we need the detail. ACOSS noted that evidence from the UK showed that inflexible and punitive compliance sanctions had the reverse effect and would increase the risk of participants becoming homeless. It had negative outcomes, particularly in terms of engagement with the labour market. We want people engaged and we want people getting jobs, but the evidence from other parts of the world, where this has been tried, is that the reverse occurs. That's why discretion and waivers must be retained in the system and, again, it should be done in a way to help people get into work. I urge the government to reinstate discretion and waivers into the compliance framework.

Schedule 9 in this proposal removes the ability of Newstart allowance and some special benefit recipients aged between 55 and 59 from fulfilling the activity test by volunteering 30 hours per fortnight. The big reform that this government is heralding is that they actually want to hurt community organisations that are reliant on volunteer labour by those who are aged 55 to 59. They think this is the big reform they need to do. Let's be very clear: the Turnbull government is going to hammer those community groups by cutting the amount of time people can volunteer and still receive jobseeker payments.

The across-the-board response of volunteer and charity organisations that contributed to the Senate inquiry into this bill was, 'Don't do this.' That was the response. They believe this change will decimate the number of people and volunteer hours available to community organisations helping neighbourhoods across this nation. Volunteering Australia tore through the logic of this change very succinctly. They said they were:

… concerned that the tightening of the activity test could move people away from volunteering positions, which will have a profound impact on the volunteering sector. The proposal will also do little to improve the job prospects of older Australians—an already disadvantaged group in the job market.

Anglicare pointed out the simple truth about the job market. Their snapshot shows there's only one entry-level position for every six jobseekers, and we know that this age cohort experiences higher levels of discrimination. The government knows this too. This is why they're rushing in what's called their Career Transition Assistance Program in trial form only. The actual program begins in two years' time, but the jobseekers who are affected now get hammered in terms of their welfare payments.

With that program itself, $98 million is only being spent over four years. This should be done by employment service providers right now: doing a skills audit, working out what the training requirements are and helping them market themselves to employers. That stuff can be done right now, but this career transition program that's being put in place by the government is simply a fig leaf to show that they're doing something for 55 to 59 year olds that's going to happen in two years' time and not now. It is, frankly, a disgrace.

When we look at all the measures that have been put in here so far as they apply in the employment sector or in getting jobs for people, they are about making it harder for them to get work while also making their life harder during the period of time they're looking for work—if this were fair dinkum. We want people to work; we need people to get into employment. We need the investment in skills and in those people's positions. For once, it would be great to hear the employment minister actually talk about getting those people into work in a way that invests in them rather than denigrates them. All we hear is ideology. We don't hear anything practical or pragmatic to help Australians get back into work.

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