Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—It was a privilege to be part of this committee and to work with the member for Bruce, the member for Monash, the member for Boothby and the member for Casey. We sought to do a deep-dive, a principles-first look at Workforce Australia employment services. Up to the 2025-26 financial year we're going to spend $7 billion of taxpayers' money on the Workforce Australia program, so the question is: are we getting value for money, is it on the right track, and will it deliver the outcomes that we're seeking for our nation?

I think it's important to look at this over a landscape where we have an unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent. On 30 September this year Workforce Australia reported having 624,000 individuals connected with them. When looking at the data we realised that some groups are overrepresented: 14.5 per cent of the case load is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and 18.4 per cent are from CALD backgrounds. These statistics come on the back of the fact that we also have over 390,000 job vacancies in our nation. When we're looking at the vacancies, knowing that 175,000 of those are in retail, wholesale, accommodation, food services and the care economy, yet we have 624,000 people who are unemployed and looking for work, it seems that there's got to be some sort of mismatch here, particularly when we look at the fact that, stubbornly, nearly one in four people on the case load have been there for five years or longer.

The truth is that many people will cycle in and out of Workforce Australia, but my focus was on how we can help the people who are in that cohort, who have been on the Workforce Australia program and its previous iteration, jobactive, and how we can intensively work with people to support them to have a better life and a better future. Clearly something's not right when you're spending that many billions yet 25 per cent of the people are not able to be properly supported into employment.

This committee was tasked with a principles-first review of employment services to look at best practice, to work out how we can potentially create a system that helps people to address their barriers, and, importantly, to look at a strengths based system that can look at the work of an individual and help that individual to see what strengths they have within to help them find employment. Some of the barriers I'm talking about are health related and some are substance abuse related, but the biggest one we came across, particularly for young people, was having a licence. A young person having their driver's licence is the biggest key indicator of them being able to find employment.

I commend the chair, the member for Bruce. His tireless dedication to this work was extraordinary; it was actually quite exhausting at times! But it was fantastic to be led by a chair that had such passion and drive, and that passion and drive has not waned over the years. On the member for Monash: I was in the previous parliament where the member for Monash was a chair of a committee—another select committee—where we were very much looking at these issues around how we better support long-term unemployed people, people who are part of a cycle of disadvantage where they've been disadvantaged for generations.

In total the committee has made 75 recommendations, and I think it's fair to say that, out of all the committees I've been on, this has very much been a deep dive into policy best practice and evidence base. I'd like to touch on some of those recommendations. Recommendation 4, I think, is critical to so much of it. When we're looking at Workforce Australia, we have contracts delivered by very large, multinational organisations, and they're delivering them in a scattergun approach right across Australia depending on where they were successful in the tender process. But we need to keep them local. Local is the greatest chance of success, where we have a network of regional hubs and service gateways, where local organisations are able to properly map what the employment needs are in their area—and they know everyone, and there is a trust built in there. Two or three contracts ago, we used to have a lot of local delivery where maybe a small organisation was delivering in one regional map, rather than there being these large multinationals I mentioned. It needs to be about flexibility, working closely with those recipients, those jobseekers, and with employers.

Recommendation 6 is a recommendation that says levels of government should implement strategies to provide those who are long-term unemployed with traineeships in the creation of entry-level jobs. Over the generations, or just over the last couple of decades, governments at all three levels have divested themselves of the responsibility of being the first job provider. Back in the 1990s, when I was a young person, the South Australian government was the biggest employer of apprentices. Now they do not provide any apprenticeships to any young people, and that's a great shame. I think that this is a very worthy recommendation, and that local, state and federal governments have a duty to provide young people in particular, but also long-term people, with a job. For young people, perhaps that first job can be a great foundation.

Recommendation 7 expands on that concept by creating a permanent administrative employee in every electorate office. When I worked in South Australian politics, we had that. I think I had four or five trainees over that period of time. They would spend up to a year in the electorate office. They also gained a certificate III in government administration or business. Not all those young people stayed in politics, but they have all gone on to have very good, sound careers. I think we have a role to play in that. It's been a joy to watch their careers flourish, and I'd love to see us do that here in the federal parliament.

Recommendation 10 relates to providing high-intensity case management for people furthest from the labour market. That's working with people on the challenges and barriers that are stopping them from getting employed. How can we expect a person to find employment when they don't have secure housing, when they are, perhaps, missing teeth, when they don't have any clothes to attend an interview or when they haven't got a quality resume or those skills for how you conduct yourself in an interview and need confidence building? We need to work with people on this. I think that someone getting a job is a byproduct of being able to have their life changed, working with them to change their life. I think this is an excellent recommendation. We need to work holistically with the person for them to lead on what issues they need the most support.

Recommendation 11 is my favourite recommendation out of all 75 recommendations. This is for a youth-specific employment service. We know that for young people up to age 25 their brains have not finished developing. We know that the transactional style that we have of dealing with a provider in Workforce Australia does not work for a lot of young people. Transition to Work is a very successful program, but not all young people can connect to Transition to Work. So this recommendation is about providing a gateway for young people, irrespective of their level of need and support. All young people would be funnelled into a youth focused, youth friendly, youth specialist employment service provider that is perhaps connected near other youth support in the community. I think this is an excellent recommendation and one that would provide enormous dividends, particularly for young people, working with them in a flexible way. It's about career development as well as addressing those barriers. We know that young people are the largest cohort of homeless. We also know that, as I said before, getting a licence and having some of those really basic life qualifications is critical.

Recommendation 45 is around employers. Very few employers connect with Workforce Australia. They don't like the system. As the member for Bruce said, there are often a number of organisations that have a shopfront in the one township. There's a huge turnover of Workforce Australia staff, so those relationships aren't built well in many locations with employers. Many employers have expressed frustration with respect to the kinds of candidates that are sent to them, candidates who are not a good fit. This all goes back to working better with the participant or the client to make sure that we can have a strengths based model where we look at what the person wants to achieve and then find the right fit for them so that employers are not flooded with people that are not going to be a good fit for their organisation, which makes them reluctant to then work again with that Workforce Australia provider.

I will mention two more recommendations. Work in the community is recommendation 49. This is a really exciting recommendation. We saw in Ireland that work in the community worked really well. What I thought was very exciting in Ireland was that the people who were involved in work in the community—it sounds a bit unusual—could be doing things like connecting to their local township and be driving a bus and or part of taking care of the gardening grounds and ovals. In my regional community and, I am sure, in many regional communities in Australia, our local councils do not own our infrastructure; we manage that ourselves. So a program like work in the community could work particularly well in regional Australia and would be very valued. It would assist participants to build their personal capacity and their self-esteem, particularly if they are very long-term unemployed and have been naturally out of the workforce for a long time.

Lastly, I will mention recommendation 50. We saw some fantastic social enterprises right across Australia—cafes, laundromats and gardening services. They are truly wonderful hubs that create a place of work experience, knowledge building and building of social connections for particularly people who are long-term unemployed, many of whom experience loneliness and social isolation.

They're excellent, and I'd like to think that we can use recommendation 50 to look at building more social enterprises across Australia.

It is my hope that this wonderful report—the writing of which has seen the blood, sweat and tears of, particularly, the member for Bruce and the secretariat—does not sit on a shelf and gather dust as so many excellent reports from committees do. There are some very sound recommendations in here. I hope that we all have the opportunity to see the minister and the department work collaboratively through these recommendations and implement some of them in the near future.

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