Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank Senator Bernardi for some notice of this question. The Australian government is, of course, committed, and very proud to be committed, to getting Australians off welfare and into work. One of the ways that we do that is through our world-class employment services system. What this system does is help prepare Australians for meaningful and sustainable work opportunities.

The government's principal employment service is known as jobactive. If you compare it to the former contract, Job Services Australia, jobactive is delivering more 26-week outcomes at a lower cost. From July 2015 to October 2019, jobactive achieved 1.5 million job placements, and it continues to achieve around 1,000 job placements per day.

You referred to the integrity of jobactive providers. I can assure you the government are committed to the integrity of jobactive providers and we expect a very high level of service for their clients. Each provider is given a star rating. This star rating is publicly available, so a jobseeker can actually go online to the department's website and compare providers. The most recent star rating result showed 90 per cent of employment regions have one or more sites with the highest possible rating of five stars. The best performing sites are actually spread across regional and metropolitan Australia.

If a provider is not performing—and I welcome any feedback in that regard—the department can actually take away some of their market share and reallocate it to a provider that is a high-performing provider. That way we are ensuring that only the best providers are in the market.