The government's Jobactive program for the unemployed is in desperate need of reform, according to government backbencher Matt O'Sullivan, who says people are cycled in and out of courses with no job to show for it.
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"The training for training's sake issue not only wastes an enormous amount of taxpayers' dollars," he told the Senate on Tuesday. "It completely depletes the trainee of any sense of pride and aspiration."
Job seekers, especially Indigenous, were often said to have "more certificates than there are TAFE colleges to wallpaper their hallways with", he said.
Senator O'Sullivan used his inaugural speech to call for an overhaul of the $7 billion program when contracts with job agencies ended in two years, saying it was the second largest government services procurement, with only defence costing more.
His comments follow a Senate inquiry this year, which said people were finding jobs in spite of the program, not because of it.
About 750,000 people are in Jobactive, assigned to 65 agencies contracted to help them prepare for jobs and find work. The agencies are charged with ensuring people apply for 20 jobs a month and sign up for work for the dole if they're unemployed for a year, and penalising people if they miss requirements.
The Senate inquiry said job seekers were being forced to miss work to attend appointments with their agency, employers were being burdened with poor applications, and agencies had an incentive to churn people through short-term work, because they were paid for work that lasted four, 12 and 26 weeks, with nothing after that. While the government said the program had seen more than 1.2 million job placements since 2015, many placements were the same people cycling in and out. People who were easy to place were "creamed" by providers, while more difficult unemployed were "parked".
Case managers were overloaded, averaging 150 job seekers each. More than 12 million appointments were scheduled a year, and job seekers were penalised for failing to attend appointments, despite sometimes having to travel long distances or miss work to attend, only to get short shrift when they arrived, the Senate inquiry said.
Coalition members of the Senate inquiry disputed some of its findings.
But separately, the government set up an expert panel last year. Senator O'Sullivan, who was on the expert panel before his election, is pushing the model it recommended.
About half of the unemployed could "self-service", reporting their activity and accessing support they needed online, he said. That would free up money to spend on people with significant and multiple barriers.
The program should be turned on its head, starting with a job that needed filling and training people for that job.
"What we need to deliver to employers is people who are skilled, competent, able to take up the job, and can be safe and productive," he said in an interview.
Senator O'Sullivan, who ran the Generation One project in Western Australia for Indigenous unemployed, said it was 30-40 per cent more expensive than Jobactive per job, but had better success. After six months, 80 per cent were still in work, compared with 27 per cent under Jobactive.