JB Chifley
Australian Prime Minister
1945-1949
Employment First: Improving Australia's Employment Service and Job Network
Report prepared for the Chifley Research Centre - July 2004
Mark Considine - University of Melbourne
Dan Finn - University of Portsmouth
Beneath the headline unemployment figure which has tracked downwards with each successive year of economic growth, joblessness remains a tragic problem for parents; young people, the mature aged and the disabled.
Today one in three teenagers living in south eastern Melbourne and the northern suburbs of Adelaide are unemployed. More than 800,000 children are growing up in jobless families, many of these headed by a single female. The number of people reliant on income support for longer than 5 years - has increased by 68% to 126,650 jobseekers.
We spend around a billion dollars a year on Job Network and related services yet the evidence shows that this massive investment has mostly secured jobs for people who would have got work anyway. The current system has failed those lacking skills or experience, trying to juggle family responsibilities, disabilities, discrimination or just long-term isolation from work.
When you add to this the endless hold-ups, the red tape and bureaucracy involved in the average low income person's involvement with Centrelink you can begin to understand why the most disadvantaged Australians have become discouraged and cynical about the alleged benefits of our strong economy. Other countries do far better than this, we can do better too.
I believe that if we are to make inroads into welfare inefficiency in Australia, Centrelink and Job Network's structural deficiencies need major surgery.
Too little of what takes place at Centrelink has anything at all to do with improving employability or gaining employment outcomes – its about managing unemployment, not solving it. In the current system every single job seeker is handed-off to a Job Network agency once they have been assessed and placed on income support. But for the first three months they are often left to fend for themselves.
This is the reverse of the way an effective system should work. The first experience unemployed people have with the income support system should include an employment assessment, a better off in work calculation and immediate referral to suitable work.
The new system should make employment the focus of every assessment and case plan with every person of workforce age seeking income support.
The links between Centrelink and Job Network are too complex and bureaucratic. Increasingly the Job Network agencies have become caught in this costly administrative tangle and they now spend far too much of their time performing routine transactions and meeting mandatory milestones, regardless of whether these help people into jobs or not.
Job Network agencies are specialists in working with people who have not managed to find work through conventional means. We should be valuing this expertise by matching these agencies with those job seekers who need short periods of individualized assistance, or specialist job skills development and programs to address special barriers. Using these agencies to undertake routine interviews and job matching for job seekers with few barriers to employment involves duplication of effort, complex administrative interactions, and extra confusion for both job seekers and employers.
The new approach should continue to require that all job seekers meet job brokers as part of their regular interactions with the income support system, and the use of mandatory programs to remove barriers to employment. Work for the Dole should be strengthened and improved to create a focus upon increasing labour market attachment through job skills programs once other intensive job search support has been tried.
Instead of a large bureaucracy designed to administer benefit payments and control traffic between a myriad of different agencies, Australia needs a flexible national network where programs and interventions are focused on employment. These new Work, Income and Opportunity Centres should offer employment help and income assistance within the same relationship. Think of a one stop job shop that has both Centrelink and Job Network staff under the one roof, working in partnership, not in competition.
This new streamlined partnership to help jobseekers should be mirrored at the policy level by merging the Department's of Family and Community Services and Employment and Workplace Relations. The policy turf wars between these agencies symbolise everything that is currently wrong with local services for jobseekers.
While structural reform is clearly needed, such change should come through evolution rather than the kind of top-down revolution that has been visited on Job Network services, employers and jobseekers every three years. The current Government is now using pathfinder agencies to blaze a reform trail in the Stronger Families program. This kind of method could be used to define the new relationships and local targets in a reformed Centrelink-Job Network system. Agencies with a strong record of working in partnership should be valued and all refunded organisations offered renewable five year contracts to promote stability and retention of skills.
Most importantly, some of the money provided to agencies should be on the basis of their overall performance, not how good they are at helping selected individuals. This would discourage the tendency to help only those with few employment barriers to the exclusion of the most disadvantaged.
Improved public-private collaboration lies at the heart of this strategy, with different agencies and organisations contributing the things they do best in a framework which rewards high performance and the sharing of innovation.
If we are to help those back to work who are currently missing out, if we are to assist employers in finding the staff they require, we must have a system that is much more employment oriented from start to finish. In such a system individuals will have both rights and responsibilities. For this to succeed jobseekers will be expected to be serious about finding appropriate work, and the Government and its partners will have to be organised in a way that delivers on their part of the mutual obligation bargain.
