ExposureDraft of the Purchasing Arrangements for Employment Services 2015-2020, released 28 July 2014:
ABC News 28 July 2014:
Most unemployed people will be required to look for up to 40 jobs a month and work for the dole, as part of the Federal Government's $5.1 billion overhaul of the job services system.
Details of the Government's draft model and tender information for new five-year contracts, which would take effect in July next year, are expected to be released this morning.
"This new system will focus job service providers on getting people into work, it will cut the red tape, and it will free them up to use their initiatives and innovate in the ways they deliver programs," Assistant Employment Minister Luke Hartsuyker told the ABC's AM program.
"It's going to deliver far better outcomes for job seekers and far better outcomes for employers."
"Job service providers will be rewarded for getting people into work for periods as short as four weeks - so there'll be four-week, 12-week, and 26-week outcomes.
Forty job application a month per person on unemployment benefits?
Did no-one in government bother to look at official ABS statistics?
There
were 2,076,666 actively
trading businesses in Australia at 30 June 2013. Of which 1,264,298 did not
employ staff, 563,412 only employed between 1-4 people and only 3,598 had
staffing levels above 200 workers.
This new policy would generate a minimum of 29 million individual job applications nationwide each month (or close to one million per day) for the foreseeable future when there are probably less than 147,000 job vacancies in the 812,368 employing businesses right across the country at any given time.
The human resources departments of companies operating in Australia are going to have a collective nervous breakdown trying to process that many ‘going nowhere’ job applications.
I can see many a giant waste paper basket and numerous overloaded electronic mail boxes in their futures.
The business community was quick to realise this, with The
Sydney Morning Herald reporting on 29 July:
''They will
be inundated,'' says Peter Strong of the Council of Small Business of
Australia. ''It's an embarrassment for everybody and it's going to make people
angry. The small business person might be having a lousy day and no customers
are coming in, but she'll be getting job-seekers. In the hospitality industry
most of the time you know straight away whether someone can pour a cup of
coffee. You don't want that person coming back month after month.''
Mr. Hartsuyker (as befits a member of the modern National Party of Australia) responded to a complex issue in a simplistic, one-dimensional media grab.
Mr. Hartsuyker (as befits a member of the modern National Party of Australia) responded to a complex issue in a simplistic, one-dimensional media grab.
Unemployed people
will be penalised if they indiscriminately spam employers with applications
rather than make genuine efforts to find work.
Jobseekers
who do not use a range of job search techniques — or approach a range of
would-be employers — will face compliance, said a spokesman for Assistant
Minister for Employment Luke Hartsuyker.
This may
include financial penalties or payment suspensions. Under the new employment
services 2015 model, which will compel jobseekers to apply for 40 jobs a month,
providers will be able to initiate compliance actions against those whose efforts
are clearly unsatisfactory or non-genuine.
Unemployed
people can use technology to make jobseeking more efficient, but may be
penalised if it can be shown that their use of technology is not part of a
genuine effort to find work.
Hartsuyker is proving himself to be a political fool of the first water.
Snapshot taken from The Australian video & graphic found at Google Images
1 comment:
Newstart is approx $500 per fortnight, the Prime Minister earns $19,514 pf. If our Politicians performances & accountability were as stringent as what is required of Australian citizens on Centrelink Benefits. perhaps our Country would be the lucky country again. Imagine if we had the capacity to cut the pay of a politician for non-compliance & failure to achieve required outcomes? Something that would achieve this is a mechanism within the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia known as Representative Recall - literally the ability of each electorate to recall a poor performing MP & replace them. No party politics involved, no general election required. Sadly that would require a Referendum. To achieve that under the current mechanisms in the Constitution we'd have to wait for an elected politician to lobby for such a referendum.Then we need a referendum on Citizen Initiated Referenda, so this mechanism can also be added to the Constitution, literally enabling all Australians the right to initiate a referendum. Alas, we don't even have a Bill of Rights, according to the Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia we don't have equality; "as it contains no explicit guarantee of equality, or exclusion of differential treatment based on criteria such as gender, race, or sexuality, of the type that is commonly found in countries with a Bill of Rights".
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