In Australia it sometimes feels as though there has never been any hope of a genuine level playing field developing in a society whose institutions are hampered by a thick 18th century British-European exoskeleton.
That the notion of universal welfare has always been distorted by perceptions of class and a false narrative of the deserving and undeserving poor.
In modern Australia the following is just another example of what happens when instead of the creation of constructive social policy, poverty merely stops being an exploitive cottage industry for religious charities and instead expands into a gold mine for rapacious secular opportunists.
The Saturday Paper, 26 August 2023:
Outsourced employment service providers are funnelling millions of dollars in government funding earmarked for people on welfare through their own companies, related entities and labour-hire outfits, creating paper empires out of their impoverished clients.
Under the $6.3 billion, five-year Workforce Australia model, private and not-for-profit job service providers are able to receive “outcome” payments for placing jobseekers in “work” within their own organisation and receive funding to refer them to other services and training, which can also be delivered by subsidiaries or related parties.
In short, a provider can be paid to take on a welfare recipient by the federal government and then be paid to place them into training within their own organisation and then be paid again by placing the person into work somewhere else in that organisation’s network.
This comes at the same time as an increasing awareness that mutual obligations – the system by which people on welfare must apply for an arbitrary number of jobs, enrol in training or perform set activities each month under threat of payment suspension – is damaging and does not lead people to employment.
Data released under freedom of information laws and through budget estimates reveals that in the year to June 30 the Employment Fund made $33.6 million in commitments to job providers within their own organisation, for example for counselling services provided by an entity with the same ABN.
Excluding wage subsidies, which cannot be claimed in this way, the spending represents a quarter of the more than $100 million allocated from the Employment Fund in total. One provider alone made $5.5 million worth of claims via its own entities in a nine-month period to March 31.
While the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has tallied the figures for organisations using the same ABN, it took longer to come up with a figure for how much providers were spending on related companies – such as those that shared a director or major shareholder – because providers self-report and the reports are often unreliable.
The Saturday Paper has been told the dollar value for related-party claims from the fund is $9.2 million in the year to June, bringing the total amount of money being recirculated within companies to $42.8 million…..
Read the full article here.
