Meanwhile in Australian Minister for Employment and Liberal Senator for Western Australia Michaelia Cash’s ministerial portfolio…..
The Coalition’s flagship $7.3 billion employment services program has been branded a “hopeless mess” with fewer than 40 per cent of unemployed clients finding long-term work, more than a third of job agencies performing so badly they should be disqualified and warnings that fraud may go undetected.
The Australian has uncovered evidence of job agencies inducing or harassing former clients for pay slips from their new employers to claim taxpayer bonuses worth thousands of dollars each.
Agencies are handed incentive payments four weeks after a client starts a job and again at three months and cumulatively can get up to $13,750 at six months if the client stays in the job.
Fewer than 40 per cent of clients remain employed after six months and almost half of the $1.7bn the department spends on the program each year goes on administration.
An analysis by The Australian of the five-year program reveals 569 employment services sites out of 1648 around the nation have failed a measure set by the Department of Employment that requires their business be reduced or taken away entirely, but only 12 companies have had their share reduced.
The problem is particularly severe in Western Australia, the home state of Employment Minister Michaelia Cash, where just 14 per cent of the 107 employment services sites met the grade for service standards. Only two sites were operating above the national average but the department has “deferred” any shake-up of the private companies “to give providers an opportunity to improve their performance”.
The bonuses under the redesigned “jobactive” program launched by the Coalition are big business and, in many cases, securing them is the only revenue keeping the organisations afloat.
The Australian understands there are active moves within the Labor Party to reconsider the entire employment services model, and while opposition employment services spokesman Ed Husic was tight-lipped on the issue in August, he admonished the system in a speech to service providers.
“We spend roughly $9bn on government jobs programs, the second largest area of procurement outside of defence,” he said.
“We have 730,000 people out of work … 40,000 employment services consultants and only 20 per cent of the people helped by the government’s jobs programs find work for more than 26 weeks.”
The Salvation Army lost more than $1 million a month in the first 18 months of the scheme launched in July 2015 because it was not qualifying for the bonus payments it needed to.
David Thompson, the chief executive of Jobs Australia, the peak organisation for non-profit providers, said the system was a “hopeless mess”, not “hugely effective” and had been run to the advantage of the largest companies.
“On average, the staff who work at these places have a high-school-level education and a caseload of 150 jobseekers,” he said. “That’s average. Some of them have 300 people they have to see in a week. They do not have a relationship with anyone. It’s cheap.”….
The department declined to release the names of the companies in the “low-impact breaches” because it said it was “concerned that publishing such information may cause commercial harm to the relevant providers”.
Of the 65 providers contracted to deliver employment support services on behalf of the federal government, the Department of Employment has classified more than 43 per cent of having a risk rating of “extreme or high”.
Of this number, more than half were rated extreme or high due to concerns about their ongoing financial viability, more than one-third due to overall service standards, 28 per cent were deemed compliance risks and almost 4 per cent were categorised as being at risk of fraud.
