Rethinking the Marketisation of Australia's Employment Services

In Australia the dominant construction of citizen obligation for the unemployed has legitimated a host of policies and practices, including ‘strong paternalism’, punitive financial sanctions and tightly scripted employment pathways that allow little room for the exercise of autonomy. Moreover, the Australian Government has devolved responsibility for the exercise of rights and obligations to a ‘quasi-market’ network of private and non-profit organisations in the form of Job Services Australia. The institutional design of unemployment policy combined with the privatisation of employment services has created a number of unintended consequences over nearly two decades of reform. The ‘helping relationship’ has been commodified, front-line staff discretion has been reduced and the employment outcomes for the long-term unemployed have seen little improvement. Incremental reform by successive Australian governments has done little to address the power imbalance and unintended consequences associated with disciplinary poverty governance. This paper seeks to examine how these processes and outcomes might be transformed so that employment assistance can become a key plank of a more just and respectful society. To this end, the paper will employ a historical and comparative analysis to problematize governance of the unemployed in Australia, reviewing recent evidence. I will argue that a new system does not have to abandon cross-sector governance. Non-profits can play an enabling role in the field of employment, but they must be freed from compliance burdens and strong paternalism that has subverted their capacity for public accountability, social advocacy and a mutually beneficial alignment of employer and worker needs.