Employment Minister Tony Burke has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset community attitudes towards unemployment and the unemployed.
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Last year's long awaited "Rebuilding Employment Services" report, which landed in November, coincided with near record low unemployment and a national skills shortage.
It is the perfect time to revisit the way joblessness and under-employment are viewed and dealt with, and to put the myth of the "dole bludger", a staple of both sides of politics for decades, to bed once and for all.
While the old CES model, which was swamped by a tidal wave of job losses in the 1970s and 1980s, was far from perfect, it was delivered by professional public servants who saw their clients as something more than numbers on a whiteboard to tick and flick.
That, unfortunately, is pretty much what is happening at the moment thanks to the outsourcing of employment services to free-market entrepreneurial firms, some of them multi-nationals, in recent decades.
All too often employment consultants are recruited off the street with little or no specialist knowledge or training and placed in a situation where their own jobs depend on meeting targets.
![Employment Minister Tony Burke should bring compassion and humanity back to employment services. Picture by Elesa Kurtz Employment Minister Tony Burke should bring compassion and humanity back to employment services. Picture by Elesa Kurtz](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/LLBstgPA4H8EG9DTTGcXBL/db4f7d98-83ca-4e71-9680-b3d72126795a.jpg/r0_0_5568_3712_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
It should come as no surprise that while the able-bodied and the skilled-up - the low-hanging fruit - fare relatively well, those with only a basic level of education, physical or mental challenges and issues with substance abuse, a criminal history or intergenerational disadvantage do not.
The result has been described as a "hunger games" that generates winners and losers.
It should not have escaped anybody's attention that this nation, which once prided itself on its "fair go" ethos, is doing a very good job of creating a growing underclass of long-term unemployed, and often homeless, people who just can't break out of poverty and destitution.
While the government has not committed to re-establishing a full blown Commonwealth Employment Service as part of its response to the report, it is dipping its toe in the water by saying it is open to having "more active stewardship of the system".
Mr Burke has announced a trial of APS employment service delivery in Broome at a cost of $3.7 million. Labor is also funding a pilot pre-employment service for parents in Playford in South Australia.
Both projects sound promising. The long term unemployed, who are all too often told they are the authors of their own misfortunes, are Australians too. They also have aspirations, family ties and hopes that the future might be better than the past.
But they are confronted with a system many find hard to navigate and also suffer from stigma, discrimination and prejudice.
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Telling people they have to apply for X-number of jobs per month if they are to retain their JobSeeker allowance is counterproductive if they live in an isolated community where few, if any, jobs are available. What are they expected to do? Fire up the Lexus and cruise into the big smoke to try their luck there while staying at the Hilton perhaps? Of course not.
This, of course, is the moment where one cues faux outrage from the opposition whose belief most of the money spent on welfare will be used to buy alcohol and drugs and that whatever remains will be wasted is a part of its DNA.
While the former prime minister Scott Morrison was very fond of saying "the best form of welfare is a job", neither he, or any members of his government, took a serious interest in those who struggle the hardest to crack the employment market.
Mr Burke can either maintain a system rooted in cynicism and callousness or go down the path of humanity and compassion. The choice should be obvious.