After all those dole diaries and ‘mutual obligations’, it turns out Australia’s privatised employment services don’t work | Van Badham
After all those dole diaries and ‘mutual obligations’, it turns out Australia’s privatised employment services don’t work | Van Badham
This is another legacy of John Howard and the neoliberal ideology he and his fans pursued despite the evidence
Literally no government service has ever run better once privatised. It's always ended up more expensive and less effective. I have no idea why the idea that privatising services is a solution to anything except unsatisfied greed.
Prove me wrong with just one example.
Commonwealth Bank isn't really any different. Not better, not worse.
There was a good period there where Qantas was consistently getting better and cheaper than it was under public ownership. It's gone downhill in the last decade, though.
Privatising the Post Offices has led to wildly variable experiences, some post offices are far worse, but if you have a good franchisee, some of them are much better.
I'm still dirty about privatising Medibank, and it cost the Libs 15 years in opposition. But today's Medibank competes well in the private health sector.
Telstra .... nah, just kidding. But it is getting better than it has been.
Maybe that's the secret - it takes 20+ years for something privatised to get better? These examples have all been private since last century.
The privatised Commonwealth Employment Service will never get better. The services offered by the private sector for job placement are utterly dismal. Personal experience via my then 55 yo partner being laid off from the mines up in Muswellbrook.
Every job he got after that, casual or permanent, were positions that I hunted down. They interviewed him once, right at the start, and not a single offer came his way from them in the ensuing 4 years that he worked or looked for work.
Commonwealth Bank isn’t really any different. Not better, not worse.
Privatised employment services are a shining example of a privatised service that "runs better".
It feathers the nest of capitalists with premium, predictable, inexhaustible government money.
It discourages legitimate claimants from seeking social security.
It perpetuates the notion that being unemployed and poor is the fault of the incurable laziness of the unemployed and poor.
Of course, it doesn't actually reduce unemployment or lift people out of generational poverty, but the only way to do that is to create jobs.
Privatisation is the result of capitalists looking at everything and asking themselves "how could someone profit from this"? It's not about running services more cost-effectively or making things easier on clients - it's about filtering taxpayer money into private pockets.
Private companies aren't naturally more efficient or less wasteful than government-owned entities - the streams of taxpayer money going to big banks, resource companies and others as subsidies should disabuse anyone of that notion. And arguably a large part of perceived government 'inefficiency' is due to the fact that they contract government projects out to private companies which then keep extracting money via "cost blowouts" and delays.
Privatisation is the result of capitalists looking at everything and asking themselves “how could someone profit from this”?
Most privatized assets are already very profitable - the rich wouldn't be trying to take it if it wasn't valuable. Balance sheet aside, public assets profit society as a whole.
I would say privatisation is the rich asking how fewer people could profit this.
This isn't about assets though - it's about government services. Things that aren't designed to be profitable, that naturally will cost money to operate while not generally making money. By privatising these, they are now entities that have to make a profit, and that generally happens by extracting taxpayer money, as well as cutting cost, by reducing staff, service levels, equipment et al. That doesn't make it more efficient - just more painful to use for clients. $9.5bn per year? Someone's laughing all the way to the bank.
Water is wet, more news at 11.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A massive congratulations to the neoliberal architects of this system on having a comfy, fun and lucrative three decades of experimentation at Australia’s expense, just to throw up their hands at the $9.5bn annual waste and go “whoopsie”.
Thirty years of pointless personal “resume writing workshops” in communities where unemployment resulted from shared structural realities of collapsing industries and offshoring.
Thirty years of vacuous chats with “job specialists” who were, in many cases, less qualified or experienced than the people obliged to take their advice on employment prospects in industries they knew less than nothing about.
Hill’s proposal that government be returned to the centre of unemployment service is practical and cost-efficient, given the inquiry revealed private providers were spending 50% of their time not on facilitating jobs but administering their own operations.
The task ahead for Labor to reform the system beyond denouncing it is unenviable, given the dehumanising twin tropes of the “dole bludger” and “fat cats” of the public service have now been in poisonous circulation since shadowy conservative thinktanks inserted them into the discourse at the time unemployment spiked during the oil shocks of the 1970s.
Persuading Australians after 50 years that the unemployed are the structural consequence of deliberate policies designed to create a “reserve army of labour” and keep wages low rather than aspirational aristocrats extorting taxpayer funds to play the lute is not as easy a task as it should be.
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Cool. Now stfu and advocate for the removal of mutual obligations. Anything less than that and you're still a scab and class traitor. This issue is actually surprisingly simple, no mutual obligations = no tax payer money going to welfare frauds (JSP system). Then we can start discussing how to reform employment support and what that would look like. But any system that's underpinned by mutual obligations will be deeply flawed.