2025-12-09
Today’s second damning report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman into the administration of the “mutual obligations” welfare system should leave Labor with no choice but to halt all suspensions of Centrelink payments and compulsory activities, The Greens say.
The “mutual obligations” system, familiar to anyone who has been on JobSeeker, forces hundreds of thousands of people to participate in harmful and time-wasting activities which do nothing to help people find work, but cost taxpayers billions in contracts to private providers to administer every year.
Today’s Commonwealth Ombudsman’s report into the Targeted Compliance Framework (which operationalises “mutual obligations”) found that privatised employment service providers regularly make inappropriate decisions resulting in a high rate of decisions being overturned, that oversight of job service agencies is poor and lacking in transparency, that communications about income support penalties from DEWR are misleading.
The Ombudsman also affirmed the pointlessness of this punishing and costly system, citing evidence that there are not enough jobs for majority of JobSeekers:
“Stigmatisation of unsuccessful job seekers as people who are reluctant to accept employment may contribute to the limited oversight of providers and possible narrow administration of the program, despite the evidence telling us that the majority of the 652,300 current job seekers are in fact unlikely to find ongoing employment no matter how hard they try, given that current unemployment in Australia is close to the natural level of unemployment with respect to the inflation rate.” (p5)
Under mutual obligations, over a hundred thousand income support suspensions are issued by private providers each month, with dismal accountability and at arms length from the government. 321,995 payment suspensions have been inflicted on 205,870 JobSeekers under this system between May and July of this year alone (14:56)
A previous review of the Targeted Compliance Framework conducted in September found that the lawfulness of these payment suspensions cannot be assured (pg7).
In Senate Estimates in October, the Minister for Youth Jess Walsh, representing the Minister for Employment, refused to say she had confidence that the system was operating lawfully (14:52). Yet thousands of decisions to take essential payments away from JobSeekers continue under this system every day.
Lines attributable to Senator Penny Allman-Payne, Greens spokesperson for Social Services:
“Today’s report confirms what any JobSeeker already knows: the ‘mutual obligations’ system is pointless, cruel, and rather than helping people, treats people on income support as disposable.”
“For too long, dodgy companies like Sarina Russo and APM have cashed in millions of dollars on the outsourcing of massive parts of our welfare system.”
“Private job agencies take food off the table of thousands of JobSeekers with almost no accountability, transparency or oversight, and meanwhile Labor doesn’t seem to care if the system is even lawful.”
“Nothing in this report will fix the rotten soul of this system, which grants dodgy private job agencies extraordinary power over people’s lives with no oversight or accountability. The mutual obligations system needs to be abolished.”
“We can’t keep punishing people for not finding jobs which don’t actually exist.”