The first yearly report of the AUWU’s National Advocacy Hotline provides a
unique insight into the dysfunction occurring within the Government’s $3
billion-a-year employment services industry. The AUWU strongly champions the need for a thorough investigation into job agencies, Centrelink and Work for the Dole sites across the country. Given the dysfunctional and punitive nature of the employment services industry, the Coalition’s recent push to give job agencies unprecedented powers to penalise the unemployed is inappropriate and dangerous. The implementation of the Government’s proposed PaTH program next year presents similar problems.

The AUWU would like to point out in the strongest possible terms that before any changes are made to the employment services industry, the government must appoint an independent body to review and appropriately regulate the employment services industry. The government should and must do better to ensure that unemployed workers are treated fairly and offered the helping hand they require to get back into the workforce. To this end, the AUWU make the following recommendations to the Coalition government:

• Establish an employment services ombudsman to handle complaints
• Establish a parliamentary enquiry into the implementation of the
jobactive and DES deeds
• Raise Newstart to the Henderson Poverty Line
• Improve laws and processes to hold badly behaving job agencies
accountable
• Provide more funding to advocacy support related to employment
services issues
• Remove strict eligibility requirements for the Disability Support Pension
• Abolish the dangerous Work for the Dole and Community Development
Programs.
• Establish parliamentary enquiry into Centrelink’s process of rejecting
medical certificates
• Establish parliamentary enquiry into Centrelink’s imposition of financial
penalties
• Implement Extensive Government Job Creation Programs