Australia’s Unemployment System Is a Marketized, Bureaucratic Nightmare
Australia’s privatized employment services system doesn’t help people find work. Instead, thanks to reforms first introduced by the Labor Party, it punishes welfare recipients with a bureaucratic maze of “mutual obligations.”
In the absence of an unemployed-workers movement or a left-wing opposition, successive governments have had free rein to heap cruel punishments onto the unemployed. (Quinn Rooney / Getty Images)
Australia, we are told, has achieved “full employment.” According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), this is achieved whenever the unemployment rate sits between the “low 4s and high 3s.” Today, the official unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1974. The RBA predicts that full employment will persist until at least 2024.
There is, however, one slight problem. Despite having achieved full employment, there are a total of 1.3 million job seekers, of whom 840,000 are underemployed and 473,600 are entirely without paid work. They are competing for 480,000 listed job vacancies. If you add “potential workers” — those who want work but aren’t counted as unemployed or underemployed — the number of job seekers almost doubles.
How can we be at full employment when there are more than five unemployed or underemployed people competing for every job vacancy? Further, if we’re at full employment, why do unemployed workers spend on average over two years receiving the JobSeeker unemployment benefit, a payment that brings its receivers roughly halfway to the poverty line? Today, just under 900,000 people are dependent on unemployment benefits, a higher number than before the pandemic, when the unemployment rate was 5.1 percent.
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