An Australian Labour MP has questioned the privatisation of the country’s employment services system, saying it’s failed to prepare many disadvantaged jobseekers for work and made others less employable by demeaning them, reports The Guardian.MP Julian Hill who was also appointed chair of a parliamentary inquiry into the sector, insisted the inquiry into the AUD 7.1 billion (USD 4.6 billion) Workforce Australia scheme will go where a long line of past investigations hadn’t by examining privatisation and ‘work-first’ ideology. Hill said the objective of supporting people into good jobs was “absent entirely” from the current system.

As evidence of the privatisation’s model’s failure, Hill pointed to the current labour market, where employers are “screaming for workers” yet there “remain hundreds of thousands of Australians stuck in the long-term unemployment queue”. Hill also criticised the “Targeted Compliance Framework” (TCF), which hands jobseekers ‘demerits’ for non-compliance. Jobseekers can have their payments cancelled for repeated ‘non-compliance’ in a so-called ‘penalty zone’ under the TCF.