If I were minister for employment services, I’d begin by stating what should already be obvious: Australia’s employment services system is not fit for purpose.

It does not primarily assist people into meaningful work. It manages them, disciplines them, and — too often — actively undermines them. And it does so with bipartisan support.

This is not a glamorous portfolio. It’s rarely given to those tasked with driving reform. More often it’s handed to the loyal – those expected to quietly administer a system no-one in power is particularly proud of. If I found myself in the role, it would likely be an administrative miscalculation. But I would use it to confront what has been allowed to drift, and in many ways, to rot.

The current regime of mutual obligations is central to the problem. These are not mutual, nor are they meaningfully linked to employment outcomes. They are compliance tools. The risk of losing income support for failing to accrue 100 arbitrary “points” each month — regardless of personal circumstances — is not a pathway to employment. It’s an exercise in control. Nearly three-quarters of participants in Workforce Australia have had their payments suspended, often for reasons that defy common sense.

Private employment service providers are funded not for quality or effectiveness, but for procedural compliance. When it commenced in 2022, Workforce Australia simply repackaged the worst features of _Jobactive_, layering digital confusion onto a system already known for dysfunction. When you add “digital” to a broken system, you get a digital broken system. The result is a market that extracts fees for forms, not futures.

Some advocates have called for the restoration of the Commonwealth Employment Service. While the impulse is understandable, the idea overlooks a more fundamental problem. The core issue is not just federal capacity — though it is undeniably weakened — but structural design. Employment services must be separated from the compliance machinery of social security.

This entanglement has distorted both systems. Employment providers spend increasing time managing demerit points and payment suspension risk, rather than assisting people into work. Jobseekers are subject to obligations that bear little relation to their actual barriers to employment. A service intended to assist has become one that supervises.

This is why the case for devolving employment services to the states and territories is compelling. Not because their systems are inherently superior — they too are under strain — but because they are structurally freer. They are not embedded in the punitive logic that dominates federal service design. In many regions, state and local initiatives are already providing more coherent, targeted assistance at lower cost. The ability to respond locally, without being bound to Centrelink’s architecture, is an advantage that cannot be replicated federally under the current model.

International examples reinforce this point. Switzerland’s decentralised system, with services delivered at the canton level, demonstrates the benefits of regional responsiveness. Australian employment services should be no less adaptive to local labour market conditions.

There are five immediate steps I would take:

1. Abolish mutual obligations and replace them with voluntary, needs-based supports;
2. Lift JobSeeker and Youth Allowance to a liveable level, sufficient for genuine job-seeking activity;
3. End outcome-based contracts for private providers and reallocate funding to place-based employment strategies;
4. Devolve employment service delivery to state and territory governments, with proper resourcing; and
5. Establish structural separation between employment services and income support compliance.

The system’s metrics have become its purpose. Compliance is mistaken for engagement; paperwork is confused for support. The result is a service environment that performs well on spreadsheets and poorly for people.

Finally, I would make no secret of the fact that the Department of Employment is overdue for reform. The public service once held deep practical knowledge of local labour markets and service delivery. That knowledge has been eroded. The current policy environment is dominated by abstraction — model design, contract management, and compliance algorithms — with little understanding of what actually supports people into work. A capable department must be rebuilt, with experience and labour market literacy at its core.

This system is not failing due to neglect. It is failing because it was never fundamentally designed to succeed on its stated goals. As minister, I would not seek to improve its efficiency. I would seek to reorient it entirely – toward support over surveillance, outcomes over optics, and people over process.

We need to stop managing poverty. We need to start ending it.