Source: ABC Radio National's Background Briefing

Sundays at 9.10am, repeated Tuesdays at 7.10pm

Out of Work, Out of Sight: Making the Unemployed Disappear
Sunday 5 May  2002

Produced by Tom Morton

Program Transcript

Twilight Zone Narrator: The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we're about to watch could be our journey.

Tom Morton: Hi there, I'm Tom Morton, and welcome to Background Briefing on Radio National. Today we're in the twilight zone, the limbo land of long-term unemployment.

"I'm in a twilight zone. They really didn't want me there, they didn't know what to do with me."
 
David Rigney: My personal experience, and I'm coming from mature-age long-term unemployed, you know, these are the catch-phrases that have stuck to me, is that I'm in a twilight zone. They really didn't want me there, they didn't know what to do with me, and people in my situation were just sidelined virtually, just sidelined and treated like mushrooms when the light was turned on, say once a month or something like that, to make sure your life support's still operating. That's basically it.

Tom Morton: David Rigney, who's President of the Unemployed People's Movement against Poverty.

For many Australians, the twilight zone must seem like a parallel universe. Last month the official unemployment rate fell below 6.3%, and economists are talking about a 'wonder-down-under', an Australian economic miracle.But for people living in the twilight zone, that economic miracle might as well be happening on Mars. There are now seven unemployed people lining up for every job vacancy. 380,000 Australians have been on the dole for more than a year, about the same number as in 1995.

And there could be a whole new group of people about to join the job queue, a queue which leads deep into the twilight zone.

After weeks of rumours, the Prime Minister confirmed a fortnight ago that the government is looking at changes to the Disability Support Pension. Around 600,000 Australians, or 6% of the working age population, currently get the pension. The government is considering changing the eligibility criteria, almost certainly, with the aim of making the pension harder to get. If they do, they'll just be repeating a pattern which both Labor and Coalition governments have followed over the last 30 years.

According to George Argyrous and Megan Neale, two political economists at the University of New South Wales, government have used the disability support pension to play a shell game with the unemployed: 'Now you see them, now you don't.'

George Argyrous: Well the shell game takes a number of forms, but most people have seen a con artist on the street, for example, especially in places like New York. There's a pea under a shell, and a very quick movement of hands, and you put your money down and have to decide which shell the pea is hidden under, and of course because of that sleight of hand, the pea has been shifted when the shell is lifted. It's a similar process with moving the unemployed around. A particular program increases the numbers, for example the DSP. The government reacts to that by tightening eligibility for that particular program but as we've seen in the past, that simply shifts the problem to another part of the income support system, and until the government does something about job creation, tightening eligibility for a specific program like DSP is only going to shift the problem to somewhere else. We saw that when the government tried it in the early 1980s, we saw it when the government tried it in the late 1980s, we saw it when the government tried it in the early 1990s; the problem just simply shifted.

Fairground Music

James Galea - Magician:
A little game played with three shells and a pea; the aim of the game is to keep your eye upon the pea; come along and win some money, very, very simple, only three shells, that's one out of three. The buck's on your side. Watch very closely, three shells one with a pea, place the money in front of the shell you think has the pea in it. Step right up, Sir, that one over there? Now you see it, now you don't, keep your eye on the pea, it's over here, don't worry that's only $10, or make it double or nothing we'll do it for $20. Here we go, that's one, two, three shells…
 

Tom Morton: It's a simple, bur striking metaphor. In times of rising unemployment, governments move particular groups of unemployed people, typically older men with low skill levels, under the shell marked 'disability pension'.

But when unemployment is falling, and the cost of the disability pension starts to blow out, government waves its hands, and hey presto! they're back under the shell marked 'unemployed'.

This year's Budget is due two weeks from now, and Treasurer Costello has already signalled it'll be a tight Budget; big spending areas such as welfare are likely to take cuts.

So the Disability Support Pension or DSP is in the crosshairs. And according to Opposition spokesperson Wayne Swan, the government is getting ready to play the shell game once again.

Wayne Swan: Well we think the government is going to raise the bar of incapacity, that is, this is going to be a back door cut to the Disability Support Pension, and this has a lot of history, because before Senator Newman announced the welfare reform process that culminated in the McClure Report, a process of well over 12 months, she had in her bottom drawer a series of proposals to take the axe to the Disability Support Pension. So we had the McClure Report, which came out with a lot of very good rhetoric about participation and capacity building, and then we had the election. And now what we find immediately after the election, is that those proposals that Senator Newman had in her bottom drawer are now back on the table. And what senior sources are suggesting is they're going to come at it through the back door, by raising the bar of incapacity and saying that incapacity will be defined by the amount of work that a person is capable of doing of only 15 hours instead of the previous qualification of 30 hours.

Tom Morton: Wayne Swan, who's Shadow Minister for Family and Community Services.

As we heard, Wayne Swan claims the Opposition has reliable information that the government is going to tighten the work test for the disability pension in the upcoming Budget. Currently, if you're considered unable to work for at least 30 hours a week, for whatever reason, you qualify for the disability pension. Now Wayne Swan is claiming that that could be reduced to 15 hours a week. So effectively, it would become harder to qualify for the pension. People deemed able to work 15 hours a week or more would no longer be eligible. And instead they'd be put on Newstart, that's Newspeak for the dole, which is $54 a fortnight less.

And Amanda Vanstone, the Minister for Family and Community Services, isn't ruling out changes to the eligibility criteria. She spoke to me on the phone just before leaving on a trip to China.

"I think it's a matter of deep regret that some people choose to make a political football out of people with disabilities."

Amanda Vanstone: Well look, I can say I think it's a matter of deep regret that some people choose to make a political football out of people with disabilities. We are looking at the disability benefit. No-one that I know of is talking about reducing the benefit, but there might be discussions certainly, about what is appropriate access to it. But I believe when the Budget comes down, people will see the good sense and the fairness in what we are doing just as they did last time.

Tom Morton: When you say that there might be discussions about appropriate access to the benefit, I mean this is a concern that was expressed by your predecessor, Senator Newman, does this mean that there'll be a tightening of the eligibility?

Amanda Vanstone: Well I'm not at liberty to go into discussions about what will and will not be in the Budget, but as I say, I don't know anybody who's looking to reduce the benefit. But I do know that there have been discussions about what are the appropriate criteria for entry to that benefit.

Tom Morton: So how might those change, or what sorts of discussions?

Amanda Vanstone: Well I think what you're inviting me to do is to go into some sort of pre-Budget discussion ruling some things out and leaving others as possibilities, and I'm just not at liberty to do that. I'd love to, because I think the changes that we can expect and that we'll be asking Parliament to approve, are very fair, and I think will be welcomed.

Tom Morton: Well as we heard, we won't know until Budget night just what changes are planned to the disability pension. But the Australian Council of Social Services, or ACOSS, believes a tightening of the work test is likely.

ACOSS President Andrew Macallum: " I don't think is particularly helpful, to redefine the problem because you have a burgeoning expense rather than looking at what are some of the causes for that burgeoning expense."

Andrew Macallum: This has been out there for a while now being discussed, and I think there is some truth in that rumour that the government is clearly looking at redefining what people's work requirements are under the Disability Support Pension, and that I don't think is particularly helpful, to redefine the problem because you have a burgeoning expense rather than looking at what are some of the causes for that burgeoning expense. Because those between the 16 and 30 hours no longer are eligible for Disability Support Pension would then go onto Newstart, and that immediately is a cut to their fortnightly income of around $54. So to redefine these people out of the system is not particularly fair and we think that victimises these people. No problem at all that these people should be encouraged to work where they can, but to change the goalpost is not particularly fair.

Fairground Music

Now you see it, now you don't, keep your eye on the pea it's over here don't worry that's only $10 or make it double or nothing we'll do it for $20. Here we go, that's one, two, three shells keep your eye on the pea we'll move them around like so. Where do you think it is? Place the money in front. Not there again, Sir, look you've done it twice, that's $40, we'll make it all a bit simpler we'll do it for double or nothing, have you got some nerve in you? You may have plenty. Five will get you ten, and ten will get you twenty. Keep your eye on the pea, we'll just use two this time …

George Argyrous: You can look at the rate at which disability pensions have been taken up since its inception as a program. There's the invalid pension in 1911, there were periods when the rate went up quite dramatically, especially during the 1930s Depression and then suddenly the rate fell with the boom period, beginning with the Second World War. And disability pension rates remained remarkably stable throughout the '50s and '60s, a very small percentage of the working age population accessing the then invalid pension.

Tom Morton: George Argyrous. He and fellow political economist Megan Neale have looked especially closely at the trends over the last 30 years, since the oil crisis and the beginning of the slow decline of the industry economy.

What they see is this: Government after government has used the pea-and-shell trick, to make the unemployed disappear and then reappear, depending on the state of the economy and the job market.

George Argyrous: Suddenly in 1971/72, things changed and there was a dramatic increase in the rate at which the invalid pension was taken up and then the Disability Support Pension when it was renamed in the early '90s, and that was principally concentrated amongst older males. As a percentage of the working age population of that group, the rate of disability pension receipt went through the roof much more dramatically. And we've looked at whether there's medical evidence to explain that growth. The ABS does occasional surveys of the population to identify disability, and there's been no evidence from that to suggest there's a medical or underlying medical cause for that growth in disability pension rates.

What we suggest is that because that group of males has been particularly hit by the loss of full-time jobs and because no new jobs for them have been created elsewhere in the economy, they have as we say, 'gone on a long slide' through unemployment, often through sickness payments and eventually onto disability.

Tom Morton: Since the early 1970s, the labour market has been in a long slide of its own. It's an international phenomenon, what the American economist Ed Nell calls 'the twilight of mass production', the gradual disappearance of jobs in manufacturing and low-skill areas of the economy. And the jobs that have vanished are full-time jobs, typically occupied by older men.

Here's Mark Cully, from the National Institute of Labour Studies.

Mark Cully: There's been almost no growth in full-time opportunities for men over the past decade. So what we're seeing is lot of jobs, conventionally in manufacturing for example, and with the shift towards service sector, people who were in semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing jobs have been made redundant, they're in their 40s and 50s. If they're able to find any work at all, they find it walking the beat as a security guard at night, around the edge of some retail shopping centre, and that's certainly a real-life example of what's been happening to men.

Tom Morton: As full-time jobs have disappeared, the number of older men on the disability pension has grown. Men make up two-thirds of the growth in numbers on the DSP. Now you see them, now you don't.

But in order for the shall game to work, governments have to keep fiddling with the concept of disability.

George Argyrous: It is important to understand the social construction put on some of these payment systems. For a bloke who was working at BHP and expected to work until they were 65 and then retire, suddenly at the age of 55, find themselves retrenched. Being on unemployment for a long time has a quite significant psychological social impact on them, and the people who have to deal with them, the social workers, the doctors, the case managers, see this and identify the problem and place them eventually onto programs such as disability precisely because there's less of a stigma attached to them.

"Now that we're getting a situation where their capacity to work is being determined by the health of the labour market rather than the other way around."

Megan Neale: Since the early 1970s because of the structural changes in the labour market, a greater weight was given to someone's socio-economic conditions, so disability and eligibility for the pension also could take into consideration their age, education and skills levels. So their prospects for employment and their capacity to work, which in fact has always been a part of the concept of the Disability Support Pension, it's just now that we're getting a situation where their capacity to work is being determined by the health of the labour market rather than the other way around.

George Argyrous: That's why we call them labour market disabled, not necessarily medically disabled. And we say that not because we think that these people are malingerers and are accessing a welfare system they're not entitled to -

Megan Neale: Absolutely not, no it's not that at all.

George Argyrous: I really want to strongly discourage that conclusion which is I think is the conclusion that's driving current policy. We want to emphasise that it is the labour market that is disabled, is just simply not churning out a sufficient number of full-time work for the number of people who would like it.

Megan Neale: Yes, it's a very fine line, it's that interaction between losing the job, you're an older male, your skills have been in a certain area and in trying to find employment, and when that doesn't happen, health effects do start to kick in, you know, you just start to deteriorate in health, certainly also in mental health. So it's a matter about being able to catch them before they become long-term unemployed.

Song: "Imagine if What you Did on Your Weekend was Your Life" - Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes

Tom Morton: 'Imagine if your weekend was your life.' Well, it sounds appealing, but for many people long-term unemployment is a long, gradual slide through frustration, boredom and loss of self-esteem into real deterioration in their health. Because unemployment is a health hazard. That's the overwhelming message from Mark and Elisabeth Harris, two medical researchers who've done extensive work with people who are long-term unemployed.

Mark Harris: I think people readily understand the psychological effects of unemployment, particularly depression, anxiety, but there's perhaps less awareness of the physical effects, there's an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease in particular. There's also associations with an increased incidence of diabetes and cancer, and respiratory disease. And when we look at people who lose their jobs, these are in studies we call factory closure studies, where we're following people over time, we see effects such as increased blood pressure, increased cholesterol, as well as in the longer term, some of these more disabling physical conditions. And the psychological effects.

Tom Morton: It is pretty extraordinary in a way that losing your job could produce those very concrete consequences, such as increased blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and so on, do we have any idea of what the actual causes are there?

Mark Harris: Well we assume that it's mediated by stress. There is some evidence again from these kind of factory closure studies where the level of certain hormones in the body that are markers of stress, increase. And that these tend to return to normal when people get back into the workforce. And that this is probably due to the fact that people feel helpless, they feel that something major has happened in their life which they can't really influence, and that's the kind of worst sort of stress there is.

Elisabeth Harris: I think it's actually quite difficult for the Social Security staff to deal with, people like this I've often heard when we've been running workshops, that many of the staff can see themselves that they're putting unrealistic expectations onto people who many of them see just like their father, and so they actually feel quite ambivalent about what they should do. And so I think that it's not just that there's a conscious policy by government to shift people onto disability pensions, I think there's something about people working in Centrelink having some human values that's saying 'Look, maybe we're being unrealistic, maybe we should help these people find other options', and you know, financially people are better off on disability pensions. They've got a clearer social role, they have access to different kinds of services. So I think it's a very complex sort of issue to try and untangle.

Tom Morton: Elisabeth Harris, who's a Director of the Centre of Health Equity Training Research and evaluation, and her co-researcher Mark Harris, Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales.

Fairground Music

Oh very good, no very bad, keep your eye on the pea over here, I'll make it a little bit simpler for you, I'll explain why you can't win the money. You see it looks like three empty shells and a pea, but if you watch closely there's a pea in the middle over here, one pea over here, one pea over here and one pea over here as well. That's one, two, three shells and three peas, but at the start I said I was going to give you a chance to win the money. You can't win the money at all because I don't use any peas, just three shells, and that's the three shell game as I know it.

Tom Morton: Over the last 2 decades, Coalition and Labor governments have moved the shells around three times, each time adjusting the definition of 'disability'.

Disability covers a broad spectrum. It can range from severe physical and intellectual disabilities, through injuries acquired at work, to conditions like depression that may themselves be a consequence of long-term unemployment.

And as we've been hearing, the diagnosis of what constitutes disability may be as much a social as a medical diagnosis.

But all that could be about to change. As part of its welfare reform package, the Federal government has been trialling a new way of assessing eligibility for the pension, one which will limit the input of doctors into the assessment process.

Here's the Minister for Family and Community Services, Amanda Vanstone.

Amanda Vanstone: What used to happen in the past was the person's either GP or specialist was asked for medical reports and then they were also asked to do some sort of assessment on workability. Now the medical profession wasn't happy with that, that's not their specialty. They were very much not happy with it. We're changing the system, we're still using the person's treating doctors for the medical diagnosis, and I think that's sensible because you know, you have confidence that someone has got an institutional memory of your medical history. So we'll be leaving the medical diagnosis with those people. But we will be asking other people, specialists in the area, to do the workability assessment, which is a different thing. It's not a medical diagnosis.

Tom Morton: Now according to Elisabeth Harris, GPs are likely to support the new system.

Elisabeth Harris: Work we've done with GPs would suggest they'd be happy with that, that they actually find it very hard to assess whether someone could work for more than two or three hours a day, and so those sort of assessments are very difficult for doctors to make, and so I think many doctors would find it a relief not to make that assessment.

But this is a sort of age-old problem that keeps coming backwards and forwards and it's really about how therefore are they going to develop a system that starts to see the person in their social context, because this is one of the things that GPs, if they have known a person for a long time, can see that person in the social context, and can understand what might be some of the factors in their life, in their background that will or won't affect their ability to work, which going to say, a Commonwealth Medical Officer, or to a one-off assessment by a Rehab. person may not give you.

Tom Morton: As Budget night approaches, many of the organisations which represent people with disabilities say their members are getting increasingly nervous. But according to Minister Vanstone, there were similar concerns before the last Budget, and they proved groundless.

Amanda Vanstone: There were people running around saying that the first block of welfare reform would attack people with disabilities. Then of course the Budget came out and the truth was there for all to see: we were putting $1.7-billion in and a huge raft of new initiatives or increased old initiatives to help people with disabilities, you know, 7,000 new disability places, 5,300 employment assistance places, 11,000 rehabilitation places, over 5,000 vocational and training places, you know, an enormous amount of things for people with disabilities. And so it is with this Budget.

Tom Morton: The government says that its welfare reforms for people with disabilities are all about opening up opportunities, concentrating on what people can do rather than on what they can't. But people with disabilities say that the government hasn't yet put its money where its mouth is.

Phillip Beddall is the Chair of Disability Action in South Australia. He has cerebral palsy and he's been an advocate for people with disabilities for nearly ten years. Phillip cares for his partner, who also has a disability, he serves on numerous committees, and in his spare time he presents a weekly program on community radio in Adelaide. Phillip says the government hasn't yet given people with disabilities a place at the table.

Phillip Beddall: The McClure Report is saying 'Well we're going to give you guys a chance', that's what the rhetoric is saying, now we've got to see some dollars, some resources, not only in terms of employment programs but in terms of the infrastructure so people can get to and from work, so people can get around their workplace, go to the toilet, have support workers to assist them in their workplace; we need to see the infrastructure there before they can start cutting the DSP.

Tom Morton: So have you seen any evidence of that yet?

"We're still like say five or ten years down the track before we can really start to see people with disabilities going into the workforce in any major way."

Phillip Beddall: There is moves in the right direction, but we're still like say five or ten years down the track before we can really start to see people with disabilities going into the workforce in any major way.

Tom Morton: So what is most urgently needed there?

Phillip Beddall: Transport, supporting employers, supporting small business to actually be able to do their bit. But it's also about the government putting their hand up and saying Well yes, we can do our bit. The government is one of the worst employers of people with disabilities. They need to actually employ people with disabilities within government, within the bureaucracy.

Tom Morton: As Phillip Beddall was saying, there are many people with serious disabilities who would like to work, but who lack adequate support to do so. But even assuming people with disabilities got all the support they need to get back into work, there's another, much more intractable problem: there's just not enough work to go round.

About 650,000 people are officially unemployed, but if you work more than one hour a week, you longer count as unemployed. That's in line with the standard international definition of unemployment. However that standard definition masks the true face of joblessness. Think of it as a queue: standing behind the 650,000 unemployed there's now an even larger army of people who are under-employed, working less than 35 hours a week. Of course many of those part-time workers are part-time by choice because they're caring for children, for example, or for elderly relatives. But many of them have had their hours cut in the last year or so by their employers, and we know from Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys that around 25% of those part-time workers would like to work more hours.

So if a whole new group of people currently on the disability pension are forced to start looking for work, even part-time work, they'll be joining the back of the queue which is already stretching far into the distance.

Mark Cully: Even at the moment when the official unemployment rate is apparently so healthy, there are seven people on that measure who are unemployed for every single vacancy that's available. And then there's this very substantial queue of people behind them who are what we call discouraged workers, or who are people who are counted as not in the labour force altogether, they're on Disability Support Pensions, and trying to move them out of these categories of being not in the labour force, or being discouraged job seekers and trying to encourage them back into work, is only going to be in the end almost self-defeating. And endlessly frustrating for the people who have been asked to do this. You can't fit seven people into the one job.

Phone ringing

Phone message: Welcome to the Job Network Information Line. If you have a question about Job Network, or would like details of your local Job Network members, press 1 now. If you have a resume on Australian Job Search or you would like details of messages left by employers, and job matches, press 2 now. If you have a resume on Australian Job Search and would like to have your password re-set, press 3 now.

Music: "The Twilight Zone" soundtrack album - "The Invaders"

David Rigney: They don't know what to do with the mature unemployed I don't think, especially long-term. I seem to be put in "Park", and no-one wanted to turn my ignition on, if you like. My personal experience is that I'm in a twilight zone. People in my situation were just treated like mushrooms when the light was turned on say once a month or something like that, to make sure your life support's still operating. That's basically it.

Tom Morton: David Rigney, President of the Unemployed People's Movement against Poverty.

David lives in Adelaide and has been in the twilight zone of long-term unemployment since 1993. Before that, he worked for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and as an organiser for the Miscellaneous Workers' Union.

David is just one of 380,000 Australians who've been on the dole for more than a year. And he's a veteran of Job Network, the Federal government's privatised employment services system.

David Rigney: When the Job Networks first were instituted in 1998, I was one of the first in South Australia to actually be forced into intensive assistance. I went openly into a Job Network, I picked one in Adelaide, I was given three days to pick one, I did, I fronted , I had to sign an agreement, I ended up having three years on intensive assistance in some way shape and form. Basically of very little value.

Tom Morton: David Rigney. And David has an unlikely ally in his criticisms of the Job Network. The Productivity Commission has recently released a report on the Job Network, which says that people like David who are long-term unemployed, are falling through the cracks.

Job Network, which replaced the old CES, is supposed to provide a personalised, customised service to job-seekers to help them get a job.

Phone ringing

Woman: Good afternoon, Mission Employment, Nadia speaking.

Tom Morton: Church-based organisations, not-for-profit community groups and commercial operators all compete for the business of getting unemployed people into work.

Productivity Commissioner Judith Sloan says the Job Network can boast some real success stories.

"There are some quite interesting little stories in the report about people being bought new sets of clothes, for example, because you know, if you don't have a sort of decent suit you can't go for certain jobs... those kinds of arrangements would never have been possible in the previous centralised bureaucratic arrangements."

Judith Sloan: I think there are some quite interesting little stories in the report about people being bought new sets of clothes, for example, because you know, if you don't have a sort of decent suit you can't go for certain jobs; people being bought second-hand bikes or skateboards to try and overcome their transport problems. Now those kinds of arrangements would never have been possible in the previous centralised bureaucratic arrangements.

Tom Morton: Yes, it sounds like a modern take on Norman Tebbitt's famous injunction to unemployed people in Britain to get on their bike; nowadays presumably they have to get on their skateboards.

Judith Sloan: I suppose that's right. But I mean I just think it's quite exciting to see what's done at the coalface, which is not to say it's all good, and I think there are some real issues that there are some people within the system who probably aren't getting the attention they deserve, and do fall through a crack, because another feature of the incentives is that a Job Network provider is rational to spend money on those that they see as easier to place rather than those who look very difficult to place.

David Rigney: The Job Network, what they want is the fresh young people to come through the door referred from Centrelink, they have a degree, they have some work experience, practical work experience, they've had jobs in the field on a temporary basis or whatever. They're unemployed at the moment but their degree is less than, say, five, six years old. They are perfect; the Job Networks want these sort of people because they can actually get big dollars, because they can fit them straight in to employment.

Tom Morton: David Rigney has been on Intensive Assistance three times. As the name suggests, Intensive Assistance is supposed to involve working intensively with unemployed people to find their barriers to employment: lack of skills, literacy problems and so on, and to help them overcome those barriers. But the reality is often rather different.

David Rigney: I remember in 1998 when I first joined the Job Network, they didn't know quite what to do with me, so they made an appointment for me to meet with their resume people, which seemed to be the thing to do. You have to do a version of your resume. Over the three years I have about 25 different versions of my resume, and I'm pretty good at drafting; I could actually into business I think, drafting and doing versions of resumes, but I don't know if I'd make a living at that. And I don't know if the community would actually benefit from my doing that. People like myself that are old, that have been unemployed for a while, that don't have the tertiary qualifications, that everything is not a piece of paper, it's I can do the work, but I haven't got a reflected piece of paper to say I can do it. So we're parked, if you like, it's like numerous cars stuck in a parking lot waiting to be exported somewhere, or someone to buy us.

Tom Morton: Parking is one of the biggest problems with the Job Network - according to unemployed people and the Productivity Commission too.

It's become part of the dialect of the job network, and the Productivity Commission says it's an almost inevitable result of the way the government's designed the system.

Job Network providers, like the Salvation Army, get paid upfront for signing an unemployed person on to Intensive Assistance. But they don't get paid again until they get a result, which might be getting that person into a job, or into some kind of education or training. The faster you get a result, the faster you get paid.

So, as Judith Sloan was saying, it makes sense for the providers to concentrate their time and money on the job seekers who'll be easier to get into work, and to park the more difficult cases in the twilight zone.

Judith Sloan: We have what's within this little micro community something of a kind of famous diagram now, the sort of twin peaks diagram, where if you look at what happens to people on Intensive Assistance, there's an initial peak where it looks as though those who are relatively easy to assist get jobs relatively quickly, and then there's a sort of great dip in the diagram, and then there's another peak at the end of their assistance period, and we know that quite a lot of those outcomes are what we call secondary outcomes, in other words, the unemployed are essentially shunted off to education or training courses. So that's very suggestive of a real lack of activity in the middle of the program for these people. It's self-evident that some people receive very little assistance under Intensive Assistance.

Tom Morton: The Productivity Commission's report on the Job Network , was commissioned by the Federal government, after allegations that some Job Network providers were rorting the system.

Now it seems that the government isn't too happy with some of the Report's findings. For example, Mal Brough is the Minister for Employment Services, and rejects the Commission's claim that parking is widespread.

Mal Brough: Well that was an assertion that was made, and of course there are other providers there that totally refuted that particular claim. And so once again, what we do in ESC-3, Employment Services Contract 3, from 1 July, will take into account the longitudinal studies, the facts base rather than the anecdotal evidence that people might want to present, and ensure that we provide the best level of services to the unemployed and to the employer so that we match the best person to the job.

Tom Morton: So are you saying that the Productivity Commission is relying only on anecdotal evidence?

Mal Brough: No, we're saying that some of the assertions you've made that it is about parking etc. -

Tom Morton: It's not me, it's the Productivity Commission.

Mal Brough: No it wasn't the Productivity Commission, in their report they stated what some of the submissions had indicated, remembering this is an interim report, not a final report, and we'll wait to see what they provide later on in the year, I think around June, when that final report comes down. So we're still encouraging people to bring forward their ideas, their complaints and also their bouquets about what is there.

Tom Morton: As you heard, Mal Brough thinks the Productivity Commission has exaggerated the amount of parking in the Job Network and relied too much on anecdotal evidence.

But Commissioner Judith Sloan is sticking to her guns.

Judith Sloan: Well I think it wasn't simply based on anecdote, and the truth is I think the way forward in this debate is to address the relatively little amount of attention certain participants in this program receive, and hence we have one of our aims or one of our propositions is that you think about reducing the length of the program, the Intensive Assistance Program, to six months. Now the argument about that is that you're then likely to concentrate the same amount of activity in a shorter period of time and then therefore the participants don't go through quite long periods of time of inactivity. So that's one suggestion.

Tom Morton: Perhaps the most damning criticism of Intensive Assistance though is its lack of success in fulfilling its primary aim: getting people into jobs.

In its Report, the Productivity Commission quotes a figure from a study done by the government's own Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. According to that study, Intensive Assistance had only a 10% net impact on the unemployment of participants. Here's Judith Sloan to tell us what that means:

Judith Sloan: It's saying that you would have been 10% more likely to get a job if you were on the program compared with not being on the program. But I think that is a very optimistic estimate, and probably the truth is considerably lower.

Tom Morton: It seems pretty remarkable that we're spending a great deal of public money on programs that effectively, you argue, probably have a lower than 10% success rate in getting people into employment.

Judith Sloan: Well I think that's a very good point, but you have to go back to what are the objectives of the program, and secondly what are the alternatives. And the alternative really is to do nothing, and essentially I think the community takes the view that even if the payoff is quite low, it's better to generate some benefits, and in that 10% of course that's not taking into account the fact that people might feel a lot better about themselves, the people are being paid attention. The Commission went to Newcastle and they met with a group of unemployed people there, and a lot of them were participating in a course in museum studies. Now the truth is that there aren't too many jobs in museum studies, but it was having a very positive psychological effect on that group of unemployed.

Tom Morton: Judith Sloan and the Productivity Commission think that job seekers should have a choice about whether or not they sign onto Intensive Assistance, and that they should be able to choose other options such as work for the dole or community work.

The Federal government plainly isn't convinced. It's just announced another 100,000 places in Intensive Assistance for older job-seekers. But either way, Mark Cully from the National Institute of Labour Studies, says we're avoiding the real issue.

Mark Cully: You know you can tell them to get on their bike, and they better had use a bike because if they start using public transport, then they'll lose some of the money they get from working. But all that's going to end up doing is if you get this person who had been going down the beach surfing or playing in a rock band or, heaven forbid, on a Disability Support Pension and they're in their early 60s, and you're saying to them, 'Well you've got to go and join a queue', if they manage to get a job all they're doing is pushing somebody else back in the queue, so they're just displacing them. So the real issue that the government's got to address is looking for ways of creating more jobs.

Tom Morton: Job creation has become something of a dirty word in Australia. But overseas, countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, have combined extensive job creation programs with reforms similar to the Job Network. And they now have unemployment rates below that of Australia's.

Meanwhile, back at home, the number of people stuck in the twilight zone has hardly changed over seven years. 380,000 people or so have been on the rock 'n' roll in Australia for more than a year now, the same figure as in 1995.

Back in 1995, Background Briefing talked to Neal Forgie, Director of Anglicare in Elizabeth. Then, as now, Elizabeth, to the north of Adelaide, had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country.

Neal Fergie said back then that it was time to come clean and start telling the truth about unemployment.

"We've really got to begin thinking differently in our community about how we're going to incorporate [the unemployed] as valuable citizens without jobs for the rest of their lives.'"
 
Neil Forgie: I don't think we are being honest about this at all, and I think we need to come clean in saying to the community, in saying to Australia, and to young people, that there's going to be a lot of people, maybe 7% or 8% of you who are not going to get jobs. Now we actually haven't said that. I think a lot of people think it, and a lot of people feel it, but we haven't actually said it, and I think that if we're going to make any progress at all, and if politicians are seen to be credible, then they've got to be honest with our community, and I would hope that we very soon would hear people being honest about that, and saying 'OK, this is how it is, and we've really got to begin thinking differently in our community about how we're going to incorporate you as valuable citizens without jobs for the rest of your lives.'

Tom Morton: Neil Forgie, speaking on Background Briefing back in 1995. And it seems things haven't changed much in the twilight zone since then.

But stay tuned to Background Briefing during the year when we'll bring you some success stories from the twilight zone, creative approaches to dealing with unemployment.

Tom Morton: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness. Research is by Paul Bolger. Technical Operator, David Bates, and our Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett. I'm Tom Morton, and you're with ABC Radio National.

Further information
UNSW: George Argyrous http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/ssp/george_argyrous.html

Australian Workplace: The Job Network
http://www.workplace.gov.au/Workplace/ESDisplay/0,1253,a0%253D0%2526a1%253D537%2526a2%253D538,00.html 

Mal Brough Minister for Employment Services
http://www.dewrsb.gov.au/ministers/brough/

Centrelink
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/

Disability Action Inc.
"...fights for the rights of people with all forms of disability."
http://www.disabilityaction.asn.au/

National Institute of Labour Studies: Mark Cully
http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/nils/MCully.htm

The Productivity Commission: Independent Review of Job Network
http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/jobnetwork/index.html

Senator Amanda Vanstone Minister for Family & Community Services
http://www.facs.gov.au/internet/minfacs.nsf/home/