PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Ms SHARKIE (Mayo) (11:02): Employment services are the Commonwealth's largest single procurement outside of Defence. In 2024, it was estimated that we would spend around $9.5 billion over the four years from that time. In the previous parliament, I had the great privilege of being part of a select committee that examined, in great detail, employment service delivery in Australia, really with an aim on what we could do better.

It was a first-principles approach. The report, Rebuilding employment services, made 75 recommendations. It was informed by over 300 submissions, more than 60 hours of witness testimony, and over 50 meetings and site visits.

That was with jobseekers, employers, employment service providers, academics, social enterprises, local and state government, social welfare groups, training providers and other human services. We did that in every state and territory, as well as having direct engagement with the OECD, experts and over 10 other nations. It was comprehensive.

I'd really like to acknowledge the work of the member for Bruce and the former member for Monash as part of that committee work. It was very important work that we did, and one of those times when we really saw members of parliament come together. In Australia, we have approximately one million Australians of working age who are on payments of either JobSeeker or youth allowance.

Of those, 557,000 are long-term unemployed—that is, they've been unemployed for more than 12 months. Approximately 200,000 people have been employed for five years or longer. To me, that just shows that the system we currently have is really failing.

Over 400,000 unemployed people are aged between 45 and 66. This is a vast number of Australians. To complicate matters, Roy Morgan calculated that, in June 2025, Australia's real unemployment rate was more than 1.6 million people because, once you're working over an hour a week, you're no longer technically unemployed.

Clearly, this system isn't working. What should we be doing? What the report said to us was that we need to work intensively with people and we need to be able to make people job ready—help them to get job ready—to fill those jobs where we're currently having a very high rate of immigration, to fill jobs that I'm regularly told Australians don't want to do.

I find that extraordinary. I can't believe that that's true because, whether it's in aged care or child care or the trucking industry or hospitality, I am quite confident that people who are unemployed would very much like to get into those industries, except there are challenges and barriers to do so. Largely, that's because a lot of employment providers will only provide a one-day course at best for someone who's on their books.

We really need to see investment in and spending of money on people to work intensively with them to address those barriers and to get the qualifications. For instance, to be in aged care, you really need to have a certificate III to get in, unless you are one of the very lucky people that can get into a traineeship. A certificate III costs time and money, so we need to be able to support people to do that.

By 2050, we're going to need an extra 400,000 people to work in aged care, and I don't think that we're doing very well at working with people who are currently unemployed who would be brilliant in that sector, who have spent a lifetime caring for their children and maybe their parents to then work in that area. Mutual obligations should be connected to how people can find employment in an area.

For instance, if you are looking to get into hospitality or you're working in hospitality, your mutual obligation should be, perhaps, working with a social enterprise, a cafe, so that you can have something on your resume. We need to do much better when we've got one million Australians who are unemployed, particularly with the advent of AI. Just one area where I think we could do much better is in the trucking sector.

We know that there are 28,000 unfilled positions, but the problem with a lot of people who are unemployed is that they can't afford to get the licence. They'd love to work in the trucking sector, and providers, unless they've got a written letter saying, 'We're going to offer you a job,' will not help people and invest in getting that licence. Licences cost anywhere between $700 and $4,000, depending on the particular licence.

That's just one area in which we could intensively invest in Australians who are unemployed for the betterment of all of us.