KELVIN'S BLOG: Bring back the CES

Kelvin Thomson

Written by
June 29, 2021

KELVIN'S BLOG: Bring back the CES

I was interested to see both Peter Strong from the Council of Small Business Association, and Leith van Onselen from MacroBusiness, calling for the restoration of the old Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). It is a view I have had myself for quite some time.

As Leith writes, when John Howard privatised the system in the 1990s, the idea was that by paying employment service providers for each person they placed into a job, the process would become more efficient. 

Unfortunately, the result was that a parasitic industry developed, with around 40 privately run employment agencies earning millions of dollars in fees.

Peter Strong has expressed the same view, saying that the privatised system was a failure. It has created a few millionaires off the back of the unemployed, but delivered a scheme which is failing job seekers. He has called for the creation of a new CES.

I agree. Privatising the CES made the openers of the new Job Search companies rich, but achieved no public good. It is money for jam, but there is no real driver for them to properly look after those who are unemployed. The financial incentive is for them to do it on the cheap. Unemployed people have told me the agencies are pretty much useless.

I also think there could be a very important role for a re-established CES in returning some integrity to our migrant worker visa programs. At the moment too many employers are rorting the “labour market testing” requirements that theoretically mean that they have to look for Australian workers before being allowed to bring in overseas workers. They advertise skilled jobs at unattractively low rates of pay, refuse to provide any on-the-job training, reject applicants without due cause, etc.

A re-established CES could be a genuine honest broker. Employers would be required to ask the CES to find them a suitable applicant before being allowed to bring in an overseas worker. If the CES can find someone suitable, the job goes to the local, as it should. If the CES can’t, the employer can bring in someone from overseas. Furthermore, if an unemployed person unreasonably rejects a job offered to them by the CES, it would have consequences for them. The integrity of the employment market would be improved all round.

The Hon. Kelvin Thomson
National Committee
Sustainable Australia Party
@HonKelThomson

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Recent responses

  • Hi Reenie, thanks for your feedback on the article and we have fixed those couple of typos.
    Regards,
    Paul @ SAP HQ
  • Thanks for your support Reenie. One thing revealed by the “Jobs and Skills” Summit was that leaving employment/training/skills to the market, which has happened since the CES was abolished, has been a failure.
  • IT’S TIME! Bring back the CES, and the CRS.
    (ps. you have a couple of typos in this blogpost.)
  • Thanks for this, Dario. If we bring back the CES, and don’t bring back the migrant worker programs, Australia could now return to the great days of full employment and job security.
  • I agree totally. I got more jobs as a young man from the CES than from any other employment agency or job provider I’ve been with since then. Howard did a lot of damage to Australia with his privatizing the CES when he was in power. Hopefully our next PM will bring it back and put our citizens before profiteering.
  • Thanks all for your comments. They make sense to me. Having travelled through northern Australia over the winter I think there are real jobs about, and for as long as we don’t resume the migrant worker programs on the scale we had before they will continue to be about. A CES could play a positive role in filling them. And if there aren’t jobs for the CES ato fill, we would learn something important – that there is no need for the migrant worker programs. Kelvin
  • I used to work at CES. When it closed and was privatised many of the new providers, including such places as the Salvos were rorting the system and having talked to officers employed at Centrelink it is still happening. Because they get credit for every placement or course they put people on useless courses, if the Jobseeker finds a job themselves the agency takes credit and they force people to give up long term part time jobs for a couple of weeks casual work, leaving them eventually with no work at all. The only disadvantage I can see is that there are not enough proper jobs to justify it reopening the CES. I believe it was only closed in the first place because the government was sending jobs overseas, cutting down on apprenticeships and knew it would be too hard to place people.
  • Whether it is aged care, the old SEC, or training, it is the same story. Privatisation means that profit is everything. The more money that can be diverted from providng a service means the more that is handed over to the owners of the business. Why should we expect anything different? When will the proponents of privatisation learn?
  • It appears fatally flawed, politically correct, economically expedient, ideologically grounded, pseudoscientific memes have infiltrated, overtaken and could ultimately defeat scientific facts regarding the conditions of being human as well as the ways the physical world we inhabit actually works.