False promise or false premise? Evaluating the Job Network

Abstract

This paper contends that the replacement of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) with a market-like system for employment services has formed part of a broader set of neo-liberal policy shifts, which have served to replace the goal of full employment with the diminished goal of full employability. While proposed changes to the funding and operation of the Job Network may generate further, and narrowly conceived, efficiency gains, they will not improve aggregate employment outcomes in the absence of a policy commitment to restore full employment. We argue that finessing the roles of the public, private and not-for-profit sectors in the provision of employment services is a second-order issue relative to restoring the role of the public sector as an employer of last resort.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.