@TheBananaKing @vividspecter @ajsadauskas the last two times I was job hunting Centrelink absolutely made it worse. I wasted so much time on jumping through their hoops and spent money I couldn’t afford to spare travelling to useless things they made me do

Was in Centrelink, the courses are typically “how to write a resume” or “how to do a job search”, typically something quite generic and usually simple as it needs to cover all walks in life.

You typically aren’t told that you can sometimes apply for actual courses because it seems like their goal/kpi is based on getting any job asap not on you studying for the next 6 months.

Okay, I’m not defending anything here but I need to call you and @[email protected] out for a second. A chef is not the same thing as a cook. Chef’s are responsible for all of the logistics of running a kitchen. They are responsible for creating the product; organising suppliers; portioning & costing each serving; budgeting for, interviewing and hiring the rest of the kitchen staff; pricing each meal to account for these costs with a reasonable profit margin; managing the kitchen staff; maintaining food safety standards, including mandatory logs; running the kitchen during service most nights of the week, on top of prepping & cooking. You generally have a Head & Sous Chef in most kitchens who occupy managerial roles. You might have another chef or two underneath them depending on the size of the kitchen. Then below them you have Cooks, whose job is to only focus on the hands-on aspects of preparing and cooking the food. You’re following someone else’s recipes and plating it to their guidelines.

“Cooking classes” or “6 month courses” will not give someone the skills to be a chef. It takes ~2yrs of study or a ~3yr apprenticeship to become qualified. What you’re both suggesting would only qualify someone to work as a cook, and there’s already a huge surplus in the industry thanks to covid. There are also genuine, tangible reasons why a business might want to hire a chef from overseas with specific culinary experience.

But besides all that, from my personal experience working in kitchens, I think this is a terrible idea. The woman at the start of the article is in the disability stream of Jobstart, as are a lot of people in the “long-term unemployed” category. She either doesn’t quite meet the requirements or, more likely, can’t afford the specialists required to meet Centrelink’s evidentiary burden. I’m on the DSP now, and while the condition I have is a genetic one, I strongly believe it was exacerbated by spending my career working as a chef. A very short career I’ll add. It is a much more physically demanding job than people give it credit for.

Why not just look internally at industry demand instead? On the topic of disability, there is a shortage of skilled support workers in that industry. I have some capacity to work, and because of my age, need to engage with a DES. I’ve been trying to get one to organise a community support certificate for over 2 years. I have a license and I’m good with admin. But instead, every one of them has tried to push me to renew my food safety cert and just “get a job in a café” because of my chef qual. Which, besides every other reason it’s a terrible idea, would have massively increased my chances of getting covid when I’m high-risk and still need regular boosters.

@Ilandar @vividspecter The short answer is yes. A lot of Australia’s mutual obligation system was created by the Howard government, copying what Bill Clinton was doing in the US, and Tony Blair in the UK.

But it was also underpinned by the same neoliberal ideology as the US and the UK.

Basically, up until the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia’s official government policy was to have full employment. It was a minor scandal when unemployment skyrocketed to around 3% under Malcolm Fraser.

Especially after the oil shocks that followed the Suez Canal crisis, inflation was running quite high through the late '70s and early '80s.

To try to curb this high inflation, the US, UK, and Australia all adopted a range of neoliberal economic policies advocated by people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

The idea was that if everyone had a job, when inflation rose, workers would demand higher wages, and those wages would put further pressure on inflation, creating a cycle.

So one of the main ways the Hawke Labor government sought to stop this inflation cycle was by stopping wage growth.

As part of this policy shift, The Australian government walked away from the idea of guaranteeing full employment.

As part of a set of policies called the Accord, Hawke and the unions basically agreed to wage increases below the rate of inflation, in exchange for the introduction of Medicare.

The Reserve Bank got an independent board that would raise Interest rates if inflation got above 2-3%.

Importantly, if unemployment rates ever fell too low, the Reserve Bank would see it as an inflationary risk, and have to raise interest rates to slow the economy (which increases unemployment) to stop inflation.

So instead of seeking full employment, the idea that there’s a “natural rate of unemployment” (as economists call it) became part of our economic system.

But, instead of properly explaining to the public that there was inevitably going to be this natural rate of unemployment, governments from Hawke and Keating onwards instead blamed the victims and called them “dole bludgers”.

In the early '90s, the Keating government followed this up by bringing in a limited form of work for the dole as part of his Working Nation policy.

Around this time, in the US, Bill Clinton, and in the UK, Tony Blair, brought in tough new welfare policies. They were built around mutual obligation.

In the late '90s and early 2000s, the Howard government followed in the footsteps of these crackdowns and made mutual obligation a core part of the Australian welfare system.

He also privatised a lot of the old Commonwealth Employment Service, outsourcing its training services to private “Jobs Network” providers. What was left over became Centrelink.

If you’re interested, there’s a lot more details about how mutual obligation came about under Howard here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/01/where-mutual-obligation-began-john-howards-paradigm-shift-on-welfare

And there’s also in this government research paper from 1999: https://aifs.gov.au/research/family-matters/no-54/welfare-reform-britain-australia-and-united-states #auspol