This paper analyses the changes to working-age social security and unemployment policies of the Albanese government in historical perspective. Australia’s working-age unemployment policies do not provide adequate financial support for the most disadvantaged people to stay out of poverty. Moreover, recipients are subject to mostly ineffective punitive conditions delivered via a quasi-market of employment services that is supposed to assist them back to work. This policy structure is badly underperforming, with about 70 per cent of Jobseeker payment recipients having been on payment for 12 months or more (EIAC 2026).
Despite opportunities for reform to these policies in recent years, Australian governments have maintained the status quo of this policy domain that has been in place since the 1990s. The Albanese government recently announced what it claimed to be the biggest reform of employment services in the last 30 years. The reform aims to re-orient existing employment service structures to be more tailored for individual circumstances through a new assessment and triage system that will provide services based on the level of need, ranging from digital self-service to intensive case management. This will be supported by a lived experience panel to advise government on the reforms as they unfold.
In this paper, I use an historical institutional framework to contextualise these reforms and contest whether they are, in fact, changing much at all. I argue that both the institutional structures and the way the problems of employment services and unemployment have been framed under Albanese are consistent with previous governments, highlighting institutional continuity rather than change.
Drawing also on Bacchi’s framework of problem representation (2009) I argue that the representation of the problem remains grounded in an understanding of unemployment as a problem of individual deficit that is fundamentally disempowering for those subject to it. This representation of the problem is embedded deeply in the institutional and policy structures of unemployment, primarily through the principle of mutual obligation that presumes that individuals need to be ‘activated’ and coerced into acting in their own best interests and presumes to dictate what those interests are. This disempowerment is reinforced in the fragmented institutional structure in which private organisations profit off the administration of poverty as they deliver increasingly automated interactions with harsh compliance mechanisms for those who refuse to engage. Labor’s reforms maintains mutual obligation, the private market of employment services, continues the focus on automation and maintains existing compliance structures.
I conclude by arguing that poor policy outcomes in unemployment will not be resolved through the technical facilitation of improving the targeting of services – because the problem is not, nor has it ever been, the motivation of individuals nor the service quality.
The core problem is that the Australia’s unemployment policies are organised in a way that is fundamentally dehumanising. The path to reform is to re-humanise employment services towards a focus on empowerment and autonomy. Such a model is not compatible with an institutional structure based in mutual obligation.
