In Australia’s welfare sector obligations are ‘mutual’, but profits flow only one way

Two words make the money go round in Australia's multi-billion dollar welfare-to-work industry: mutual obligation.

When someone loses their job and applies for the dole, they are sent to an outsourced job agency to get help looking for work. It triggers a payment to the provider - and the possibility of more to come.

The federal government will spend more than $11bn on the two main outsourced employment services programs over four years. The top companies - some of them multinationals - will rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.

When a single mother's child reaches nine months, she can be sent to a work preparation support program. The taxpayer sends cash to the charity or for-profit running the program, sometimes to check she is sending her children to playgroup or "storytime" at the library.

Those on the jobseeker payment may be sent to work for the dole, or a training course, which is sometimes run by the same company as the provider, or a related film.

And if you get a job yourself? The provider can still claim a payment. If you find yourself back on Centrelink payments, you return to a job agency. The money-go-round keeps spinning.

Since the Commonwealth Employment Service was wound up and the system was privatised in the late 1990s, a vast network of private job agencies and related training companies dependent on government contracts has formed: an "unemployment industry" fuelled by the ideological mantra of "mutual obligation" that guarantees their business model.