Buying and Selling the Poor at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas — Rick Morton, Mark Considine, Emily Roy with Natasha Mitchell

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and more.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

There are a lot of perfectly sensible reasons to start a war. Territory, resources, pigs, wait, what?

Emily Roy (0:13)

You've got to pay for that pig.

SPEAKER_2 (0:15)

Yes, a pig, a pastry shop, a football game, sometimes even birds.

Natasha Mitchell (0:20)

They don't seem to be easy to kill.

SPEAKER_2 (0:22)

History is filled with some stupid wars. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are diving right into them with me, Mark Finnell.

Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Natasha Mitchell (0:37)

Today on Big Ideas, why being poor became big business in Australia, but not for the people who need the work. Hello, I'm Natasha Mitchell, and you're joining me at the 2026 Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on Gadigal land.

Rick Morton (1:03)

Mum was always the perfect welfare recipient. She worked as much as she could. She sent her kids to school. But when the government is telling you there's fraud and rorting, then someone must be doing it, but it's not her. So then you look at someone else, and the whole country is doing this.

And the government's doing it too, and they're still doing it.

Emily Roy (1:20)

I think there's a really strong case for my personal opinion for universal basic income, or at least something that says, we know you're finding it hard to find work right now. Let us help you not have to worry about rent and groceries and things. So you can actually access the part of your brain that helps you plan and think about goals and all of that stuff. You are in total survival mode when you live in poverty, and it is literally hard to access those things. So I think the system keeps people in poverty, despite some of the very good efforts by providers.

Natasha Mitchell (1:55)

If you're out of a job, the Australian Government under the banner of Workforce Australia, spends billions annually to contract private employment services to help you find work. But who's the system really working for? And why do we continue to stigmatise unemployment and poverty in this country in the way that we do? A recent eye-opening investigation by The Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research concluded in its report, Who's Rorting Who? The Failure of Outsourced Job Services, that the system is, quote, filling the pockets of private equity and millionaires while leaving job seekers without work. In 2023, a parliamentary committee recommended a major overhaul of the system, and the federal government has just proposed a new set of reforms. But will they fix the flaws? Joining me today, investigative journalist Rick Morton is the award-winning author of Mean Streak about the Robodebt Scandal and books My Year of Living Vulnerably, On Money and One Hundred Years of Dirt, which in part explores his own experience of growing up in poverty.

Political scientist and professor Mark Considine from the University of Melbourne, where he is co-director of the Australian Welfare and Work Lab, he's author of The Careless State and co-author of Buying and Selling the Poor, Inside Australia's Privatised Welfare to Work Market. Emily Roy is based in Tamworth, where she's chief executive officer of JobLink Plus, which is a not-for-profit organisation providing employment, disability and training services across regional New South Wales. It's also involved in research conducted by Mark's team at the University of Melbourne. If you've got views as you're listening, I want to read them on the Radio National text line 418 226 576 Text to 418 226 576

Employment services are the second biggest procurement by government outside of defence in this country.

The Who's Rotting Who report concludes that Australia's system of privatised employment services has failed. That is their stark conclusion. And I'm interested in each of your impressions of whether you think it has failed. Mark.

Mark Considine (4:12)

Thank you and great to be here. I think the model has failed. But inside the model, there are variations in how well the service works. We've got pockets, what I would describe as pockets of excellence where we can see where things should be heading. But if you aggregate the service and say how well is it doing, how well is the model of trying to use a market model to deliver this, the answer is that hasn't worked. And we've tried, depending on how you count them, at least five major variations and refits to try and make it work. We're about to do that again.

And I think really that it's time for a change in the model.

Natasha Mitchell (4:53)

By what measure has it failed?