As a nation, we have been trained by our political leaders and capitalist elites to direct our outrage downwards.
The recent budget announcement proved this earlier this month when once again the nation balked at the cost of welfare payments as the largest piece of the federal budget pie.
We grumble about "taxpayer dollars" being spent to keep our most vulnerable Australians alive, sheltered, and marginally afloat. We have been conditioned to believe that the problem with our social safety net is the people who need it.
But the real scandal - the one hiding in plain sight - is not the money spent on welfare. It is the power we have handed to private companies to administer it.
For decades, successive governments have outsourced the management, monitoring, and policing of unemployed Australians to private providers. These companies are not elected. They are not accountable to the public. They are not bound by the same transparency obligations as government agencies. Yet they wield extraordinary authority over the lives and incomes of people who rely on social security to survive.
And let's be clear: the only institution that should ever be responsible for administering public funds is the government itself. Not because government is perfect, but because it is at least structurally accountable to the people whose money it spends.
Placing compliance oversight, that is the power to suspend payments, impose penalties, and determine whether someone has met their obligations, in the hands of private enterprises is a recipe for corruption, perverse incentives, and undue political influence. We have already seen what happens when profit and poverty are allowed to mix.
Look at the Indue cashless debit card, a system that funnelled public money into a private company with deep political connections. Look at the Liberal Party president who sat on the board. Look at the way the card was trialled on communities who had no meaningful ability to refuse it and no political power to speak out. Look at the way it expanded, not because it worked (the evidence proved it didn't), but because it was lucrative.
Look at the employment services industry, where companies have made billions from government contracts while delivering outcomes so poor that a parliamentary inquiry described the system as "not fit for purpose".
Look at the revolving door between politics and the sector. They are symptoms of a system that has outsourced not just service delivery: they have outsourced governmental power.
And yet, despite inquiry after inquiry, report after report, and testimony after testimony, the government refuses to do the one thing that would actually fix the system: end the privatised compliance regime.
Why?
It's not because they don't know what's needed. They do. The evidence is overwhelming. The 2023 parliamentary inquiry said the market model itself was the problem. Social services organisations have said it for years. Lived experience advocates have said it even louder. The government's own language now acknowledges that the system is "ill-equipped" and "failing".
So if the problem is known, why isn't the solution being implemented?
Because dismantling the privatised model would require political courage - and political courage has always been in short supply.
Reclaiming employment services would mean rebuilding a public system that was deliberately dismantled. It would mean hiring thousands of staff, reestablishing local offices, and taking responsibility for compliance decisions that have been conveniently outsourced. It would mean confronting powerful private providers who lobby aggressively to protect their revenue streams. It would mean risking accusations of "big government" from opponents who rely on fear campaigns to score points.
It would also mean admitting that the last 25 years of policy, under both major parties, were fundamentally wrong. That the outsourcing experiment failed. That the harm inflicted on unemployed Australians was not an accident, but a predictable outcome of a system designed around competition, profit, and punishment.
Governments don't like admitting they were wrong. They prefer to tinker, soften, rebrand, and "overhaul" without ever touching the core. Especially if it's a mistake that costs money to fix.
So instead of ending privatised compliance, we get a three-tier model. We get softer mutual obligations. We get fewer automatic suspensions. We get more human oversight. These are improvements and they will make some people's lives less chaotic.
But they are not structural change. They are harm reduction in a system built on harm.
And the most galling part? We don't need more reports, more inquiries, more consultants paid millions to tell us what unemployed people have been saying for decades.
The government has the data. They have the evidence. They have the recommendations. They have the moral imperative.
So what are they waiting for? A report that tells them what they want to hear? A political moment that feels safer? A way to avoid upsetting the private providers who have become embedded in the machinery of welfare?
A lotto win?
At some point, we have to stop pretending this is about evidence. It's about courage.
If we are serious about building a fair, humane, and effective employment services system, we must end the privatised compliance regime. Let private providers offer career support to offset costs, but the power to suspend someone's income, determine their obligations, decide whether they eat or go without, must return to the public sphere.
Our outrage has been aimed at the wrong people. It's time to aim it where it belongs: at the system that punishes the poor while enriching the powerful.
