The 550,000 Australians we don't talk about
There are 550,000 Australians on JobSeeker right now.
That number gets quoted in policy papers. It almost never gets turned into what it actually means: 550,000 people on roughly $20,000 a year, cycling through requirements designed to prove they are trying rather than to help them succeed.
At Worthy Cause, our participants move from JobSeeker into paid work at above-award wages. That is a shift from roughly $20,000 a year to roughly $50,000 a year. That is not a rounding error. It is a life.
It is also, arithmetically, a return to the Commonwealth. Each participant off Centrelink is paying roughly $10,000 a year in income tax rather than drawing $20,000 a year in benefits. At 30 participants a year, that is $300,000 in tax returned and $600,000 in benefits saved. The program costs roughly $18,000 to $19,000 per participant to run.
The math is not complicated. The will is the hard part.
The system is not broken because the people in it are broken. It is broken because the access it was designed to provide was designed by people who never needed it.
The job ad that says “must have two years of experience” for an entry-level role. The interview process that filters for confidence rather than capability. The hiring manager who mistakes “this person makes me comfortable” for “this person can do the job.”
Worthy Cause’s model is built on the opposite assumption: you have not failed the system. The system has failed you. The way back in is not more effort. It is access.
That is what the cookies are for. That is what the cafes are for. That is the only thing this whole operation is for.
If you run procurement for a large organisation and you have not asked your supplier list how many of them actively employ people with complex barriers to work, the answer is almost certainly zero.
The question costs nothing to ask. The answer, once you have it, is hard to unknow.
The kitchens exist. The licences exist. The proven program exists. The only thing that closes the opportunity gap between 11 people in the program and 30 is the decision, by enough organisations, to make inclusive procurement a real line in the budget rather than a line in the annual report.
That is the ask. Not for sympathy. For a decision.