A massive congratulations to the neoliberal architects of this system on having a comfy, fun and lucrative three decades of experimentation at Australia’s expense, just to throw up their hands at the $9.5bn annual waste and go “whoopsie”.

Thirty years of pointless personal “resume writing workshops” in communities where unemployment resulted from shared structural realities of collapsing industries and offshoring.

Thirty years of vacuous chats with “job specialists” who were, in many cases, less qualified or experienced than the people obliged to take their advice on employment prospects in industries they knew less than nothing about.

Hill’s proposal that government be returned to the centre of unemployment service is practical and cost-efficient, given the inquiry revealed private providers were spending 50% of their time not on facilitating jobs but administering their own operations.

The task ahead for Labor to reform the system beyond denouncing it is unenviable, given the dehumanising twin tropes of the “dole bludger” and “fat cats” of the public service have now been in poisonous circulation since shadowy conservative thinktanks inserted them into the discourse at the time unemployment spiked during the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Persuading Australians after 50 years that the unemployed are the structural consequence of deliberate policies designed to create a “reserve army of labour” and keep wages low rather than aspirational aristocrats extorting taxpayer funds to play the lute is not as easy a task as it should be.

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