Indigenous aged care services could benefit from long term jobless funding

Posted January 6th 2009

by DPS

The Rudd Government will spend $41million to get jobs for indigenous people, those with mental health conditions and those who reside in jobless families, and the indigenous aged care sector will be targetted for job seeker work experience and training.

Employment Participation Minister Brendan O’Connor was reported in The Australian (5 January) providing details of a new $41 million Innovation Fund that would help the most disadvantaged job seekers.

The Government said job agencies would be able to use the money to develop “innovative solutions” to problems, the report stated.

“With unemployment forecast to increase due to the global financial crisis, I believe it’s important that we continue to encourage and foster innovative ways to help disadvantaged job seekers into work, with low-skilled job seekers expected to have an even tougher time finding a job,” Mr O’Connor said.

The Government will devise a panel to determine what projects are funded.

The panel will be asked to put forward projects to create social enterprises that provide indigenous job seekers with work experience and training.

The Minister said social enterprise projects could include indigenous aged-care services to provide training and work experience in a range of occupations, ranging from aged-care attendants to office administration and cleaners.

Employment agencies and other organisations are applying to be on the new Innovation Fund panel as part of the tender for the $3.9 billion universal employment services, with membership expected to be announced in April.

“The Innovation Fund has been established by the Rudd Government as a pool of funds to encourage communities, employment service providers and employers to come up with new and creative ways to help job seekers into a job,” Mr O’Connor said. “There has been a great deal of interest, so much so that we agreed to broaden the range of organisations able to put forward their ideas to address barriers to employment.”