COTA Australia, in partnership with COTA Tasmania, has made a submission to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ discussion paper, Shaping the Future of Employment Services.
While COTA supports the Government’s broader reform direction, our submission argues that mature-age jobseekers are largely missing from the detailed design, and that older women re-entering the workforce after caring responsibilities face a distinct, compounding disadvantage that the new system must explicitly address. We use Tasmania as a case study of how these issues play out in a nationally consistent service.