A petition calling for the Work for the Dole program to be shut down has been delivered to minister for jobs and industrial relations Kelly O'Dwyer, after an employment contractor was fined $90,000 over the death of a teenager.
Joshua Park-Fing, 18, died from critical head injuries after he fell from a flatbed trailer being towed by a tractor at the Toowoomba Showgrounds in April 2016. It's suspected the tractor slipped a gear and jolted, causing the teen to fall.
At the time of his death Park-Fing was earning $218.75 per week on the federal government-sponsored Work for the Dole program.
NEATO Employment Services pleaded guilty in Toowoomba Magistrates Court on Thursday to failing to comply with its health and safety duty and was fined $90,000.
In April 2016 the Toowoomba Showgrounds site was shut down and has not reopened. As of June 2018, 11 outdoor Work for the Dole sites run by NEATO in Queensland had been shut down. The company no longer runs worksites.
Following Thursday's verdict, nearly 4,000 people have signed a petition calling on Work for the Dole to be scrapped.
The petition was hand delivered to O'Dwyer by Jeremy Poxon from the Australian Unemployed Workers Union (AUWU).
"As a Work for the Dole participant, and an organiser for the AUWU, I'm calling on jobs minister Kelly O'Dwyer to shut this program down," Poxon told BuzzFeed News.
"It's clear the government cannot ensure our safety on these sites — and unemployed workers like myself, like Josh, cannot continue putting our lives at risk."
Despite advance warning from Poxon that he and other unemployed young people would be delivering the petition, O'Dwyer was not available to meet them.
"If we don't put up resistance to this program now, the government will simply continue to expand it, forcing more and more vulnerable unemployed workers ... into punitive, and humiliatingly pointless, activities to keep our paltry Newstart entitlements," Poxon said.
The AUWU says Work for the Dole injuries have increased fivefold under the Coalition’s “jobactive” system that makes Work for the Dole notionally compulsory. In 2015-16 there were 500 injuries sustained, out of 106,000 participants in the Work for the Dole program, including one death.
The union says of all complaints made to its national safety hotline, 30% were to report safety issues on Work for the Dole sites, and a government-commissioned report by Ernst & Young found 64% of Work for the Dole risk assessments in 2016 failed to fully comply with standard workplace health and safety procedures.
Thirty months on from Park-Fing's death and the government is still refusing to release the report into his death, or detail how it has increased safety on job sites.
Small business minister Michaelia Cash, the minister in charge of the Work for the Dole program at the time of the teenager's death, promised to conduct an investigation and publish a report within a month of the incident.
The Department of Employment (now the Department of Jobs and Small Business) provided an internal report to Cash in September 2016, which the government has declined to release publicly as it contains information that could "harm" NEATO. The report was given to NEATO.
BuzzFeed News understand the new jobs minister Kelly O'Dwyer is happy for the report to be released, once the trials for the other two parties charged over Park-Fing's death is completed.
Labor has not ruled out scrapping the Work for the Dole program if it wins the next federal election.