A monthly activity target imposes its costs on employers who never agreed to carry them
The points system measures activity, monthly. The predictable result is applications made to reach a number, and the cost of reading them falls on employers who are not part of the scheme and get nothing from it.
Steps this would change
Rationale
The Points Based Activation System was an improvement on what preceded it. A fixed monthly quota of job applications was replaced with a menu in which study, training, paid work and volunteering all earn points. That change credited things that actually lead to employment and it should be recorded as progress.
What it retained is the shape: a monthly target measured in activity.
Two consequences follow, and only one of them is usually discussed.
The one that is discussed. Activity targets produce activity. Applications are submitted to reach a number rather than to obtain a job, and the person submitting them knows it, and it is demoralising in a way that compounds everything else about being unemployed.
The one that is not. The cost of reading those applications falls on employers. A small business advertising one role receives applications from people who are not seeking it and cannot tell them apart from the rest. That is a compliance cost imposed on a third party who is not a participant in the scheme, receives no benefit from it, and has no way to opt out.
This database has recorded compliance costs landing on councils, on providers, on applicants and on the state. This is the only instance of a scheme's costs landing on someone with no relationship to it at all, and it is invisible because nobody measures the recipient side of a job application.
What might change. Weight the target toward things with a plausible causal link to employment — training completed, hours worked, a qualification obtained — and away from raw application counts. Allow a provider to set a lower activity requirement where a person is doing something demonstrably more useful.
Filed as an idea, not a proposal. The evidence that would settle it does not exist here: nobody publishes how many applications employers receive from points-motivated applicants, how much time that costs them, or whether a lower-activity regime produces worse employment outcomes. Those are answerable questions and this project cannot answer them.
Days saved: zero. This changes no elapsed time. It is on this site because the database's unit is the step, and a step whose cost is borne by someone outside the process is the kind of thing a step-level model is uniquely able to notice.
What is being traded away
Outcome-weighted targets punish people in weak labour markets. Someone in a regional town with three employers cannot generate outcomes at the rate someone in a capital city can, and a system weighted toward outcomes would find them non-compliant for living somewhere without jobs. Activity targets, for all their faults, are within the person's control. That is a real virtue and this proposal would erode it.
"Plausible causal link to employment" is a judgement, and judgements get gamed. Weighting training more heavily than applications creates an incentive to enrol in training, which creates a market in low-value courses — a pattern this database has already documented in the VET sector. The Commonwealth has been here before and it went badly.
Reducing job search requirements is a contested political position. A serious constituency holds that looking for work should be the central obligation of receiving unemployment payment, and that the number should be high. This entry treats the employer cost as decisive; someone who thinks the obligation is the point will not, and they are not being unreasonable.
And the employer cost may be smaller than it feels. Application volume is driven by online application systems and a weak labour market as much as by mutual obligations, and no published evidence isolates the points-driven share. This proposal rests on a mechanism that is obviously real and a magnitude that is entirely unmeasured, which is why it is an idea.
Precedent
The Points Based Activation System already replaced a fixed job-application count with a menu that credits study, paid work and volunteering. The principle that activity other than applying should count is established; the question is whether the target should be an activity count at all.
Sources
- DEWR, published Points Based Activation System guidance: tasks including job applications, study, training, paid work and volunteering count toward a monthly points target
- Reporting on the 2026 employment services reform package moving away from compliance-heavy settings