Senator VANSTONE (Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs)(9.25 p.m.) —Thank you for your question. These amendments are, of course, interrelated. A number of people have made reference in this discussion, for example, to amendment 13. You could go back to amendment 4. These changes are not stand-alone changes. What we are seeking to create is a situation where the PEPE and employment placement enterprises, whether they be community, such as Centacare, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Salvation Army or private providers, are on equal terms with the newly corporatised CES, the PEPE. We do not guarantee a share of market to anybody. We do not guarantee a share to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, we do not guarantee a share to Centacare, we do not guarantee a share to the Salvation Army, we do not guarantee a share will go to the private sector, nor should we guarantee a share for the PEPE.

I think it is just unimaginable that the PEPE would be so uncompetitive that it would not get any work, but in terms of the design there is no guarantee for any other single provider or portion of providers. I think that underlines the remarks I made earlier about a commitment to look after the CPSU more than unemployed people. Your proposed clause 9(3) is the point that has been canvassed—we have canvassed this point; it is not as if we have been off the point at all—on accreditation. It would be complete stupidity to have a Commonwealth body credit provider and then another Commonwealth body, a separate group of people, taking up more money that could otherwise be used for unemployed people, go through and do the tendering process and in that tender process go through the sorts of things that I raised earlier that people said were not on the point.

I do not know whether people were not listening, whether they thought we were talking about another amendment, or what. We do not understand why people would want to allocate Commonwealth resources to go through a rigorous tender evaluation process, including a check on conformity with the tender conditions that check on financial viability, assessment against standard selection criteria, use of surveys of job seekers to assess performance of service providers, a code of conduct and a regime of performance audits—doing that job twice when it should be done once. It should be done properly and the money that this amendment would seek to have expended on CPSU members doing it twice should go to the unemployed.