Centrelink says it will ask people receiving unemployment benefits in New South Wales to justify why they haven’t accepted a trade posting from the Perrottet government, giving the positions are so readily available.
“There are literally thousands of these trade postings available, so you’re going to need to have a really good reason why you haven’t accepted one if you want to keep receiving payments,” a spokesperson for Centrelink said.
Claiming you don’t have the correct skills or experience will not be considered a valid excuse, the organisation said. “These are walk-up, learn-on-the-job positions. It doesn’t matter what experience you’ve had previously. You could have worked as a window salesman, for example, or done nothing at all. We’ve had plenty of people successfully placed in these positions with absolutely no qualifications”.
Sydney resident Hugh Boland said he’d never seen a job market as buoyant as this. “You walk down Macquarie Street and there are signs up in the windows everywhere advertising trade commissioner positions”.
Centrelink has advised interested applicants to get in touch with their mate at the NSW Liberal Party.
