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Rudd’s wife makes fortune from workless Britons
Andrew Bolt Blog Icon Arrow July 08 2013 (5:19am) Filed under:
Kevin Rudd’s wife is making a motza from the British policies Rudd deplores:
In a return lodged last December for her international job placement agency Ingeus UK, [Therese] Rein, one of seven directors, states that the country in which she is usually resident is the United Kingdom. Clearly, unlike her spouse, Rein does not fear life under Tory policies.
Last week as justification for his backflip on the ALP leadership Rudd warned of the need to stop Tony Abbott because “his alternative economic policy is to copy the British Conservatives—launch a national slash-and-burn austerity drive and drive the economy into recession as happened in Britain"…
Well every cloud has a silver lining, especially if, like Rein, you’re in the welfare-to-work industry in Britain. For while Rudd might rail against the evils of “Cameronite” policies, a company ultimately 50 per cent owned by Rein’s Australian company Ingeus has bagged contracts worth $1.2 billion under the Tories’ “Work Program”. The policy is intended to secure jobs for the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged groups.
That is a staggering amount of money, and British Labour is wondering what Britons are actually getting for it:
THERESE Rein faces multi-million-dollar contractual problems with the British government after her jobseeker company, Ingeus, failed to deliver on promises to get sufficient numbers of long-term unemployed back to work.
Ingeus ... faces having some of the lucrative contracts axed before the end of the year…
Opposition works spokesman Liam Byrne noted that, in many parts of the country, taking part in the scheme was indeed “worse than doing nothing"…
Its reputation has been tarnished, especially among the poorest and most disadvantaged, after it coerced some unemployed people to work unpaid for 30 hours a week for up to six months in charity shops and big-name retail outlets.
This “workfare plan”, detailed in Ingeus’s tender document, is mandatory for the claimants to maintain their pound stg. 71.70 a week jobs benefit.. . Ingeus told The Australian “all work experience is voluntary, with the duration determined by the individual"…
Joanna Long, a member of the lobby group Boycott Workfare, told The Australian that the unemployed had no real alternative but to work for free with no job at the end of the period.
“It is deeply concerning someone so closely connected to the Australian Labor Party is helping to erode labour rights in the UK,” Ms Long said…
The latest figures, released last month by the Department of Work and Pensions, underscore a poor performance, dramatically below the government’s target that Ingeus and others would find work for 30 per cent of applicants, which was a minimum figure the government expected would be “significantly exceeded”.
Instead 130,000 of the 1.2 million people who joined the Work Program since June 2011—13.4 per cent—have found employment, a figure well below that which the government believed would have found work without any intervention at all.
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