ABC 4 corners investigation has uncovered the amoral gamification of government contracts purported to offer job seeker assistance.

http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/four-corners/NC1504H004S00

This video may not be available after march 9 2015 so get in fast.

Forging and falsifying documents seemed to be industry standard practice.

Specific rorts uncovered were:

Categorizing people into more at risk categories in order to get more funding.

Claiming payments for assisting job seekers into work even when the job seeker was not assisted.

Funneling job seekers into in-house training courses  order to claim a training payment, often the training was low quality, inappropriate or never actually provided.

What is more shocking was successive governments were aware of the widespread fraud and waste but did nothing to punish the fraudsters.

So a total of 18 billion dollars was spent on this program, conservative estimates are that about half was fraud by the contracted  agencies.

18 billion dollars spent over a 16 year period is a lot of money, what else could be done with such a sum.

In November  1960 President Kennedy was elected and quite quickly promised to have a man on the moon before 1970.

In the period of 1961 and 1969, 34 billion dollars was spend on getting man on the moon.

So effectively we could have had half a moon landing for the price of the wacky ideologically driven ‘be mean to the battlers’ program.

The original NASA moon landing from 1961 to 1969 cost 34 billion dollars. Australia wasted about half this amount harassing unemployed people in the early 21 century and has not landed a man on the moon.

So who is behind all of this, who else Tony Abbott,

Minister for employment when the program was announced,

under John Howard.