A HARD-NOSED GP of my acquaintance used to begin every check-up with the same question: How much are you drinking these days? Years later he told me that whenever he asked that question of his patients - and he always did - hed mentally double the figure given in response, just to have some idea of the scale of the problem. Messrs Abbott, Hockey, Abetz et al all have children who doubtless think of their dads as honest men. I dont share their optimism. Ive believed for some decades now that unemployment is out of control in this country, and that the overall figures would see just about any Government hounded from office, were they made known. I believe at least 1.5 million Australians (at least 15%) are jobless - at least double the figures announced this week. Let me explain how I arrive at this rough figure. Say youre receiving Newstart & you (1) do more than a certain number of hours volunteer work each week; (2) do more than a few hours part-time work each week; or (3) have been forced into one of the many ridiculous Job Training schemes. In none of these cases will you be registered as Unemployed. Youll still be receiving a government payment as your primary source of income, but it wont show up on the jobless roles. Hundreds & hundreds of thousands of young & middle-aged people fall into this category. Three-quarters of people interviewed recently a year after completing a Job Training course still had not done so much as one days paid full-time work. In some areas part-time work is the only thing going. Streets & shopping malls are crowded all week with people hanging around eking out their miserly stipend - you can bet few of them are registered as unemployed. The Disability Support pension is another way of hiding the jobless. So was Keatings masterstroke, converting dozens of Community Colleges into degree-granting universities & encouraging as many young people as possible to sign up to a lifetime of HECS debt. Several hundred thousand students sign up for at least three years, during which they might otherwise be clogging the employment market, finishing degrees in fields which are in many cases already over-supplied. Australia has been shedding tens of thousands of jobs a year in manufacturing, retail, service, banking, communications, trades. Places like the Illawarra & the Hunter Valley lost more than 50,000 jobs within a few years when the steelworks were phased out. Most of these jobs which flowed on from steelmaking (in engineering, supply, transport) are, like poor Clementine, lost & gone forever. Hardly a month passes without another big concern (airlines, banks, telcos, department stores) announcing another round of layoffs. No nugatory figures either - most of these are in the hundreds. What happens to all these people? Do they all become barmaids, baristas, tour bus drivers -- spin doctors assure us that tourism will save us. Centrelink has become arguably the largest peacetime bureaucracy this lands ever seen. Its primary task seems to me to be not so much connecting people to jobs or job training, but to lie - systematically & with great efficiency -- about just how many of those people are out there. Eight million Australians informed the last Census that the Government was their primary source of income. My suspicion is that many of these are fit & able to work, but their true situation has once again been buried under reams of dodgy statistics. I never thought Id see this happen in my lifetime. Sadly, I dont believe any of the major parties has any real answers. But it would be nice if some of them could tell the truth, just for a change. In my view this is the real obscenity behind the farcical 457 Visas. Work built this country ; lying about the absence of work may well destroy it.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 09:57:07 +0000
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