In the wake of her Gough Whitlam Oration, Julia Gillard has devoted another speech to articulating her “values” – an address to the Sydney Institute’s annual dinner.
Her speech on “The Dignity of Work” is another repudiation of what the Labour Movement has traditionally stood for. Trade unions and the Labor party have always, up until now, focused centrally on struggles about working time: the length of the working day, the need for autonomy and meaning at work, and the need to free time to devote to self development, one’s friends, family and communities. In short, the “dignity” of work is not a given: it needs to be fought for. And the meaning involved in work transcends the slow grind of the clock and the hard grind of the boss and must imply an embedding of social and creative value. The fruits of our labour build up the community and the self.
But, what we have from the PM is an arid vision indeed.
There’s nothing in Gillard’s rhetoric that suggests any concern whatever with the quality of work, or its content, or a recognition that “dignity” actually entails autonomy and meaning, not just a hard grind for its own sake. When has a Labor PM been so unable to articulate any positive content to national aspirations? We work, we work ourselves out, we have kids, we drop dead, and the cycle starts all over again. It’s an empty Calvinism and nothing else.
Say what you like about Howard. at least he had hobbies
Let’s hope she doesn’t ask for a copy of this bill http://t.co/QtpVZYa
One really has to suspend belief to accept that Gillard’s a Labor PM.
Despite my cynicism, this still surprised and disappointed me. At least Kevin Rudd displayed compassion, whether he followed through or not. Gillard is almost indistinguishable from Howard, and I have no idea who she’s trying to impress – Rudd didn’t need this victim-blaming shit to be one of our most popular prime ministers ever.
It’s digusting, and using people’s lives and hardships to make political hay just shows what a moral vacuum Labor really is. I look forward to Rebekkah jumping into this thread and explaining how wrong we are about Gillard.
Patrick,
“I have no idea who she’s trying to impress” is the question regarding everything she touches on whether it’s ‘dole bludgers’ or marriage equality.
Disappointed. Thoroughly. I am beginning to understand why the PM has shown so little interest in science, the arts, in anything of life that doesn’t involve a clock and performance indicators. I would send her my well-thumbed copy of Russell’s In Praise of Idleness but she’d only read the summary briefing, pencil her initials in the margin and move on the the next document.
Disappointed by so much this PM and this government have done and failed to do. Their only redeeming feature is that they’re not the other lot. Soon that won’t be enough.
Well, Mark, you’ve just about said it all. I agree absolutely with the comments so far. I fear for my few friends on the disability pension, especially the two who are more than a little bit mentally disabled. And for evertbody else on the DSP.
I guess I’m a Socialist Alliance/Green for life now. There’s no way I can go back to or vote for this travesty of a Labor Party. We need Some-one like Stephen Smith to lead the party. Give me some-one who over-reacts with compassion any day over Gillard’s cruel, graceless vision.
Don’t suppose there’s any hope of true Labor men and women pulling this Judas into line is there?
I agree with the post. It is a very narrow arid view of society and the role of work and workers within it.
One of my concerns is basically centered around the so called tactical question of making some room between the ALP and the Greens.
The ALP can no longer out right the Liberal party of Abbott. It’s a trick that worked for twenty years but Abbott has neoliberal economic views allied with a NCC moral sensibilty that is toxic. Besides that if you view politics as a project the neoliberal project has run out of steam in Australia.
More disturbingly veering to the right by somehow chopping up the idea of a workers party and turning it into a party of work shows a certain rigidity of thought processes. Gilliard and her team are not thinkers and are I suspect suspicious of those who are. This will be her undoing in the end.
“Her speech on “The Dignity of Work” is another repudiation of what the Labour Movement has traditionally stood for.”
I just thought it showed that she was just another populist moron. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “traditionally” here. I suspect that you are framing the question based on your own age — if you were 30 right now, it’s not clear to me that “tradionally stood for” would have anything to do with what you are saying except for the rather small number of 30 year olds that have studied the minutae of Australia history.
oops that should be “Australian history”.
Except that Howard believed in something. Well, OK, cricket. He believed in cricket. But at least that’s something!
I know it’s bad form, but I just penned this on a now-exhausted thread, and felt it fit in better here…
It could have been from the PM’s own speech
I think that she is proving to be far worse than any of us possibly imagined.
Her droning, lifeless and monotonous way of speaking is merely a reflection of the vacuous nature of her thoughts and ideas.
When we start looking at Howard in a favourable light in comparison, we will know that we are well and truly stuffed.
She did have the nickname of ‘Julia Dullard’ when she was AUS President.
I’m not looking at Howard as a favourable comparison, but I still know we are well and truly stuffed.
The saddest thing about this for me, and I’ve been feeling it intensely since the Whitlam Oration is the despair I feel for the Labour Party.
I’m going off to watch some Jaws movies now. At least they’ll cheer me up/
OH. GOD, MY COUNTRY IS STUFFED!
The bits i heard reminded me of the Godfathers. Birth, school, work, death.
We’ll let you know when it’s safe to go back in the political water Paul…
There’s nothing dignified about working in most of Australia’s workplaces in this era; hours spent on crush-load public transport or in traffic jams, dealing with sociopathic middle-managers who force highly-qualified people to do humiliating and tedious compliance work, topped off with compulsory team-building weekends and an overload of unpaid overtime.
I encourage people to work as little as they can get away with.
Agree whole-heartedly with the post and the comments.
But isn’t this just the logical endpoint of the technocratic managerialism that they keep going on about in the pages of Arena? John Hinkson and all that? Other than Working Hard and Saving Money to Spend on Shit, these clowns have nothing else to offer.
Of interest here might be the discussion going on in the UK about “social mobility”
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2011/04/cleggs-social-mobility-confusion.html
http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2011/04/against-social-mobility-equality-class-and-the-jilted-generation/
I’d hardly look at Howard as a favourable comparison.
Sadly, there’s always votes in bashing the unemployed. But that’s not an excuse for Gillard to succumb to the temptation. What’s more interesting to me is how much she actually believes this rhetoric and how much is playing to the peanut gallery?
I’m hoping that the Budget provides a lot of carrot and no stick, when it comes to the unemployed and people on the disability pension. But, I guess I’m an optimist.
Mark, I don’t think it’s so much a repudiation as a betrayal. Turning the phrase “the party of work” into an attack on the welfare state is pretty mean-spirited, as is using Curtin’s wartime call for more workers as a cheap justification for work-for-the-dole schemes.
How is it that all this calvinism can come at a time that Gillard herself claims is a time of unprecedented prosperity and economic growth?
Labor is just way too obsessed with triangulation.
It’s been 17 years since I was last unemployed and I still remember the stigma from those few months. I was hoping those days were behind us but watched on in horror as Kochie this morning showed “how much of your hard earned pay is taxed to pay for welfare.”
I remember as a welfare kid being treated like absolute shit for being on the government teat while one of the upper middle class girls showed off the Swatch watches she got on her full AusStudy. Buying trinkets on middle class welfare was seen as acceptable while being one admin mistake away from sleeping in a car or on the street was seen as shameful.
Indeed Rudd would never have made a speech like this due to his background. I’m starting to wonder if Julia is trying to either destroy the ALP from within or become the alternative Coalition leader. I could see Rudd being sorely tempted to walk over this.
Mark, spot on as usual. Thatcher..well hey…she sounds just like Thatcher to me. I thought at first it was an action replay of an old Thatcher speech.
Before I go off and watch Jaws 2, 3 and Jaws:The Revenge, I’d just like somebody in the Labor Movement to remind Ms. Gillard that one of the main mottoes of the Labour Movement since the 1870s and before was:
8 Hours Work.
8 Hours PLAY. [N.B.]
8 Hours Rest.
I’m finished now. If I stay on LP any longer tonight I’ll just get in a foul mood and end up with a severe attack of insomnia.
I love this in reference to adults who “can’t” work:
Yeah that’s right, Julia, learning to read and write at a higher level is just so simple, anyone can do it just like that.
And this from the woman who in the same speech wrote this shit:
Some things never change.
And also coming from someone who pronounced hyperbole as ‘hyper-bole’ in a recent interview.
How about learning to speak at a higher level, Gillard!
Thank goodness she’s a member of the Left faction, is all I can say. Imagine what we’d get with a Right-aligned PM.
Or , closer to the point.
@jumpnmcar nice!
Fine@14 – I also wondered how much she believes it herself and how much she’s playing to an audience. But either way, she comes out of it badly.
Maybe someone should set her a challenge: you’re on the dole, you’ve got one year to learn to read and write Chinese to a level sufficient to be foreign minister, or we cut you off.
It’s simple, surely?
I agree completely Mark. It appears the PM is mounting a pincer movement what with the “work, any ind of work, is good for you” line combined with “sturdy beggars” claptrap. It is just amazing to me that there are still Labor supporters who justify the Rudd coup based on perceived character flaws. I wouldn’t care if he wore womens underwear at least he didn’t carry on like Ian Paisley on mogadon.
Don’t mourn – organize.
Especially, as Elizabeth Farrelly wrote in today’s SMH, organize to overturn a situation in which intelligent and creative people are dominated by thugs and bullies.
Always union.
simple mistake, gillard picked up abbott’s speaking notes on the way to the podium.
Every couple of years – the times when I am having a shittier day than usual at work – I dig up one of the many copies of The Abolition of Work, and read it from end to end. It often makes me feel better.
It would be nice if someone read the whole thing to (or at) Julia Gillard. But I doubt she’d ever get it.
This is quite plainly a statement made by the leader of an employer’s party, not a worker’s party.
If work were dignified, it would be done for no pay at all.
The cash nexus proves the hierarchical relationship between employer and employee. Wages are a salve for injuries to independence and dignity.
Is there nothing Gillard won’t do to stay atop the greasy pole?
She is a Manchurian Candidate and must be removed from all positions of responsibility in the ALP.
Down and Out that sounds heavenly. Currently I’m back to trying to fit 60 hours of allocated work into the week. Mind you when Howard was PM I wrecked my health doing reams of unpaid overtime. There were several deadlines where I would take clothes with me to work and get changed around the 16 hour mark and keep working.
All my peers were doing the same, we all knew that refusing to do unpaid would mean signing up for work for the dole.
Thanks Julia. Thanks for bring the spectre of Workchoices back.
As a life long lefty voter the ALP can piss up a rope if they think I’ll ever even think of voting for them again. Greens all the way from now on.
must be from the Matt McGinn, or Jim Reid wing of the left.
She is a Manchurian Candidate
Nah, she’s a Welsh Baptist.
She’s an effing disgrace, that’s what she is.
Christ, I really picked the wrong year for my schizophrenia to degenerate to the point of needing the DSP. Wish me luck in my appeal!
Well its not all down to her.
Possibly anyway.
I take a teeny bit of heart from Combet’s mention yesterday that our current ALP government has increased pensions and lower incomes [via tax reform] and thats good, one could even say “traditional ALP”.
It, the current ALP government that is, ain’t all bad.
But then there is this stuff from Julia which I presume is ALP strategy approved by the various top levels.
And I have to admit it stinks of the Liberal party to the point that if one or all of them was to spout it there would be no surprise, after all this has been their basic un-Australian worker pleb bashing line for yonks.
So I am forced to conclude, again *sigh*, for the umpteenth time, that the difference between the ALP now and the rightist Libs decades ago is bloody minimal.
So I’ll support the Greens.
Obviously, having jobs for all these people is not important to Gillard but you would think someone would have posed the question to her by now.
The best estimates I can find are between 175,000 and 195,000 job vacancies.
There are 600,000 registered job seekers, 600,000 hidden unemployed, 600,000 under employed and possibly 200,000 disabled.
Are we going to subcontract some call centres from India and some sweatshops from China?
Peter Martin:
“Australian Labor Government abandons its roots”
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=14161
My apologies for 41: that was a link provided by Peter Martin on Twitter.
And that was 45 not 41.
Time for bed.
Gillard is to the right of Malcolm Fraser. When he was PM.
She is going to lose government for the ALP. Who supports or thinks well of her? No one that I can see apart from the seat warming apparatchiks.
And I agree about her voice now, though I previously resisted this criticism. It’s becoming beyond creepy.
Hey Ron, stay awake a minute longer, that billy blog you linked to a couple of times above is good value.
I bookmarked it.
Ta.
“Gillard is to the right of Malcolm Fraser. When he was PM.”
I was an office-bearing member of the Liberal Party up until about 1981 or 2. I left because of Howard and the retrospective legislation on the ‘bottom of the harbour’ scheme (it didn’t affect me as I was a public servant; I just didn’t like the principle involved).
I admit time does change perception but I firmly believe that the Liberal Party* of that time (and before) would definitely be labelled left-wing today in comparison to today’s ALP. For me the rot with the ALP (ie movement to the Right) began with Hawke and Keating.
Salient Green @ 44 hits the nail on the head with those figures. Why don’t we have any journos asking the same question?
*(I’ve been a Greens voter for the last few years and can’t see myself changing at anytime in the future.)
Hey just remembering back…do you all remember when Keating told some student to “go get a job!”
Worked well for him didn’t it.
If Rudd ever wanted to do TWO things to save the Labor Party and Australia he could ..
1. defeat Howard
2. bring down Julia Howard quick smart.
I’ve never quite been able to work out why Calvinism is associated with hard work; it always seems like someone has misunderstood the concept of grace in Protestantism. (And Baptists tend not to be Calvinists!)
I haven’t worked up the courage to read Gillard’s speech yet; it was bad enough hearing snippets on the radio. I am reminded of a young teacher I met again after she’d returned from six months in a rough school in London. I’ve never been able to forget the contempt she showed for the kids she’d taught. “When you heard the language their parents used,” she sniffed,”you knew just what kind of people they were.” She came from one of the wealthiest suburbs of Sydney and had no idea about how other people had to live and no interest in finding out — just rejection for anyone who wasn’t just like her. Is this what Julia Gillard is really like?
“Christ, I really picked the wrong year for my schizophrenia to degenerate to the point of needing the DSP. Wish me luck in my appeal!”
Remember, what is being talked about, with regard to possible new Gillard measures on DSP, here, are still just speculative.
Any policy change is likely to have quite a few months lead up time before it is introduced. It may not prove not as bad as it now seems. And probably will not make any difference to you.
Good luck, James T.
Well, it’s pretty clear that the economy needs unemployed people otherwise wage inflation gets out of control. That’s just how it is, nothing ideological about it.
Maybe Julia comes from that village in Wales where everyone has either committed suicide or are addicted to heroin? It’s a bleak world-view, that’s for sure.
What joe2 said James T. Good luck. I don’t envy you. Unless your illness is visible you can get treated pretty roughly in Oz. I recently got over something that had chronic fatigue type side effects and one of my work mates cheerfully told me “You know it’s probably in your head.”
People tend to be full of ‘helpful’ advice like that in this country.
All those women who supported Julia Gillard for PM because she’s a woman have really got a lot to answer for.
tssk, on calvanism and the work ethic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
Chookie at 52 really says it all about the responses on this post: “I haven’t worked up the courage to read Gillard’s speech yet” but I know exactly what she said. This is critical analysis from a left perspective?
http://grogsgamut.blogspot.com/
Grog has a different take.
I need time to think about what he has written, but he is often on the mark.
Is Grog’s Gamut’s completely different take on this to be ignored then?
He at least analysed the actual speech and justified his opinion.
Right now, by comparison, this thread looks like an uninformed pile on.
Megan
Well, presuming that was directed at me, I’m still thinking. I went back, had a quick second read, will continue to think, read again, and then respond.
He is, I think [?], saying that she has been deliberately and lazily mis-read.
Maybe.
He says we are fully employed and shows a graph to that effect.
Thats wrong.
We have over a million people total in unemployment, under employed and hidden.
But your last line may be correct.
On the other hand the billy blog linked to in #45 above also analyses her speech in detail and places it ibto a real world context with different conclusions to Grog.
Check it out.
But I’m still thinking.
Hannah’s Dad and Megan, I was about to link to Grog’s Gamut with the tag “Now hear this” – but you got in before me…
IM not at all HO, I think that Grog’s take is infinitely more believable than the slant that the MSM are putting on Gillard PM’s speech.
But then, what would I know?
I’m not sure whether her vacuity betrays a lack of imagination, a lack of compassion, a lack of a moral compass or a just a lack of any idea of a mission.
Maybe it’s a bit of everything, but she surely is the most uninspiring Labor Prime Minister I can recall.
Initially, when she started down this grey road, I thought she was doing the standard Labor Right thing of appealing to the petit-bourgeois aspirationals.
But there really is nothing noble in her message, or even aspirational in the pure material sense. She really is just talking about work as a grind.
Perhaps it’s the Welsh heritage; a genetic memory about trudging down the mines day after day as part of some grim ritual of the fatalist working class that motivates her dour and soulless rhetoric.
I keep thinking why does she bother? What possible difference is there between her and the ‘punishers and straiteners’ of the Liberal Party whom Keating used to flail in parliament?
Then on the other side of the house you have the skeletal monk Abbott, whose thing is to punish his own body with extreme sports and to confess his sins to his favourite Cardinal.
A Calvinist and a Catholic as our political leaders; I feel like I am trapped in the Reformation squeezed between Martin Luther and the Inquisition.
Hear, hear, Mark.
But I can’t help wondering what we’re being softened up for with these series of speeches.
her dour and soulless rhetoric
Dour. That’s exactly the word for the Prime Minister.
If it wasn’t for her relationship with Timothy, some might call her a dour spinster.
[Waits for shellacking]
In my defence, she comes across exactly like that stereotype, like a character in a novel from one of the Bronte sisters.
A few points on the Grog’s Gamut post a number of people have referred to. I think Grog is being, at the same time, partisan and wearing rosy coloured glasses. And on the “Labor gets a rum deal from the media” argument, I think it’s greatly underestimating Julia Gillard to suggest that she didn’t anticipate – and intend -the sorts of reports of this speech that have come to pass, as with the digs at The Greens in her Whitlam Oration. The slur about “idleness” is a classic dog whistle. Just is.
She’s very clearly engaged in positioning on the fallow ground of “values” and “the mainstream” (in a way that’s quite politically futile imho). With all respect due to Grog, a lot of the assumptions he makes are typical of the Canberra policy community.
Some more specific points:
1. The claim that the economy is crying out for workers is at best misleading, at worst specious. See the the ratio of job seekers to jobs, which outside WA, is still more often than not close to 5 to 1, and much worse for younger and older people.
2. A lot of the arguments from employers, as always, have a lot to do with displacing the costs of training onto the public purse, and keeping wages down.
3. All this “wait for the budget” stuff is also quite misleading. All you need to do is read the Fin Review every day (in its capacity as the Boss’s Bible) to see that it’s clear as day that the thrust of the policy will be punitive, and particularly punitive towards people on the DSP.
Anyone who actually knows anything about the DSP knows that people on the DSP *do have bloody disabilities* and that the modes of assessing those have already gone beyond rigorous to approaching punitive.
4. The comparison with Paul Keating is also wrong in that his programmes were very expensive, evidence based, and designed in conjunction with the unions to provide genuinely worthwhile 6 month full time placements with wages within the ambit of the award system. The “mutual responsibility” stick approach and rhetoric only really ramped up with the Howard government, and it’s the latter that a “tough budget” will almost certainly embody.
Keating, and previous Labor PMs (including Kevin Rudd) actually had a notion of how work could be valuable and valued, and could contribute to broader social and political objectives. Not this dreary crap encouraging us all to accustom ourselves as supine servants to the voracious needs of “the economy” (for which read employers).
6. Yes, I’ve read the whole speech. Not only is it vacuous, but also patronising in the parts Grog finds “compassionate”.
7. I’ll repeat the point in the OP that the tradition of the labour movement is all about facilitating meaningful and empowering work as a means to an end, not a narrow concentration on work for its own sake somehow being equated with dignity.
Nah, it took till Fine at 18 for someone to twig to what it’s actually about, later HD.
They are no longer about changing paradigms, but working within them and it’s political feasible for them to do this since they have ceded the caring sharing stuff to the Green left, eg “banked” it, to then engage with Abbott’s hard right, for the mortgage belt.
They’re going back to good ol’fashioned values and a question to these sorts of electorates, “who do you trust out of us and the coalition”
They understand that the suburban mortgage belter doesn’t like his and her jobs, since both work to pay off the consumer durables and mortgage at a time of increased job insecurity.
As an act of good faith, Gillard therefore jumps on the people these people despise most of all, shirkers who dont like working for small businesses without workplace protections, pot smokers, malingerers, refugees, gays unmarried mothers, drunks (apart from themselves) “ethnics” and indigenes with their noisiness, threatening the further deterioration of real estate values.
Their metanarrative does involve components of the
Calvinism Mark talks of and Alan Jones knows it too, when he talks of “Struggle Street” and rouses his constituency to crush the unworthy on behalf of those he knows experience a precious sense of victimhood /entitlement.
Faced with key electorates whose prejudices are too easily reinforced by tabloid media, Labor now plays by the rules, dog whistling the mortgage belt back from Abbott as long he remains distrusted for his overt Thatcherite economics. Knowing it has to hold the mortgage belt to keep government, it can always knife the Greens later when passing legislation with the Tory opposition against that constituency the Greens will now represent.
The question is, has Labor so lost touch with its roots that it derived its previous sense of fair play from, that it actually beleives it’s own economic Hansonism, in which case we will have a Cameronist bloodbath, whoever gets in. Immigration won’t be cut to accomodate people chucked off welfare to seek out unskilled employment and the “bullring” with its high unemployment and coercion could become the norm, pleasing also many employers.
One more here for Grog, Megan & Fiona’s take on it.
Apparently it isn’t just talk-back listeners that love being outraged…
yes all the observations on this thread are very interesting but why is the PM making these speeches?
is this NSW style politics having a last spasm?
Is it as some have stated the result of poll driven analysis and having a budget?
Who is advising the PM to pursue this campaign?
Yes Mark.
I reread Grog and Bill Mitchell and the latter, and you, are, sadly, closer to the mark [oh dear didn't intend that]
than Grog.
hannah’s dad, I can’t recall, unfortunately, where I saw the exact ratios of job seekers per vacancy, but it was somewhere in the last couple of days. You are quite right about underemployment too.
Grog’s work is often good, but to be honest, I think he does get too caught up in the narrative of the day, and too readily accepts some of the propositions which underpin it, which are actually false.
@murph –
Buggered if I know!
I can’t work it out. Outside Canberra and the media bubble, nobody believes in “the mainstream”. The only electoral appeal I can see in this is among the downward envy crew and the petit bourgeois who hate paying wages to their workers, and … er… um… they vote for Tony Abbott. It’s just nuts politically.
Mark
Australia wide I think its about 4 [unemployed] : 1 [vacancies] with underemployment about 10%, around 600,000 hidden unemployment.
Not good and a long way from ‘full’ employment.
But I presume the only place to get authoritive numbers is via the ABS but I find their site a real challenge to my search skills.
And, to get on one of many hobby horses I ride, we have to take into account a poverty level in the vicinity of 12% [however defined] mainly composed of women and kids.
Purely coincidental of course.
Paul Walter
“They [ALP] are no longer about changing paradigms, but working within them ..”
Funny, hannah’s mum and I were having a yak about this general topic and those words exactly summarise out thoughts.
One of us, probably the smarter one, said almost exactly that.
Well, thank goodness for the last line of my comment (just a careful legal type, of course).
I still want to see how this plays out in the budget. If I’m wrong, I shall be abjectly apologetic, assuming of course that I am still alive after being apoplectic.
Joseph @ 48.
Normally I would agree with you re: Gillard’s voice but I’ve noticed a certain ‘refinement’ of vowels lately.
(Or maybe I’m just getting used to the way she speaks and am regarding it as normal.)
Could it be that she’s received elocution lessons or voice training while she’s been off for a few days. She certainly sounded a lot better yesterday.
or maybe it was pesky ole fake Julia appearing again…
Mark@67. Regarding your point 4. I was one of the beneficiaries of the state Labor government’s labour scheme in the ’80s, called the Employment Initiative Program. You’re correct in the way you describe it. I was paid award wages for 6 months to start up a business with two friends. We also received training and all office costs were paid for. So, it was expensive. It was also very successful. The business continued on for years after the support was removed and we employed other people. It was a world away from today’s NEIS schemes and the like.
*74, “great minds think alike, fools never differ”.
“why is the PM making these speeches”
Well she was making at the at the Sydney Institute. However it’s just a more extreme version of the Whitlam oration so it’s not just audience driven (or is it, I doubt there were many R&F at the WO). I believe PW@68 provides the best explanation with this comment:
“since they have ceded the caring sharing stuff to the Green left, eg “banked” it, to then engage with Abbott’s hard right, for the mortgage belt”
There’s a double movement here, you can bash the Greens and wedge Abbott. It’s a sick, cynical form of politics that must be rooted in the PMs young Labor days.
But, of course there are people here who need to be misogynists as well. Hence the dour spinster and the remarks about her voice. Criticise Gillard for her policies as much as you want, but try to keep a lid on the ugly misogyny.
It amuses me when blokes here know they’re being misogynists and try to preempt it by saying they’re expecting a shellacking. If you know you’re being hateful, then simply stop being hateful.
And Sam, you’ve obviously not even read the Bronte sisters. Name one ‘dour spinster’. Catherine Earnshaw? Jane Eyre? So, you can add ignorance to misogyny.
If you think that, then you obviously haven’t read any novels by the Brontë sisters and don’t know anything about them.
Fine: snap. I just barged down to the comments box (which is not usually my way) after I came to Sam’s ugly little steaming pile without reading the rest of the comments first, soz. Not that it’s not a good thing to have a bit of reinforcement of the point.
She did have on a nice shiny jacket. Though it would have looked better with a top hat and magician’s wand.
But then, there was nothing magical about this performance. Just, as previously mentioned, dour and soulless rhetoric.
This is the part I don’t understand at all. Surely this is common knowledge? So why the question-begging assumption built into her speech that some of the people on the DSP shouldn’t be on it at all?
I read Grog’s post and it has modified my view a bit, not least because I’m probably closer to both his and Gillard’s views on the value of work and responsibility than Mark and some others here. And he’s right in that I do feel a fool for falling for the headlines and ‘news’ grabs. But I still think that targeting or being seen to be targeting the most vulnerable members of society is a particularly repulsive form of political suicide. Can’t help wondering where Lindsay Tanner is tonight and what he’s thinking.
probably filling in a citizenship application form for some foreign-language country with a sensible government. Thinking of doing the same myself.
Pavlov’s Cat @ 83 – so exactly where does Julia Gillard target people on DSP? I think you should trust what I think is your instinct to agree with Grog’s take on the PM’s speech.
Recently I’m finding some commentary at LP on Julia Gillard as bitchy as anything in right wing blogs, perhaps with better syntax and spelling.
I like Andrew Elder’s comment at GG which I think answers
Mark and someone else’s question about why the PM is making these speeches.
What a misleading reading of Gillard’s speech.
Let me make a few points:
1 – the central point of her speech was that the good economic times Australia is currently experiencing afford the country an opportunity to generate better labour market outcomes, especially for the disadvantaged. There is nothing wrong or controversial about that goal and it certainly is consistent with Labor values.
2 – her second key point was that there were mismatches (skills and geographic) that the government had an obligation to reduce. The unemployed do not always live in those areas with the most employment opportunities and many vacancies require skills that many of the unemployed don’t have. Again, there is nothing controversial about those statements. It is just another way of saying that Australia’s employment rate (or unemployment rate) could be improved further if those structural problems were addressed.
Australia’s labour market is tight. I don’t know a single economist that doesn’t think so. Tight labour markets can lead to wages growth in excess of productivity growth, and hence generate excess inflation. That in turn will lead to higher interest rates. The RBA has made this point many times recently. All Gillard is doing is saying that there are things the government can and should do to ease these pressures.
3 – Her speech was not an attack on the unemployed or those that genuinely cannot work. Indeed, she stated very clearly that not everyone on welfare can work and that those people deserved our respect and support. However, she went on to say that there are some people receiving welfare (whether on DSP or unemployment benefits) that could work and that the government had an obligation to help them. With that also comes responsibilities on the other side – to engage in proper search, to undertake training, etc.
Reciprocal obligation has been at the heart of the ALP’s labour market policies for two decades now. Mark compared current policy to Working Nation unfavourably. But that is unfair. I worked at the CES from 1994 to 1997 just after I finished high school. My own experience and the results of internal evaluation studies suggested that many of the programs set up during that time were not cost effective and did little to improve the employment prospects of the unemployed. The rhetoric was different than under Howard but the LTU had similar obligations to prove job search, make regular contact with case managers, and participate in training programs. Breaching was common then as well.
In her speech, Gillard reiterated the government’s promise that anyone under 25 not in work or education would receive a training place. It was hardly a statement of someone being mendacious towards the unemployed.
4 – her point about improving reading and writing skills was a basic one about the importance of improving literacy. Again, many long-term unemployed and young unemployed people do lack adeaquate literacy skills and it makes it very hard for them to obtain employment (above and beyond the other barriers they face).
5 – as for the politics, the speech was aimed squarely at those Labor sympathisers currently registering support for the coalition. Those that tend to have a slightly different attitude to work and welfare than those at LP.
You buggers voted for her and her cronies.
Told ya – she is a weather vane.
I’m not cynical.
I’m not, seriously I’m not I tell you.
Part of me still wants to believe the light on the hill is flickering within the ALP and Combet’s words lifted my spirits just a bit, they are at least better than t’ other mob.
But this, this speech, and the previous, ain’t good.
Its kicking people who are down.
Now Grog, who I respect, reckons Gillard was mis read.
Yeah maybe, but hell she is a very experienced politician and knows that if you use code words and concepts such as the ones one person at GG cited from her speech and some of which have been repeated here, then the audience she was addressing and the mass media whose responses an experienced politician can easily predict will hear exactly what was intended.
Dole bludgers and welfare cheats and lazy disabled people etc.
The usual victim blaming.
Incompetent she ain’t.
And Bill Mitchell illustrates clearly that the economics are not behind the rhetoric, the government chooses not to know that.
We have more unemployment in its various guises than we should have, less job vacancies than people, less full time jobs than wanted, more poverty in this of all countries than we should.
Nope, you don’t directly or via code words and whistles [hannah pricked her ears up, not only did the Australia Institute and the media hear them but so did she and so did, entirely predictably, all those who watched TV news etc tonighjt] hear the leader of the ALP kick the victims for the sake of ….
For the sake of what?
The votes of those who are being continually for the last several decades led to believe that unemployed equals bludger?
For those, even those unemployed, who are led to believe that its always the ‘others’ who are the problem?
As whatsisname above, Paul Walters sort of said, the ALP is not fighting, its rolled over and playing the game of the right wingers.
Using their bat and ball, playing by their rules under their umpire.
Guess what?
They are going to lose.
Thats why I reckon Andrew Elder has misinterpreted.
The ALP more right than the right?
Only the right wins there.
It will just be a matter of pretty smiles, who is more regressive than the other, presidential politics between Tweedle dum and dee.
And the ALP will never get the favour of the Australia Institute types, they are the Libs, same mob to the core, why barrack for the ALP even if they suck up and try to talk the same when you can get, are part, the real deal?
OK maybe, hopefully,I’m wrong, Grog and Andrew and the ALP strategists are correct and when the budget comes round the victims won’t be further victimized and scapegoated.
I think they will.
They already have been.
It seems to me that a major part of the problem is that many unemployed/DSP recipients do not have reasonable access to employment opportunity.
This is particularly so for people who are not fit for full-time (as in 40+ hours a week) work. Whereas once job-seekers with mild impediments could find a niche within the workforce, employers nowadays seem disinterested in anyone who is unable or unwilling to work 40+ hours a week.
Perhaps Howard’s drive for workforce flexibility has led to rigidity and inflexibility amongst employers. If I was PM, I’d be hammering away at heads of industry to provide a greater diversity of flexible workplace conditions.
I think Razor has it right – she’s a weather vane.
LO point 4: if she was making a basic point about proving literacy she wouldn’t have been so dismissive. The way she phrases that point makes clear her disregard for what’s actually happening in the actual lives of the underskilled and unemployed.
She wasn’t being dismissive. The word simple referred more to failures on the institutional/government side than the failures of those whose skills in that area are lacking. Your interpretation says as much about your biases as it does Julia’s.
HD – I wish you wouldn’t refer to Bill Mitchell. He has to be about the least respected prominent labour economist in the country. Also, everything you said in that paragraph more or less ECHOES what is in Gillard’s speech! She says clearly that there is more unemployment than there should be. And she clearly is not satisfied with Australia’s record on social inclusion and poverty. Try reading the speech while setting your own jaundiced view of Gillard aside.
@84 – it is actually untrue that all people on DSP are disabled. DSP in Australia (as well as similar welfare payments in other countries) has long been a place where many of the long term unemployed, or 55-64s that are not yet qualified for a pension, are pushed away from the obligations that come with unemployment benefits. Just because the majority of people receiving those payments have genuine disabilities does not mean that there aren’t many receiving them that are capable of work. It is not an either or situation. Numbers on DSP have generally risen more than one would expect given trends in the actual incidence of disability in the population. Gillard is perfectly right to argue that the state should not give up on so many of these people.
On the actual numbers there are 600,000 officially unemployed and about 200,000 official vacancies. However, just because there are fewer vacancies than unemployed does not mean that there is no scope for the unemployment rate to fall further. Gillard was not claiming that there were jobs for everyone. She was claiming that there were jobs for more Australians and that everyone had an interest in improving the labour market prospects of marginal workers.
LO
I read Bill Mitchell’s blog tonight for the first time.
Seems worthy of respect to me.
Andrew Bolt and Denis Shanahan and lots of others are regularly introduced as ‘respected’ journos whatever.
Doesn’t mean I’ll respect them.
[Grog said re Bill Mitchell "he is always worth a read" so he isn't rejected out of hand by someone whose opinions I read].
Maybe you and I have different viewpoints as to what constitutes being worthy of respect and as I read Mitchell’s stuff further I’ll make up my own mind.
And Gillard omits a fundamental fact re un[der]employment.
There are more such persons by a long shot than there are vacancies.
We do not have full employment or oodles of job opportunities no matter how well [or not] ot where located people are, so to state that it is merely a matter of training is patently false.
4 [whatever] into 1 don’t go.
And that is without taking into consideration ‘welfare to work’ type stuff that impacts on groups such as single parents [mums in particular] whose circumstances are consistently underrated by those who make the rules.
Or the hidden unemployed.
LO I worked for yonks, far too bloody long, in regions, urban and rural, with chronic serious un[der]employment problems.
Structural rates of 50-60% for youth, women [single mums in particular], the mature, where transport difficulties, personal circumstances and changing employment patterns rendered the opportunities for people to gain jobs, just jobs as opposed to careers, virtually impossible except maybe for some on a musical chairs basis.
Thats a reality for many many Australians about which the general public is unaware.
I’m living in one such region now.
You know this stuff.
The glib platitudes, the lovely rhetoric always pissed me off as it denigrated people with real problems.
I am unhappy that the ALP PM has joined the chorus.
Gillard, the ALP, judging from this speech and a couple of other things eg the attitudes of govt depts, don’t.
Or maybe they do.
Again HD you are misreading both me and the speech. Nobody is saying that there are jobs for everyone. Julia certainly isn’t. So she hasn’t missed the point at all.
And you are wrong on welfare to work policies. Well designed policies in that area have been found in almost all circumstances to raise employment rates amongst targeted groups. They shift the labour supply curve out and the only way that will have no impact on aggregate employment is if the labour demand curve is perfectly inelastic. You should at least get your head around the exhaustive literature in this area before you dismiss it.
And again, saying that government assistance to help people develop skills is likely to improve structural unemployment is not the same thing as saying tht all or even most employment problems can be solved through such policies.
[Good conversation LO.
Oh and I just lost a long reply to your previous and we're cross posting]
Yeah but….
It won’t.
Take an anecodote or several thousand.
I worked for an NGO mob on the Howard govt laws that changed single parent support payments amd in particular the commissioned reports by Harding [?] of Natsem and the other expert whose name I forget.
Chalk and cheese and the Libs opted, funny about that, for the one that suited them and the result was that the numbers looked great but the human impact was’nt mentioned cos it was nasty.
I had colleagues who had to face people [and women and kids take the brunt of this] who had real problems meeting damn near inhuman requirements and hoops to be jumped through that ignored their realities.
Tens of thousands of such.
Yet the right claimed these laws were successful, got a letter from the relevant shadow minister a couple of weeks ago saying the usual ideological rubbish and these laws which are still operative are great.
Same for training kids for non existent jobs or jobs in places far far away.
Looks nice, has bugger all real impact.
For 2 years yonks ago I headed a state research team looking into all the national and international transition school to work programmes which were magically going to disappear youth unemployment.
They didn’t.
Were never intended to.
Just public relations politics and shuffling numbers.
There are no jobs just about in my region for whole cohorts of people.
Training them is useless, just makes the numbers look good.
Hence one reason for the hidden unemployed.
How many are there of them?
The problem is Julia didn’t go close to looking at the million plus un[der]employed.
She, the ALP PM, chose to use phrases and words and concepts that denigrate people.
I can’t leave this screen and come back [computer problems which should be fixed in 2 days] but at Grogs Gamut someone gave several specific dole bludger type phrases that were clear hannah whistles to the Australia Institute and MSM types which duly got into the TV news as was entirely to be expected and public antipathy to bludgers et al has been shaefully exacerbated.
HD – just a question. If there are no jobs for certain categories of workers in your area, do you think more of them should move in search of better opportunities? At any given time some local labour markets will perform better than others. Internal immigration is an important way in which regions adjust to different circumstances. It simply isn’t possible for all regions to generate the same amount of employment growth and job opportunities.
Of course some of them move.
And it costs them in finacial and personal terms particularly when they have personal/family obligations.
And some can’t.
Take a mum [or dad if you wish but there are less of them]with kids trhe youngest of whom is 6 years and one day old [from memory] who cannot get a job, the skill factor can be completely irrelevant, cos such don’t exist in a region, any region, not just mine.
Rural more so but that applies to plenty of suburbs, I could name several in my metro famous for such.
Or infamous.
What do they do?
Remember there are such mobs as Family Court [do you relate to that allusion?] out there who have an impact on these scenarios which can number in the tens of thousands.
Or the cost of accepting a job, as a required hoop, is greater than the benefit once one takes into account that the kids are to be home at 4pm but the parent will be away by 25kms or an hours travel at 5pm and the job is part time and casual and there are no convenient grandparents whoever handy.
What to do?
In same cases the answer is catastrophic.
Are you aware of that?
Social worker types handle this sort of shit daily.
Statisticians don’t.
Thats not denigrating stats people but there is a little more to the world a lot of people live in than numbers.
As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey a couple of weeks ago.
“Picking on disability support, a favourite past time of policymakers”
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/31/disability-pension-reform-yet-again/
HD – of course I’m aware of the barriers and costs for people in some circumstances to taking jobs or moving to put themselves in a better position to find employment. As I said, I’ve worked on both the policy and implementation end. My sister is also a single mum with two kids that has found that balance very difficult to achieve.
But again, nobody is saying that every unemployed person move to a stronger labour market, regardless of their personal circumstance. I’m simply saying that making it easier for people to do so is a good idea. It is also undoubtedly the case that unemployment rates in certain attractive coastal areas are often higher then unemployment rates in other areas for reasons other thant he weakness of the local labour market. I see no problem with making life a little harder for those that are not making genuine job search effort.
Jacques – Family Tax Benefit is not strictly a welfare policy, so the comparison is pretty weak. And Australia makes less use of middle class welfare than nearly every other OECD country. The point about DSP is not that it shouldn’t exist. The point is that there are many people receiving it that should not. There is a welfare cost from having some people effectively removed from the labour force that are able to work. Do you really feel comfortable with nearly 800,000 Australians receiving DSP?
The Gillard government is not attacking DSP recipients. It is just trying to make the system work more effectively.
Well, at least Ms Gillard did not actually say “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”. But the soundbites from this speech were terrible. My (Canadian) wife was appalled and asked (she knows nothing of Australian politics) why Mrs Thatcher was still a political role model in Australia.
Getting a pension in Australia is inordinately stressful. Back in the day I went through a fair ordeal getting the carers pension to nurse a terminally ill parent. From what I read of the speech (yes, I read the thing too) I get the impression that people on DSP are going to have a ‘review’ which is a cruel ordeal for them. Remember, people on DSP are by definition poor people with no access to the things that most people take for granted. You don’t go to the football or the theatre and dining out for them is McDonalds.
I have to say that I agree with the comments made by Mark B. at 67 too.
LO:”to engage in proper search, to undertake training, etc.”
LO, last time I checked, the search process for the unemployed was ridiculous and punitive (12 jobs per fortnight or whatever it is). I think you also need to consider the difference between “training” and “useful training”. Any evidence that the government’s training policies (at least at that level — cf. schools etc.) do anything? No, I didn’t think so. So if we only have training and not useful training, then it’s just a silly punitive measure. I imagine this problem is rather deep and it’s easy to see why it doesn’t work even with those that would have time to work because they arn’t single mothers, full time carers etc. — what type of training do you think is going to help, for example, a 55 year old male with a verbal IQ of 80?
“Reciprocal obligation has been at the heart of the ALP’s labour market policies for two decades now.
That’s one of the reasons why the ALP isn’t a Labor party as Mark (and many other Australians dreaming about the past) think it philosophically is.
I have to run for work (already late) but I will add this to the mix. Gillard has created a platform from which Abbott can talk about ‘harsher’ ‘authentic’ measures.
I’ve already seen a clip of him saying how weak the ALP are and he thinks there needs to be harsher action such as his favourite “jobs in your area of any type? no dole for you” scenario.
I can see why some are supporting Julia’s use of the dog whistle to try and attract some of those that have drifted to the Libs. But dog whistles have another side. Don’t be surprised if some of the weaker horses and cattle have sussed out that the whistle might mean it’s off to the glue factory for them.
Oh and again, why is it that no-one tackles the other reason for unemployment rates, over working of the employed? I bet loads of us know people who work unpaid overtime at all levels of industry.
Labor needs Malcolm Turnbull as its leader – and I would be happy to lose him since the move would improve both of the major parties in terms of integrity and consistency.
If Labor can pre-select him in Julia’s seat, then he can become leader immediately in the spirit of current Qld LNP arrangements. Instant win.
Of course, he owes it to his electorate of Wentworth to stay loyal to the Coalition for the rest of this term, but I’m sure he can work that out – Chinese walls etc.
Deal?
Conrad. How on earth is reciprocal obligation incompatible with the Labor tradition? Labor was built as a workers’ party. It supported the rise of the welfare state to protect workers from unavoidable periods out of employment, not as a permanent means of income support.
And what proportion of the unemployed do you think have verbal IQs of 80? You are just being silly now. The point of training and welfare to work policies is to encourage greater activation amongst those that can feasibly work.
FWIW I think that upscaling Australia’s active labour market programs would be a good idea, as long as they are designed to be cost effective and a rigorous evaluation processes are set up.
Jacques@101
If Bernard Keane really did type a favourite past time of policy makers, shame on him. {pastime}
It hardly helps having idiots like Paul Howes in the wings. Withdraw CO2 tax support if ‘one single job is lost’? What if 5000 others are created in a different sector, moron? And nice strategy to set up guarantee fail tests. The whole point is some jobs will go, with more created elsewhere.
What a deadweight on the labor movement.
a pathetic suck job that will blow up in her face
What might be freaking some people out with past experience of living on welfare is the amazingly stupid rules that when follwoed to the letter have real impacts.
We had oou bank accounts zeroed by the DSS and tax office due to an admin screwup. However they would not give back the money until the next financial year.
It was only $150. However back then that was our rent, food and medication money. Cue weeks of eating one meal a day and of a lot of walking.
Hey, Labor Outsider, did you overdose on earnestness pills when you were a child?
Because you sure come across that way.
re the politics – where is the information that this attitude – which may be called a polite but firm insistence on helping those not helping themselves – is appealing to ex ALP voters?
Who has the poll figures?
Which ALP staffers/politicians are the current policy enthusiasts?
Picking on the most vulnerable in our community is always mean spirited and counter-productive, but in the context of abundant middle class and corporate welfare, casualisation of the workforce and the chronic overwork of those who do have jobs, it is simply unforgivable.
As for Paul Howes, what a waste of space.
I think most of us here would support reciprocal obligation. I think athough that a lot of people in the wider community at the moment have this disconnect where really hammer home the reciprocal obligation of the poor but don’t give a toss about the rich or themselves.
I drive my tax agent nuts with that $300 no questions asked no reciepts refund. If I don’t have a reciept I don’t claim it. It’s my reciprocal obligation as a taxpayer to be honest. (It’s also my reciprocal obligation as an ex-benefits recipient as I feel I need to repay at least in part the system the kept a roof over my head and food in my mouth.)
A lot of people who seem to be happy to see ‘other’ people possibly starve or go homeless are quite fine to accept middle class welfare. Hell they’re fine with corporate bludgers who either pay no tax at all or in some cases get tax refunds!
I can assure you as well from my experience growing up in housing commission estates and doing the job club thing that maybe a highly visible 1% of recipients if that are rorting the system. The other 99% are invisible because they’re leading quietly desperate struggles to make ends meet, to get employment or to better themselves.
LO what you conveniently don’t mention in your railing against the DSP is that the reason for the increased numbers is because it currently pays much more than the dole. This is because the dole is currently indexed to inflation not wages, and is being outstripped by other benefits (DSP, pension – which has gotten even more ad hoc raises from both governments).
If Gillard wants to talk about obligation, I think her first statement should be about providing a living wage to the unemployed, ffs. It’s disgraceful, and demonstrates just how much she – or any of those bourgeois fools – care about people on unemployment.
…and devolves blame and accountability onto the unemployed, away from the government.
Personally, I think the entire ‘welfare-to-work’ paradigm of the last ~15 years is a political reaction to the ‘recession we had to have’ — that was the last occasion on which the government was perceived to have some sort of responsibility for employment, and now successive governments want to innoculate themselves against that perception.
Hence raising the compulsory school (or TAFE, or traineeship) age to 17. Hence all the programs that LO and Hannah’s dad were discussing.
My wife was actually visiting a ‘Job Network’ provider the other day and suggested to her that the whole system was simply about finding ways to blame the unemployed for being unemployed. The job network consultant actually agreed that was how the system is supposed to operate!
We have now reached the point where a Labor government is lashing out at people who need help, doing that playground bully act of grabbing their hand and mashing it in their face, while saying “why are you hitting yourself?! Stop hitting yourself!”
LO, surely you know as well as everyone else who studied economics that a certain amount of unemployment is necessary and good? You can’t have a mobile or flexible workforce if no one is unemployed – nor can you have a thriving voluntary and community sector.
You seem to refuse any responsibility of the government in making work for people. So all the responsibility is cast onto the unemployed, who have to do onerous tasks in exchange for a tiny income that constitutes the entire total of the government’s responsibilities.
Why should people in areas with no work be expected to move, and the government not be expected to find ways to support work for them in the areas where they live? Why should people who have contributed to industry and paid taxes suddenly have to move because some shyster company relocated to China, or collapsed without handing them their pension entitlements?
My guess is that most people who talk about “mutual responsibility” have never been sacked, “downsized” or “restructured.” My Father was sacked at 55 in a dying industry (typesetting). He had perfectly decent computer skills but 5 years of looking couldn’t find him a job in an industry that was fast disappearing.
Look me in the eye and tell me, realistically, that any amount of retraining would make a 55 year old typesetter look employable in a different field.
tssk @111
I spent 3 months on the dole in the early 90s (my only period of unemployment since starting work in the 60s until retirement). It was a very hard & unpleasant time. With the rules and obligations so much tougher now, I can’t imagine what’s it’s like and the stress and distress it creates.
During my dole period I had a Centrelink inspector knock on the door and want to ask a lot of questions. During the interview he demanded to see our current bank statements and questioned two deposits – one for $13 and one for $17. They were from the contents of two money boxes. It was just so demeaning. He made my partner and I feel like criminals.
Thankfully after three months I was able find a job again (at a third of the salary I had been on previously). I was only in my 40s at the time and it was too easy to feel passed over for many jobs because of my age despite my experience. I understand this situation is even worse today for people over 40.
Anyone who thinks life on the dole (or other life sustaining benefits) is easy has their heads in their posterior.
Another annecdote about fears of how the system of mutual obligation might be perverted.
Open the job network system to owners of brothels, strip clubs, certain religious organisations that require large tithes from their members and various con jobs (earn huge $$$ for stuffing envelopes! Ask us how!)
Then call in all your welfare recipients one by one and present them with one or more of the above options. When the recipient turns there down breach them for not being serious about seeking employment.
Job done.
Could it be that the Job Network provider’s reply was just a fob off to a rude, snooty, ignorant and sanctimonious inquirer rather wasting her time on a futile attempt to engage her with the facts and enlightening her?
No, GregM, please, don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think of Mercurius’s wife.
Ron @119. I had one of those visits in 1994. It was completly demeaning. I was asked about all my money details and my personal details.
He even went into my bedroom to see that I wasn’t illegally cohabitating. This included looking in my clothes drawers for clothes that weren’t mine. (God knows how many drag queens would have been breached back in the day.)
I was completely civil throughout all of it. But I did refuse him access to my flatmates room. There was a disagreement over this “sorry mate but I need to check it to make sure you two aren’t sleeping together.” I held my ground though using the arguement that my flatmate was not my partner, was a taxpayer and so I wouldn’t allow their privacy to be breached. We reached a compromise. I allowed him to look into the second bedroom from the door in order to sse the room had a bed that was used.
I was given a warning over that, and I had to write and sign a Stat’ Dec’ stating that I was not sleeping with my flatmate, but otherwise nothing else happened.
And this is one of my other problems with the government in this area. The government is quite fine in all other areas to ignore same sex relationships. But if you are on welfare you can be damn sure they’ll recognise a same sex partner in order to reduce your welfare payment or even throw you off the system.
Here’s a good account of what going to a Job Network is office is actually like:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/56672.html
That pretty much sums up my experience, and my wife’s. Sir Humphrey’s quip about politicians needing activity as a substitute for achievement comes to mind.
Stay classy, GregM.
Has anyone mentioned Malcolm Farnsworth’s piece at The Drum?
“Down and out in Centrelink and NewStart”
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/56672.html
I’m kind of hoping that it IS about reciprocal obligation – real reciprocal obligation for once, instead of government having to recycle “dole bludger” rhetoric whilst forking out megabucks to subsidise big business to employ people. Which people have in the past often been sacked when the subsidy runs out, so employers can swap them for fresh subsidised human commodities. If business has to put some of its own money where its mouth is, it might value people more, even if only in that terrible empty Calvinistic way, you know, training them, making them employable, so that possibility of dignity might even move out of the abstract realm for them.
I suppose the company law could be problematic – some indignant shareholders complaining about failure to maximise their profits … but anyone with superannuation (ie most of us commenting here I would guess) is a shareholder now, indirectly at least. I think that business investment in people is an excellent use for my profits.
Another issue that warrants discussion is that people on Newstart, DSP, etc., are not simply inactive. They may be casually or seasonally employed on terms which don’t presently allow them to get by without a Centrelink benefit but which do keep them engaged with the labour market, and/or studying for a professional qualification which could provide a means for them to get by without a Centrelink benefit in the fullness of time. Yet some of the actual and proposed micro-management of Centrelink clients lives (compulsory Work for the Dole, Intensive “Support”, forcing people to take McJobs at the expense of work for which they are professionally qualified as happened to single parents under the Howard government’s “reforms”, etc.) is and would be gravely detrimental to the efforts they are making on their own initiative to become employed and qualified.
@125 – Ron – heh! snap!
—–
GregM, if that’s the mental image my anecdote about my wife calls to your mind, you really need to examine your prejudices and assumptions. You couldn’t be more empirically and objectively wrong if you tried.
That you would so blithely leap to such an uncharitable portrait of a total stranger, is a peccadillo on which it may serve you to reflect. Your grubby slurs are a tremendously useful illustration that some people carry around in their heads a caricature that isn’t real, yet they base real-world political views and decisions upon their bogey-imaginations.
I think I might take your unbelievably grubby comment @121 and frame it, just to serve as a reminder to me that some people are quite prepared to throw a perfect stranger under the bus if it gets between themselves and their preferred world-view.
I think GregM’s comment serves as a useful example of the kind of politics and voters to whom Gillard is presently playing. There is a tremendous wellspring, (and it doesn’t take much to tap it, just an anecdote about a day at the job network is enough to set one off), of bitter and scabrous resentment towards welfare recipients, among some sections of the voting public.
@87
This all sounds extremely credulous. The only part of this analysis that makes any sense is the last part concerning the politics, I really think you have to take it as a political strategy. I doubt that the rest of it is very solidly connected to reality. Economists evaluations of the labour market have never really seemed to reflect conditions on the ground in my experience. Interestingly we find that here in the West we were recently technically in recession.
The mining boom has become so mythologised in this country that it can be deployed for almost any purpose, look at the campaign against the RSPT and Gillard’s “bloke from Altona working on Barrow Island” anecdote. It’s all getting a bit silly, mind you I’m seriously looking at getting into it as pretty soon there won’t be anything else to do here.
LO: “And what proportion of the unemployed do you think have verbal IQs of 80? You are just being silly now.”
I would think quite a reasonable amount have poor verbal skills, especially if you’re digging around the long-term unemployed/disability pension groups in older males. You’ve basically got a group that can’t do physical work due to poor health (just look at obesity stats), and can’t communicate well. What are they going to do?
FWIW, I think if you’re just interested in gains, then the best groups to target are females with children (often very well educated but don’t work much), and all you need to do is fix-up childcare for this group. I think some of these other groups (e.g., males above 50) are basically impossible.
well now I’ve read this piece inc comments, and Grog’s piece, and the speech itself, and I can say that I’m more comfortable with Grog’s view on it than that held commonly here. I suspect a lot of the confusion is that people didn’t actually read the speech, they are merely commenting on the reporting. And as we can all safely agree, australian media is shit and unreliable.
A reasonable point indeed.
I did read the speech, especially this bit:
How on earth can Curtin’s conscription of labour be interpreted as justification of any ALP tradition of belief in the “dignity” of labour? Conscription is the antithesis of freedom and dignity.
Chifley’s “Light on the Hill” speech was directed against the injustices of market capitalism. The security of which he spoke was security against the ruthlessness of the market. Working within the market was preferable to not working in the market but it was by no means the embodiment of the good society that Chifley had in mind.
Gillard’s misappropriation of these powerful ALP tropes is a falsification of foundational principles of the ALP.
Having read Grog’s piece, I am willing to acknowledge that the PM’s speech was less Draconian than what has been reported in the media. However what was completely missing from it was any acknowledgement even of the possibility that the labour market difficulties of the disabled, the long-term unemployed, single parents, people in particular localities, regions, etc., might have something to do with the dynamics of capitalism, the behaviour of capitalists, or the current orthodoxy about how to manage a capitalist economy. In this regard it can legitimately be critiqued in the same terms as the PM’s Whitlam Oration was critiqued by John Quiggin, amongst others, and can legitimately be interpreted as conveying the message that remedying unemployment is as simple as fixing the unemployed.
Never thought I’d see this rubbish in relation to Gillard:
https://guttertrash.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/gillard-i-saluted-hitler-too/
Grigory M @ 83
“She did have on a nice shiny jacket. Though it would have looked better with a top hat and magician’s wand.”
An incongruous choice… I thought that wearing a sparkly golden jacket when talking about issues of unemployment and welfare was simply in poor taste.
It is all very depressing and sorry to say I find myself unpleasantly unsurprised by the content of the Gillard speeches.
When will this once-was-warrior against work choices stand up against employers who foist increasing casualisation & insecurity on their workforces – even those who’ve done degrees to qualify for the privilege – ah but one of the worst offenders I know of is a state dept of education…
I still get emails from the ALP dating back from the Kevin 07 campaign… don’t know why I haven’t unsubscribed, but the other day I got an invite to a get together in Sydney for ‘supporters’ to contribute ideas etc… it’s called ‘Building a Progressive Australia’ and here is a quote:
‘How do we develop modern progressive values in keeping with our unique history and traditions?
What can we learn from other progressive political parties worldwide?
How can we grow and rebuild our Party and movement?
What should a modern Labor Party look like in the 21st century?’
It also says to ‘please invite your friends who might be interested in attending the conference with you.’ Well I don’t live in Sydney, but I hereby invite everyone participating here to visit said conference (30Apr-1May) and complain about the clearly unprogressive direction being taken by this government.
The avalanche of self-indulgent hysteria continues, I see.
Ron, that “rubbish” is pretty funny. It’s taking the piss out of most people here and Julia Gillard, and the phrase “Socialists for Fascism” is hilarious.
If you think that’s bad, compare it to what the Daily Mash say about David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and the other guy (whoever is in charge of labour in Britain at the moment). It’s positively tame…
SG,
Yes, I re-read it and realised I reacted too quickly – a swastika has that effect on me. One of those (many) times one wishes you had an hour or two to edit comments on WordPress.
Sorry, Reb.
People shouldn’t have to work if they don’t want to. Everybody should be free to enjoy beautiful days and the freedom of the breeze and the sound of the birds. Including the able-bodied.
So ….. society should finance their wishes for lifelong unemployment ? They shouldn’t have to work, like other people ? The government shouldn’t design pathways from unskilled unemployment to basic skills for employment, so that some of the hitherto unemployed can contribute to those who remain unemployed ?
Or should the unemployed be free as birds to find their own way to support themselves ? No compulsion, no obligations to other people ?
Fruit-picking is not so hard, you know, certainly not as hard as it used to be. It doesn’t require much in the way of skills. Yes, you can feel pretty tired at the end of a day, especially on 40-degree days, but you know that you have earned your money.
Dairying is a bit tougher – you know, where we get our milk from: you might have to get up at 4 am, and you have to milk twice a day, so you mightn’;t finish until 9 or 10 at night. And of course, it’s seven days a week. So, no, I don’t see too many of the unemployed – or even of the hard-workers on this thread – giving that a go.
But of course, many have to – hence your milk
But as so many contributors here have pointed out, perhaps implicitly, able-bodied people shouldn’t have to work for a living. But perhaps, neither should the State subsidise their income for life.
Perhaps we could have a vote on it, with those who are working but who are in support of lifelong unemployment benefits, willingly contributing some of their pay to finance their able-bodied ‘brothers’ in non-work. How much would you like to chip in ? $ 50 per week ? $ 10 ?
Or should the Magic Pudding of the State finance able-bodied people in their perfectly legitimate, lifelong indolence ?
It is hard work that pause for the new SUV. Hard work that pays for the air conditioned McMansion. Hard work that gives us too little time with the family….. Hard work that keeps Fred unemployed because “hard workers” are hogging the available work.
Hard work that is stuffing our environment and society….
Perhaps we need leaders who really understand what a better future might actually look like.
John D,
I fully sympathise with your desperate and unfruitful quest for work, while ” “hard workers” are hogging the available work”, those bastards.
But don’t give up – all around Australia, and at most times of the year, you can find work picking fruit and vegetables, cutting sugar, and really a wide variety of wholesome, semi-skilled work in the open air. Don’t despair – the work is there if you want it.
And you meet some terrific people, hard workers, back-packers, immigrants, even some Australians.
Good luck
As somebody who has had brief periods of unemployment and was a long time on the disability pension, let me tell you of the effect of statements like Gillard’s, Abbott’s mantras, and Howard’s bashing of disability pensions. As I understand it, most people with disabilities of whatever kind, quite naturally suffer from some kind of anxiety, and sometimes much worse psychological effects, apart from their actual physical disability or in addition to their main diagnosed psychological disability. I certainly do.
A politician gets up and makes some sort of statement that amounts to “WE’re going to bash you and you might end up starving on the street.”. Now, it may turn out, as it did with Howard’s disability ‘reforms’ with me that in the long run you’re not affected. (I was one of those who was ‘grandfathered’. ) Nevertheless, in the intervening period, the DSP/USB recipient goes through really intense spasms of high anxiety, etc. (My late partner took to bed for days with a severe depression that at times verged on the suicidal, and she was a bit that way normally.One of my best friends went back on the piss and it took him months to get sober again.))
That they have freeaked out huge proportions of the population by their thoughtless, uncaring statements, not to mention the biased media reporting of their statements, is something that never even occurs to them.
Just sayin;.
I’m okay now. I’m on the aged pension. But I still shudder to think the effect Gillard’s latest brain-fart is having on thousands of peoples’ minds, who are not well in the first place.
On the subject of adequate State support for the lifelong, able-bodied unemployed, is this the appropriate place to mention Larissa Behrendt ?
“Trying to impress”? No. Trying and depressing.
Hi Paul,
Let’s get realistic here: the relevant govt dept would categorise the unemployed according to employability; for a start, the able-bodied as distinct from the ‘rest’. Any sensible department would look at the praticality of finding work for unskilled people over, say, 40 or 50, and focus on younger unemployed able-bodied.
[Of course, this is making the huge assumption that a government would make an effort to create pathways from (unskilled) unemployment to (semi-skilled, skilled) employment (i.e. self-support). Probably this is aforlorn hope.]
In other words, government may huff and puff about coming down hard on the long-term unemployed, but in reality, if they had any sense, they would be trying to shut off the ‘supply’ by trying to ensure that young people, those just leaving school, are led back into some form of skills-training before they stuff up their lives any further.
IF they had any sense …..
There’s also, apparently, gainful employment to be found in constructing huge strawmen. Sadly, the work is currently being hogged by Old Yobbo.
@123
Sweet Jebus, are you serious? I haven’t been on the dole since the 80s but it sounds like it’s approaching gestapo levels.
Old Yobbo, why exactly is it that you haven’t attempted to raise Larissa Behrendt in the designated Open Thread, even though the last time you tried to raise her in a different off-topic thread, the Open Thread is where you were directed?
Tangential hobby-horses belong in the Open Thread. Get it yet?
@134
Yes what supporters of the PMs position seem to miss is that the PM places no obligation on business to try and do anything about planning the employment future for Australians. I think Rudd tried and look what happened there. In that regard the PM is happy to pay homage to one aspect of ALP tradition but loathe to take up another: holding business to account. I noted elsewhere that Premier Barnett has had to admit that engineering work in WA has not reached the levels he anticipated. I think he is now considering local content quotas but he may have missed the boat. And even if quotas are imposed the lack of skilled labour due to 2 or more decade neglect of training may make the measures unworkable.
The position of the PM and commenters such as LO is so lopsided that in the end it can really only be seen as ideologically driven, any analysis that completely ignores the effect of capital on economics is debased and, if accepted, can only lead to a catastrophe.
@143, well Paul, the other aspect of the situation you recount is that there is simply no pleasing the welfare-bashers. They are implacable in their resentment. No matter how many hoops you jump through, no matter how many forms you fill out and how many roads you walk down, you will never, ever, satisfy their ever-shifting criteria for being a “deserving” recipient of welfare.
Take my family’s situation — we have ticked all of the “deserving” welfare-recipient boxes. Moved 600km from our family and friends in our hometown to be where the work is. So I have some work now, and my wife, who is permanently disabled and on a fractional DSP (because I report my income to Centrelink fortnightly as required), signs up to the Job Network to try and get back into some kind of paying work, even though it’s not a requirement — she just wants to work if she can find something she is able to do — and having submitted to all the medical tests, having waited, languishing four months to even get an appointment with the local provider (I wish I were joking), having turned up to the interview with all the accoutrements (updated resume, portfolio of work, etc.) is told there is nothing suitable (or, more to the point, that no employer is willing to make the accommodations that would be needed for her to work…).
So we are, or should be, according to the rhetoric, “model” or “deserving” welfare recipients.
For this, my wife cops the kind of abuse that GregM saw fit to dole out @121. This what the phrase “kick someone while they’re down” means. And GregM feels perfectly entitled to have a swing, take a free kick, against a disabled woman he doesn’t know, because I have the temerity to try and share an anecdote of what life is really like for welfare recipients who are trying to do the right thing.
There is no pleasing them. There is no end to the stigmatising. There is an implacable bitterness that will never be assuaged, no matter how many hoops one jumps through. They feel entitled to heap abuse on welfare recipients. They feel no shame in their dishonourable conduct. And it’s socially acceptable for them to carry on in this way.
Calvinist Nation, indeed.
Sorry, Tigtog, what and where is the Open thread ? I wouldn’t have called the issue of Behrendt’s attack on Bess price just a ‘hobby horse’, though: perhaps an unfortunate choice of words
patrickb at 150, this is because the English-speaking world has been captured by the twin fantasies of modern economics: that government spending is bad and industry policy is bad. Never mind that the world’s two most successful economies – Japan and Germany – are built on exactly the opposite notion.
We can get away with it because we have huge resources and a small population. The British don’t have that advantage, and they are well fucked. Yet the LOs and JGs of the world continue to think that we can keep going under this economic model of privatizing all social responsibility, and socializing all corporate costs.
Hi sg,
Yes, and I do it freely, without a cent from the government
Well said Mercurius.
The combination of ignorance and lack of empathy is a dangerous one, and it is most likely that the voters to whom Gillard is attempting to appeal would be the ones whinging most loudly for compensation for rising electricity prices or whatever. While seeing no need to limit their consumption.
And imagine how the world would end if the government even considered ending the massive subsidies to ‘private’ education.
Australia becomes dumber by the day.
LO, you had me in qualified agreement with your line until 93, where your assertion that DSP was a parking place for getting the unemployed off the books immediately convinced me that you know nothing about our actually existing welfare system.
For a start, baby boomer men get DSP at LESS THAN HALF the rate their fathers did at the same age. For a second, once you abstract from the rising age pension age for women, the number of people on DSP has been falling for a decade (despite population aging, which you would expect to drive it up strongly). For a third, it’s bloody hard to get onto – it’s ridiculous to spend years making damn sure that only those who can’t work at all get onto DSP, and then complain that none of them work. For a fourth, because its bloody hard to get onto DSP now most of the very long-term “unemployed” have significant disabilities (most commonly mental health issues). Their payment rate is already 40% lower than the pension that Ms Gillard loudly claimed a few years ago was too meagre for anyone to live on, so their incentives are not the issue. Getting these people into continuing work can only be done by spending an absolute shitload of money on in-work support, which would probably cost more than the economic value of their production (but, depending on our values, might be worth doing anyway).
The irony of all this is that the old left-wing Julia had the right idea – the only effective answer to welfare dependency, chronic skills shortage, etc is the long-run one of massive human capital investment with a strong focus on equality of opportunity.
Watching parts of the TV coverage of this ‘issue’, there was some mention that Abbott had outlined something similiar a few weeks or months ago….could it be that subsequent ALP polling shows a blip from the focus groups?? And now, our own ‘iron lady’ has to out-tough Mr Abbott.
DD @ 156:
“…. the old left-wing Julia had the right idea – the only effective answer to welfare dependency, chronic skills shortage, etc is the long-run one of massive human capital investment with a strong focus on equality of opportunity.”
Yes, indeed: far more funding for TAFE and other skills-raising mechanisms, for universities and for employment placement programs for particularly the young able-bodied, in the first instance. Leave the DSP alone.
@152
It’s extraordinarily depressing. The retreat from Rudd’s attempt to redistribute some of the wealth from the mining boom is being done backwards, bowed, with forelock tightly gripped and eyes averted. It’s obscene ,really, hearing this kind of one-sided rhetoric being rolled out to an audience at the Sydney institute. They must have had chuckles afterwards thinking about how a Labor PM had just told the workers to just get on with it and not cause problems for the boss, whilst no doubt enjoying the finest fare that Gerard and Anne could muster. Makes me physically ill just thinking about it.
Charlie @ 155,
No. Abbott was just pulling the same silly trick that Hockey tried on with his “getting tough on the banks” malarkey a while back. That is, wait until a week or so before a Govt announcement on a topic, then jump in with a showy but fatuous attention-grabbing statement- ably abetted by a partisan and/or shallowly incompetent media.
It is a useful tactic for idea-poor Oppositions to adopt: it requires little work beyond getting wind of the impending announcement; it steals oxygen from their opponents’ message; it can make their opponents look as if they are reacting, when it is in fact the other way around.
Patrick B. What happened to me in terms of a personal at home interview happened in the erly 90′s under a federal ALP government. I understand that the changes during the Howard years made things harder for the unemployed. Back when I was on the dole I had to apply for at least two jobs a week and turn up to the DSS (losing almost half a day at times) once a fortnight. I would also have to go to the CES once a fortnight as well.
I can understand why the guy wanted to look in my flatmate’s room. There was (and still is) a massive thing about living with someone you were sleeping with. I don’t quite understand the logic there, some sort of social ideal to stop the unemployed sleeping with each other? Another way of reducing the welfare bill? Outmoded ideas on support? (ie Young lady, your boyfriend can pay all your bills. I wonder how many women stayed in abusive relationships just to keep a roof over their head and food in their children’s moouths.)
There are loads of other things they could fix up with the welfare system. I found if I found casual work and was completely honest not only would I not be better off financially, the way it was set up you could be worse off. For a meagre days pay you could lose a large whack of your dole. And I’m not talking the end of fortnight being equal to the dole. I’m talking being $10-$20 worse off. Not counting for things like transport and other costs either.
And then there are other disincentives. Like not only having to drain all my bank accounts (of a mere $800). But also being told to draw all my superannuation out and use that to live off before recieving the dole. And of course when that happened I had to declare the full ammount and they counted that as the full amount even though I lost a third of it throough tax and other penalities. Which meant I had to wait an extra couple of weeks because of this ‘phantom money’ that wasn’t actually in my pocket.
How some people are able to eke out a lifestyle on the dole that includes cigarettes and beer is beyond me. I survived by selling off some of my meagre possessions at the time.
“If government doesn’t step back when the private sector employs more people, spends more money and builds more projects, we will be chasing the same scarce resources, driving up prices and adding to the inflationary pressures arising from the investment boom.”
Does anyone believe this?
If money is pouring into the country a Keynesian response is surely to tax? This governments response will leave the country with a big hole in the ground and a population with broken iphones AND NOT MUCH ELSE.
PB @143: I think your personal comments are highly relevant and show exactly how vicious and punitive Gillard is prepared to be in order to meet the needs of the big end of town and feed the self righteous tradies and nursing home captives who constitute the audience for 2GB.
GregM, it’s clear you’ve never had direct experience of a Job Network Service Provider. Anyone who has would recognise that Mercurius’ missus was being overly polite, and solicitous of the other person’s feelings.
On personal experience, like Fine, I was one of the people who benefited from a six month gig at award wages under Keating’s Working Nation program in the mid 90s – when the “recession we had to have” meant that BA graduates weren’t exactly flooded with job offers! Subsequent experience, when I was working as a sessional academic and therefore sometimes unemployed and without an income for several months, completely bears out the comments made by people who’ve actually experienced the “tough love” of the Job Network.
I also completely endorse Derrida Derider’s comments about the DSP.
Gillard says
This is a bit of a red herring. Mining as an industry accounts for 1.35 percent of all employment according to ABS figures for 2008/9. It would have to get a lot hungrier before the other 98% of Australians started to enjoy the fabulous working conditions offered by mining.
It is also worth noting that “these pressures require careful management” which includes “cutting company tax cut and increasing tax breaks for small businesses”.
But Robin Hood is funding these generous tax cuts with “the mineral resource rent tax, so the most profitable miners increase economic reward and opportunity in other parts of the economy”.
The magic money tree is really just a big hole in the ground out of which flows all manner of government largesse, except to people on DSP…
Further, the last time I was subjected to the tender mercies of the Job Network, I found that the Service Provider I got was about as much use as tits on a bull. (There’s a much coaser expression, btw, but it would probably upset people.)
I was 55 years old, with a degree and years of experience in a field (IT) we are constantly told has such massive skills shortages that we have to import a large labour force, and not only were these useless folk unable to help me find a job, they wanted me to undergo some sort of training. My response was basically that I didn’t need any fucking training, as I had a degree, what I wanted was a job.
akn @162
“the audience for 2GB”
My neighbour has 2GB on most of the day (loudly!) in his backyard. Talk about redneck radio. I can stand about 15″ of it before I have to come inside.
And I wonder why I have a Vit D deficiency! ;D
(Seriously, and off-topic, Vitamin D deficiency is becoming a growing and serious problem in Australia due to sunscreens, working hours (a slight link to the topic) and such.)
Yes, Ron, I sympathise. It is alarming. I quit one job because of constant 2GB broadcasting in the workplace. I didn’t really want a career in the tyre fitting industry anyway
“The values I learnt in my parents’ home – hard work, a fair go through education, respect – find themselves at the centre of Australia’s economic debate, in the challenge to cut long term welfare dependency”
Why would she single out those on dependant on welfare but yet not offer a compassionate program or response?
One would have to assume it is the stick and not the carrot that is being proffered.
And this constant harping on about the values of her parents as critical to her world view is the sort of nonsense (the grocers daughter) that made Thatcher politically unhinged.
I know this is a huge threadjack, but wouldn’t tits on a bull actually be quite useful? You could milk it in between breeding it.
Multi-purpose bulls: a future program for the CSIRO.
As opposed to multi-purpose bullshit, which is what this “mutual obligation” business seems to be all about.
David Irving @166
With my one encounter with Centrelink in the early 90s, I also had extensive IT experience beginning in 1969.
Naturally I wanted to work in my field if I could and that’s the area in which I was applying for positions. Centrelink informed I might have to be satisfied with being a ‘checkout chick at Coles’ (actual words said). Nothing wrong with that job but what a waste of my experience. In the end I doubt I would have got the job at Coles anyway because the feedback from job applications was always overqualified and/or too old (not that any employer would admit to the latter).
Just remember all this I can feel the tension and stress returning. I have great sympathy for those suffering under an even tighter welfare regime these days (and one which might get worse).
The system is clearly broken and not helping anyone except the service providers whose service is clearly inadequate, and in many cases, counter-productive.
But why even attempt to fix it when you can bash the victims instead.
Anyone else have the feeling we’re going backwards at an alarming rate?
Things have come to a pretty pass when I’m linking to the Gold Coast Bulletin.
Sorry if this point has been raised already, but not everybody on benefits is idle. I know someone who, when their husband retired at age 65, found that ‘they’ would not get the aged pension, only he would. She would have to apply for unemployment benefits until she was elgible for the aged pension in two years time.
This lady last worked in paid employment 55 years earlier – she had been a typist for 2 years before marrying and having children. After that it was children, parents, grandchildren and helping with the family (very small) business. So, at age 62, she was facing having to be ‘trained’ for work, even though she had never been completely well after treatment for cancer a few years earlier.
Her doctor got her on to the Disability Pension. Anyway, she had for many years, apart from being the backup person for all family needs, volunteered via her local Council to help out old housebound neighbours – she did their shopping, took them to appointments etc. She wasn’t idle, she just wasn’t being paid for the time she gave to the community.
Eva Cox: http://newmatilda.com/2011/04/15/stop-bullying-jobseekers
I don’t know what’s it like anywhere else but ‘Job Network Providers’ tend to have the biggest and most expensive shopfronts in the local towns.
I would like to see a return to the CES but I can’t see that ever happening now.
It’s also worthwhile to put the debate into historical perspective. As a teenager I well remember Gough Whitlam and his ministers being pilloried as the worst economic managers in Australia’s history for presiding over an unemployment rate of 5 per cent rather than the <2 per cent which was considered to be full employment in those days. The current economic orthodoxy, accepted by the Gillard government, defines 5 per cent unemployment (NAIRU) as the best we can do. It's not rocket science to work out that you're condemning a lot more people to dependence on the dole if your employment policy goal is 5 per cent unemployment rather than <2 per cent.
“last worked in paid employment 55 years earlier “, should be, 45 years earlier – just as well I’m not applying for work these days.
Paul – do you know if 5% then is the same as 5% now – haven’t they changed the measuring? I wondered about that with the graph at Grog’s blog.
This is another measure of unemployment
Russell @179, the methodology and definitions have been changed so many times that exact comparisons are very difficult, but I doubt that the changes have been so drastic that 5 per cent today equates to 2 per cent in 1971.
Paul @ 177,
What does that mean?
You always approved of and agreed with the people who pilloried the Whitlam Govt’s record on unemployment?
You didn’t approve of and agree with the people who pilloried the Whitlam Govt’s record on unemployment then- but you do approve of and agree with them now?
Or is it that you’d agree with anyone, saying anything, as long as they were bitching about the Gillard Govt?
Kersebleptes, it’s pretty clear that Paul@177 means none of those things, but you knew that already didn’t you?
So your point is?
None of the above. Stop being silly.
Sorry, Adrian, our posts crossed.
Ron @ http://larvatusprodeo.net/2011/04/14/julia-gillards-calvinist-nation/#comment-275935
“sorry reb”
Hi Ron, no worries at all…
I was really just trying to highlight how pathetic journalism is these days.
Why aren’t the mainstream media investigating the remarkable timing of these accusations against Wilkie and who is behind them, rather than just whipping up a frenzy over the allegations themselves?
I can appreciate that the Nazi imagery may offend some people, but sometimes offending some people is part of making a point, I think anyway…
Cheers
reb.
I agree with everyone about everything sometimes…
Paul,
If none of my guesses were correct, perhaps you could try to enlighten me.
You were the one who seemed to be indicating that the Whitlam Govt was being hard done by in being castigated for presiding over an unemployment rate 2.5 times the then accepted rate of 2% for full employment. If so, you seem to be saying that the 2% should have been higher then (and the same now, one would assume). Or, as I asked earlier, do I have that wrong and you thought that the criticism was justified, or that you now think the criticism was justified?
You were also the one that saw fit to pepper the second half of your post with negative terms- with that half of the comment, coincidentally I’m sure, being the half that was regarding the Gillard Govt. Thus the third option I offered you.
You used wtte of Gillard: “accepting current orthodoxy” that 5% is the “best we can do” (ie- unwilling to get off her lazy arse and have a go); how it “is not rocket science” to see that Gillard is “condemning a lot more people to dependence on the dole” (ie- you are saying that Gillard is either a moron, or otherwise is an actively evil tormenter of the poor).
And after all of that immature carry on- it was you, Paul, that then had the gall to accuse me of being silly. I think there is something in your eye, sir, and it looks very like the trunk of a tree…
Ok, so you don’t actually have one. A point that is.
Let’s all move on then.
Thanks Adrian. The troll will have to catch and kill his/her own mutton.
adrian,
Assuming that you are still talking at me, I must say that the incisive quality and depth of your comments (indicative, no doubt, of an agile & powerful mind) have quite flummoxed poor little me. I would definitely be too frightened to engage you in discussion.
So yes, let’s move on…
Paul,
Many thanks to you as well for your kind, clear & useful explanations as to what your 177 actually meant.
Keep it up!
Old Yobbo,
There’s a prominent link in the sidebar under the title “Not sure where to comment?”, and if you’d simply plugged “open thread” into the search function above the banner you would also have found the latest rendition of our weekly Saturday Salon open thread.
Generally, using the search function on a site is a damn good start.
What an interesting thread this has been.
I am in the position of Mecurius’ wife(hubby working, me on part DSP). Until 12 years ago I was employed at Centrelink. I worked there from 1985 till 1998, through the change over from CES to job network providers. Although many of the changes made during that time, and subsequently, by various govts, were sh*tty (to say the least) that change has to rate as the worst.
My son had learning difficulties and bullying issues at high school and was unemployed for about 5 years, not once in all that time was he ever offered a job interview. As I was very ill and not able to offer a great deal of support he languished, unitl his girlfriend arrived from the US, went to private employement agencies and lo and behold he had a job within 2 weeks.
I have never been able to understand the bashing of those on the dole or pension. I know that there are those who cheat the system, I doubt that will ever change, but they are extraordinarily rare. A society should be judged on how it treats those less fortunate. Empathy needs to be seen as a virtue, a strength and not as a weakness.
I have worked with the long-term unemployed since the early nineties, and my observations are the same as conrad mentioned earlier – perhaps 1-2% of the jobless are rorting the system. Most LTUE people just don’t have the skills employers are looking for (and many don’t have the innate ability to acquire those skills, no matter how much training you force them into). Employers have become less flexible and there are now even more gatekeepers between job seekers and the job they are after. Many HR departments only exist just to screen out anyone that doesn’t fit the picture of a ‘perfect employee’.
Speaking of my own situation – I’m a university educated woman in my forties with lots of experience, but I’m hanging on like grim death to my government job, because I have a number of disabilities, including deafness and physical problems that would make my employment in private enterprise more difficult.
To address the issue of picking fruit etc. It sounds like it would be a nice easy way of getting work. However, there are barriers to this as well. If you have any sort of physical impairment, as many older unemployed do, this sort of work could exacerbate this injury and put you straight on the DSP. In addition, most farmers expect you to have your own transport and to arrange your own accommodation, in towns where there really aren’t too many options. So, not as easy as people think.
Btw, I’ve noticed in a number of places the DSP being confused with “Sickness Allowance”. The current processes by which people are assessed for the DSP are incredibly rigorous, and usually involve a series of intrusive challenges to medical opinion, having to offer all manner of personal and health information to assessment panels including bureaucrats as well as health professionals. The notion that it is somehow possible to get the DSP without having a disability is just an absolute fiction. The procedures have already been “tightened up” to exclude people who “could work” so it’s a complete nonsense to say now that there are stacks of people on the DSP who “could work”. People I know who work within the system agree it’s dehumanising, depressing and confrontational. Note also that to qualify for the DSP you can’t be “sick” – “Sickness Allowance” is at the much lower rate of Newstart. To get the DSP, you have to have, at the very least, a chronic medical condition which renders you unable to work. So it is both bizarre and cruel that the DSP has been the chief thing discussed in Gillard’s crackdown.
I know some people who’ve done it. It’s actually back breakingly hard work under awful conditions for shit money with a strong possibility of serious injury, and of creating permanent muscular-skeletal disabilities and impairments. Even for “fit and healthy” twenty somethings.
I have mixed feelings on this issue.
My first real job was contract straw carting. I did it as a “private contractor”, 10 hours a day, seven days a week and barely made the minimum wage. I was clearly exploited, nonetheless, at that time, in the late early nineties, work was hard to find and I was severely depressed and socially isolated. That job, which left me blistered and bruised, got me at of my rut and might have saved my life.
@ Kersebleptes Here’s a reading of Paul’s comment @178 that might have alluded you.
ie a perspective, that is, a view based on relatively recent history
I concur with Paul’s recollection,but if you are in any doubt about the sense of this claim, that the then Labor government of Gough Whitlam was attacked, especially by the popular press, for having the misfortune to be in government when unemployment went from under 2% to over 5%, then go and look up some press coverage in the archives.
current economic orthodoxy = prevailing economic opinion and certainly not one actively contested by either major party
and certainly below the average unemployment rate for OECD countries (8.1%)
It’s very simple to work out. A unemployment target of ~2% in the mid 70′s represents a lower actual number of unemployed, given Australia’s population has grown since 1972, compared with an unemployment target of 5% in 2011.
CONCLUSION! If you accept the conventional economic view that 5% is a good figure for unemployment and on the analysis there are more unemployed now than 35 years ago then you are in effect, condemning more people to suffer the indignity of welfare (which may have been what Gillard was trying to say but her language and her choice of friends leaves a lot to be desired).
Personally I see nothing wrong with not working, it’s not called wage slavery for nothing.
Now what exactly was your point?
Mark, that doesn’t even include the fact that much fruit-picking is now being done by people on 457s and itinerant traveller. I have read multiple cases in NSW of foreigners with little english and no security being ripped off, abused, exploited, and even sexually harrassed.
… and that has happened, I’ve been told, to people who aren’t foreigners, too, patrickg.
A lot of fruit picking is done by people on Working Holiday visas, which the government encourages, not 457, which require higher level skills.
But you are right about the exploitation, plus the accommodation problems, not to mention the physically demanding nature of the work and lousy pay.
Russell @ 180, 5% unemployment now would be closer to 20% than 2%, as measured 40 years ago.
On Job Network Providers it was Howard privatising the unemployed that has been a nice little rort for all of the organisations involved in it which I suspect was the intention.
They get paid shitloads to put people into placements, real or imagined. If anyone ever gets a job themselves without any involvement from them if they hear about it they put it down that they found it for you and get the kickbacks. You wouldn’t believe the amount of money these joints turnover as aside from the big kickbacks they get allocated thousands of dollars by the government to spend on each and every job seeker (clothes, equipment, petrol tickets etc) but funnily enough very few ever tell the job seeker that, thank you very much.
Remember when the Salvation Army got busted cooking the books?
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1604688.htm
Adelaide “Advertiser” bottom page 26 of “News In Brief”
Hungry Jack’s have been fined for underpaying 693 Tasmanian junior staff a total of $665,695 between 2006 and 2008.
The fine?
$100,500.
hd – that would be acceptable cost of doing business in some peoples eyes
@206. Lovely. Hungry Jack’s is then I guess legally bound to keep ripping off their employees like that for the good of their shareholders. Simple math isn’t it!
I used to work the last shift at (a large ff franchise) and we were required to clock off at the end of the shift before spending the next hour to clean up the joint. The reason? “Incentive for you mob not to spend all night over it isn’t it.”
Yep, good odds, around 6:1 for.
Contrast the unemployed persons chances of getting a job of about 1 [vacancy] : 4 [jobs].
After I posted that a few thoughts came to me.
Taking advantage of kids. Nice.
The Fair Work Ombudsman said “This penalty sends a clear message that the underpayment of young and vulnerable workers will not be tolerated”.
Really.
The offences occurred 3-6 years ago. That’s quick ain’t it?
Any jail sentences for those responsible for what was I presume deliberate underpaying?
Such was not mentioned in the Advertiser, it was after all only ‘brief’ news.
Why?
I suppose HJ’s will still advertise on TV etc, perhaps a prominent message could be attached “This company underpaid its workers for 2-3″ or something snappy along those lines.
“Trollday: welfare bashing”
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/04/14/trollday-welfare-bashing/
DI(NR)@164, I had personal experience with a Job Network provider four years ago when I returned from living in Asia. In the three months it took me to find a job I found that the support they provided was fantastic. They let me use their resources for searching for jobs and provided me with their enthusiastic support in holding up my morale as I went about my search. They treated me with respect and dignity.
No, Mercurius you are the one who is taking a swing. In telling us what your wife told you about a comment she says was made by a Job Network provider you disclosed nothing about your wife’s particular circumstances, which would obviously make it very difficult for them to find a placement for her.
I made my comment unaware of her circumstances and addressed the more general point you were trying to make, using your wife’s anecdote for illustration, about the general uselessness of Job Network providers.
If you had disclosed your wife’s circumstances I would not have commented as I did although my experience with the Job Network provider I dealt with was very different as I have told DI(NR).
Your comment shabby is disgraceful, and reflects badly on you, and that is as much as I will say.
Well, not exactly. The workers were also paid the money they were owed (eventually).
GregM @ 211,
I have been unemployed in the past and as you have to sign up with a JSP signed up with the Salvo’s Employment Plus. Went down one day signed all the documents and what not with job search training due to start the following week. In that initial sign up they told me there were a few placements going at a local wheat silo for good money and I enthusiastically said put me down, turned out they never existed.
Anyway the following day after the initial sign up I thought I’d go in and check their computers for any placements only for a very young lady to come up to me and asked me to leave. I said what are you talking about this is my job network she said she’d never seen me in there before so I should leave. I told her I signed up the day before and she can go and check her computer if she liked. She told me to wait by the front desk while she checked and then came over and said yes, I’m free to look at the job search placements on the computer. I walked straight out.
I also remember years ago a different JSP telling me a few factory hand jobs were going at a local factory and that my minimal experience would be fine and I would be almost a lock to get one of the jobs on offer. Went along and given some of the questions in the interview realised I was way out of my depth. The next day at the Job Network I scanned their placements on the computer and found out I’d been sent for a job requiring a fully qualified boilermaker/fitter & turner.
These JSP are some of the dodgiest & shonkiest organisations I’ve heard about.
@212 In other words you have learnt nothing from your carelessness in casting aspersions on people you don’t know, and instead are seeking to blame my “lack of disclosure” for your poor form. You could have emerged from this experience a little wiser, and resolved to be a little more cautious in future before slagging people off — but now the moment has passed. Carry on, then.
Jacques @214, Life’s a lottery isn’t it?
You got treated like shit while I was treated well.
I don’t think that that gives anyone a licence to pour a bucket of shit on all of them on the basis of a few anecdotes.
But GregM, your accusation of ignobility was not directed at Merc’s wife, but rather at the Network Provider. Viz.:
You accuse this person of lying. This is doubly mysterious, given your later praise of another Network Provider.
Now, I suppose we need to address the substantive issue concurred with by Merc’s wife’s Network Provider. Viz.,
Why is the PM even addressing the Sydney Institute? Will Abbott follow up by addressing the Fabian Society? The least harm the PM can do is increase the stature of the institute. Unfortunately it seems Labor also wants their approval enough to tailor their rhetoric to appeal to a group who actively identify as militant anti-Labor.
The politics (!?!) of all this strike me as really bizarre. Anyone who’s seized with downward envy or small biz types who resent having to pay their employees by the clock when they have to work for their own profit without reference to an hourly rate (sorry, but that’s the deal with a petit bourgeois set up) is surely going to be voting for Mr Rabbit anyway.
In the meantime, Julia Gillard pisses off even more Labor voters who might have been tempted to come back from The Greens, and sends more who were wavering away…
Also, what Mark and Derrida Derider said about the DSP. To get the DSP, you have to be pretty much unable to work. As work is defined right now (bearing in mind employer stereotypes and the failure to make adjustments for people with disabilities). And the regime people are put through is already horrendous.
The *actual* issue is that a lot of the “impediments” to work are directly correlated with:
(a) employer bias reflecting social and class judgements;
(b) the fact that people scraping to survive on the pathetic rates of welfare have that as a major cause of various other things which are supposed to render them not “job ready”.
Basically, we now have pretty much all of Fightback! by stealth after a decade and a half of the Howard/Gillard era (with a brief Rudd intermission).
And Grog couldn’t be more wrong about the labour tradition.
What Kim said.
I will happily wait to see what is actually in the budget rather than jump to any conclusions from a few words directed to a right wing thoughtlesstank.
I knew some brits who were attacked and bashed by rural Aussies for trying to work as fruit pickers – the backpackers were resented for stealing local jobs. I can’t imagine that urban dole-bludgers would be greeted with flowers in such an environment (that was the 90s, though).
GregM, maybe your job network provider was one of Therese Rein’s companies…?
That Theresa Rudd’s wife has made an absolute fortune out of these sort of contracts, tells you everything you need to know about the privatised job network.
And (surprisingly, as I have read the whole thread), the biggest issue is still surely the mismatch between a relatively unskilled unemployed pool and a strong demand for skilled workers. HOw is JG going to fix that?
Whoops, Thérèse Rein — sorry about that. I knew there was something wrong, but hit post before checking.
“patrickb at 150, this is because the English-speaking world has been captured by the twin fantasies of modern economics: that government spending is bad and industry policy is bad. Never mind that the world’s two most successful economies – Japan and Germany – are built on exactly the opposite notion.”
Sorry, this is pure bullshit. Australia’s living standards are higher than both Japan and Germany’s. If you look at the Penn World Tables you will find that per capita GDP grwoth in both Germany and Japan was absolutely dismal over the past decade. Export performance (which I assume what you must be focusing on) is not a measure of overall economic success when for most economies, most activity occurs in the non-traded goods sectors. Both Germany and Japan in fact have terribly unproductive non-traded goods sectors, hence their dismal productivity performance over the medium term.
DD @156
Sorry, but parts of what you say simply aren’t true. I have significant experience with Australia’s welfare system and the agencies that run it. Yes, there is a lot of paperwork to fill out to qualify for DSP. And yes, most that receive it are completely genuine. However, there is still a not inconsequential minority that receive it that could feasibly work and would thus should be receiving an unemployment benefit. In saying that I completely support the principle of welfare payments being equalised – I see little justification for the pension, DSP and UB being paid out at different rates. But saying that does not change the argument that it is important that people are only put into the “cannot work” bucket that are genuinely in that position.
Mark, as with anything, the problem is with the dichotomy. Disabled or not. There are varying degrees of disability and hence varying degrees of not being able to work. The problem is that once someone qualifies for DSP work incentives fall away very quickly. In a sense, the system gives up on them. I wasn’t claiming that there are many people in the DSP system with no disability at all. Just that many of these people are abled enough to work, or have greater support to give them a better chance of working again. Almost 800k people on DSP is 7% or so of Australia’s labour force. There are many more people receiving DSP than there are receiving unemployment benefits. Only 10% of people receiving DSP undertake any work (one of the lowest rates in the OECD).
“LO, surely you know as well as everyone else who studied economics that a certain amount of unemployment is necessary and good? You can’t have a mobile or flexible workforce if no one is unemployed – nor can you have a thriving voluntary and community sector.
You seem to refuse any responsibility of the government in making work for people. So all the responsibility is cast onto the unemployed, who have to do onerous tasks in exchange for a tiny income that constitutes the entire total of the government’s responsibilities.
Why should people in areas with no work be expected to move, and the government not be expected to find ways to support work for them in the areas where they live? Why should people who have contributed to industry and paid taxes suddenly have to move because some shyster company relocated to China, or collapsed without handing them their pension entitlements?”
sg
Where did I say that the goal was zero unemployment? Some unemployment is frictional (and more or less unavoidable). But some unemployment is structural and we should be concerned about that. I’m sorry but the backbone of Australia’s voluntary and community sector is not Australia’s long-term (structural) unemployed. You must be having a laugh surely in implying this.
I said nowhere that the unemployed bare all of the responsibility for their predicament. Indeed, I’d attribute a fair wack of it to misguided public policies, whether that be labour market and educational institutions, or the design of the tax transfer system. You are reading things into my comments that are not there.
There are very good reasons why people should move. Regions and towns have varying economic fortunes and migration is a key way to adjust to those varying circumstances. Are you seriously claiming that governments have a responsibility to ensure that employment growth is evenly distributed across all of Australia’s local government areas? That is impossible and would be a daft goal of public policy. Local areas are subject to a variety of idiosyncratic shocks that can not be simply offset by government industry or other policies. Governments have a terrible track record with regional employment or regional economic development schemes. But I guess your support for such things is to be expected given your seeming faith in that type of government planning.
Pretty good points, Paul. You’ve got the vital bit that both political sides have missed or refuse to acknowledge: a lot of it is essentially labour market failure. And it is not helped at all by the abolition of the CES. It was a major source of labour market intelligence on jobseekers and industries/employers, specifically covering the diversity across the country. I’m not saying it was the most competent, but it was a resource.
I didn’t read the address as the big stick approach at all, albeit she probably didn’t mind the media taking it up that way simply to move it off the debating agenda.
There is quite a bit of ‘motherhood’ rhetoric but there seem to be some good questions asked: can we help break the cycle for the seriously disadvantaged? The last time these questions were asked, Keating and Brian Howe had a go at it and might have got somewhere if Labor’s political fortunes didn’t decline soon after. It is very labor-intensive, with rewards occurring over a relatively long time. Most politicians want a quick fix and there isn’t one.
A bit of lateral thinking may help. There was a C-M report that the Government may be seeking a trade-off with employers: that they only get 457 permits if they’re willing to take on a certain percentage of apprentices or trainees. Might be worth a try.
On DSP, I know there are a lot of hurdles to get through to obtain it. In my day (the 90s) in the CES as an employment counsellor it wasn’t easy, but we could with some internal support and sympathetic doctors channel people onto it.
These were over-50s with some injury, not necessarily debilitating but enough for them to fail a medical assessment at any job interview. These people were pushed from pillar to post complying to the system requirements. No amount of recall interviews or training programs would change their plight. A DSP saved everybody’s time and gave them some dignity.
Then people like Des Moore started grumbling about the growth in numbers on DSP.
I’m unsure about the bagging of Gillard over this. She is in a minority government. Nothing she’s proposed is very different from Kevin 07. It’s not the solution but she has addressed a lot of the concerns. Something to work on. Wonder if Ken Henry would be interested in a post-retirement job?
I do hope you’re right. I have been on the dsp for a long time now. It was always my fervent wish to have a job but it was never possible. I have now something of a life, though I am older with high blood pressure and diabetes to complicate things further. It would be nice to think the world would leave me alone to get up in the morning, eat, breathe, and go to bed at night. My God I will turn a bloody screw if you like but please you souless haridan let me live.
@229. Don Wigan
Ms Gillard has ‘form’ about singing the praises of capitalism at the feet of the bosses and speeches like this (on top of the Whitlam speech) leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You can tell by words and actions which causes a politician favours, and Ms Gillard’s words have been all in favour of the bosses, and none whatsoever in favour of the disadvantaged. People have ‘bad vibes’ about what the budget is going to bring. This is why the bagging of Ms Gillard.
Can we have a roundtable at LP where the followers of Bahnisch fils and the adherents of Bahnisch pere debate and settle once and for all whether “Calvinist” or “Lutheran” is to be the preferred term for Worst Religion Ever?
That’s how I’ve been. I’ve been in a serious state of mental decline since Julia started banging on about making it tougher for the unemployed. I’ve had the CAT team visiting for a week. I can’t understand why on the one hand the government can pretend to care about mental illness and suicide and on the other hand do so much to make it worse.
D & E – that’s because she is a disgrace
@225
Er … I think you’ve got the wrong man. I was critising you for being a free market ideologue, I don’t need to quote stats to do that. I think you meant 153.
PaulofAlbury @ 218: ” Why is the PM even addressing the Sydney Institute? ”
That is a very good question!!
233.
Indeed. the powers that be seem to have no idea that words have power. It doesn’t occur to them even before they impose their Draconian solutions, that they might in fact be making people sicker and even more unemployable.
Anyway, depressed and Unemployed, I hope something good happens in your life soon that might relieve your depression. Because probably that’s the only thing that’s going to work. These people who tell people to snap out of depression have no idea what its all about. get well soon. Best wishes.
LO, do you believe you can actually compare living standards between first world countries with any success, or that they reflect the success of an economy? And do you think that Germany and Japan’s lack of economic growth over the last decade is the sole marker of their economic success? Japan was until this year the world’s second largest economy, with only 120 million people, most of whom don’t speak English. It also dominates the medium and high tech and heavy manufacturing sectors in the world economy, and has extremely low unemployment. Germany also does well on many of the same measures.
Furthermore, Australia’s economic growth in the last 10 years has been dependent on exporting to countries with an industry policy (China and Japan).
I don’t think governments should be responsible for balancing unemployment across regions. But if they aren’t going to do this, they shouldn’t insist that individuals be willing to move for work, especially not for the piddling money that the dole offers.
This “mutual obligation” bullshit is not mutual. This is its fundamental problem. The “mutuality” is very carefully designed to cut one way.
@206 & 209 hannah’s had, @207 dave, @208 tssk:
“Hungry Jack’s conducted its own assessment of the underpayments and back-paid about $900,000 to 800 staff in 2009.”
Hungry Jacks fined
oops. hannah’s dad
I call bullshit on that claim by Hungry Jacks.
Clearly they were found guilty of underpaying.
Clearly it follows they were found culpable.
Self serving PR spin notwithstanding.
Clearly
LO: “Just that many of these people are abled enough to work, or have greater support to give them a better chance of working again.”
I don’t disagree with this, but it would be good if you could give some indicative range of what proportion you think could work and, more importantly, how much the support they would need to get them working would cost and how many could actually get work with it (I think there probably is a lot of category choosing going on, but it’s with groups that are never going to get work easily). In my books, there are far easier and cheaper groups to target that exist now if you want higher workforce participation (e.g., well educated females that need better childcare) and groups that will become a social problem if no-one does anything (i.e., the ever growing number of poorly educated males).
“There are very good reasons why people should move.”
I think the only people that believe this one are economists — it ignores a whole host of things at the individual level, like the stability of your children’s schooling, what your partner does, the ability to get reasonable housing, services to help if you really are disabled, etc. . The only group that I think that could really move easily and live an essentially itinerant life are young unattached singles that can get jobs easily, but they’re not the group that needs to move to get a job.
Interesting. I’ve just been reading The New Statesman, April 4 edition, and Gillard seems to fit in with the way things are trending there. I read:
“A healthy scepticism about the capacity of the state, a renewed enthusiasm for localism and self-help and respect for working-class anxieties would go a long way. Contrary to what we often think, these values are not alien to the Labour Party’s history or to the English radical tradition; they are part of their DNA. Strange as it may sound, if the party of the left wants to reconnect with its heritage and win again in England, it needs to rediscover its forgotten conservatism”
Labour … need to recover the value of the ordinary, the importance of the specifically English struggles of working people – a politics of English virtue ….”
“.. some people work hard and some people don’t. And if you don’t recognise that, you are leaving out something that is not only popular with the electorate but is key to our moral vision.”
One of the key people making the change from New Labour to Blue Labour is a Maurice Glasman.
Oh well, as we gear up for our Royal Wedding parties, it’s good to know we’re not falling behind the trends at politics central.
Relax all you lefties. Gillard only pretends to be a conservative whenever there’s an election coming up or there’s a dip in the ALP polls, which seems to be happening a lot these days.
The right/libertarian side of politics have long stopped believing her (since well before she lied about the carbon tax), so why do you lot really think she’s going to be tough on welfare? Do you also think she really hates the Greens and that she’s a Bible-bashing traditionalist just because she said so?
julia gillard should find someone els to pick on and leave people on a disability alone, if these people were well enough to work they would, no one is going to hire someone that isn’t well enough to work, if she trys to have these people force to work it will only create more problems then we already have now, they could lose there payments and cause a lot of poverty. then we will have a lot more homeless people living on the streets, we will end up with problems like other countries have. so julia gillard stop looking down on people with a disability that can’t work, and help the people that are well enough to get a job.
The Liberal, National and other parties are chockas with male wack jobs, dour punishers and straighteners and Family First moralists. Difference is, you don’t make their marital status the reason.
Sit down and think about that for a while. Recycling ancient stereotypes in’t “edgy”, it’s just the opposite. Why do some of you cling so grimly to a mean and reduced definition of “free speech” which you take to mean “my right to belittle and recycle insulting stereotypes”?
Razor, many of us here vote/voted Green as you know perfectly well. That comment, like Sam’s, is just a blatant troll.