Unemployment has risen
to 6.3 per cent. Over 775,000 Australians are out of work. The total number of
hours worked in Australia last month actually FELL by 0.3 per cent. This is
clearly a recipe for an income recession. This is clearly a major reason why
the Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index is now at its lowest
level in over three years. Ugly news for Santa.
The big end of town
doesn't care about unemployment or job insecurity, because they believe they
make better profits if they can keep wages down, and they think that
unemployment and job insecurity through a part-time, casualised workforce,
keeps wages down. They should be careful for what they wish for. The economy is
not travelling well, and could get worse.
There is a number of
things the Liberal Government could do to stop the slide in consumer
confidence. They could abandon their plans to deregulate student fees and to
cut pension indexation. They could abandon their plans for job cuts in health,
education, the CSIRO, the ABC, and many other areas of the public sector
workforce. They could stop undermining manufacturing in Australia's automotive
component parts and shipbuilding industries.
But most of all they
should put a stop to the migrant worker programs that skyrocketed in times when
Australia's unemployment was much lower and job security was much higher.
It is crazy that we now
have permanent net overseas migration running at three times the rate it did
during the 1990s, and in addition we have over one million people in Australia
on temporary visas which give them work rights.
The Consumer Sentiment Index and today's unemployment rise show the absurdity of Joe Hockey urging consumers to spend up big for Santa. It is like a Football Coach who has his players run twenty laps and do a hundred push ups on the morning of a match, then exhorts his team to go out and kill em.
Our government recognizes that our sluggish economy is not creating enough jobs to keep up with the increasing size of the work force, yet our "skilled" migration program continues to advertize our so-called "skill shortages" all over the world! If we do have an actual while we have this outrageous unemployment rate, then it's an indication that educational and training schemes are failing to match business needs, and that there are more people than our economy can employ!
ReplyDeleteIt's said that there are more than one million temporary employees in Australia, adding the unemployment of Australians. It's assumed that "big" is better, and population growth will actually create jobs, when it isn't. It's time to trim our government's unrealistic growth agendas, and limit immigration.
The rant about Australia's "skill shortages" has been toned down, and now the list is simply the Skilled Occupation List, SOL, of jobs "needed" in Australia. Many of them are not in short supply! We have engineers, accountants, nurses and IT specialists who are unemployed, and migrants accessing their jobs. It puts downward pressure on wages and conditions by introducing global competition. Population growth rode us over the GFC, but now we have record youth unemployment, cuts to government sponsored jobs, and our economy is sluggish. Instead of trimming population growth, our government can only "fix" the welfare budget by cutting free the unemployed from unemployment benefits! Non-performing politicians should be cut free from their financial support.
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