By John Haly  

“There is enough work in Australia for nobody to be on unemployment benefits except for those medically incapable.” (Quote from Twitter!)

This is a familiar theme on social media. Such claims are often made, predictably, by a privileged white male with a job; and no understanding of the misery of the unemployed because he has some anecdotal “proof” based on his personal experience of how his “mates” have kept him in work.

Outside of that cocoon, as my recent piece demonstrated, there are far more unemployed people than the ABS has ever stated. However, the notion that bounteous employment is available, prevails.

According to Roy Morgan’s research, full-time and part-time employment are increasing, but so are underemployment and unemployment rates beyond 2021. There are numerous reasons from my last exposition on this using October 2023 statistics to believe that one and a half million people are validly unemployed.

This is significantly more likely than the around half a million claim that has dominated the ABS estimate over the last year. I’ve already addressed that, so let’s move on to the subject of work opportunities in Australia.

Surveys vs Advertisements

Understandably, having a low unemployment rate serves corporate and government interests. There is strong motivation to find a high number of vacant positions to support the narrative that the unemployed are simply unmotivated, preferring to live off grandiose welfare cheques. The idea of below-poverty aid being sufficient to propel individuals into occupations clamouring to be filled by desperate employers is ridiculous. Unfortunately, so many people think this is true.

Despite the ideological incentives, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and estimates from the Department of Employment show that job opportunities have decreased in recent months. Businesses report a 35% higher number of job positions than the number of classic job advertisements as identified by the Department of Employment, (See Figure 1). Despite the drive for a narrative that implies there is enough employment. However, all the government can come up with is a little over 402K job positions. Only two-thirds of these are classically advertised. This is still less than the half million ABS estimates are unemployed. In October 2023, Nine News featured headlines like “The Aussie industries desperate to hire more workers”. If this is the case, why are there so few adverts in comparison to claimed vacancies? Figures 1 & 2 both show that over a decade ago, surveyed jobs were less than advertised positions.

RM Under and Unemployment & Job Vacancies (ABS & Dept Emp’)

There are reasons for this, to be fair, which are because of developing technologies. Seek, CareerOne, Australian JobSearch, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter/X have emerged as key outlets for job seekers and employers in the digital era. The final three are not tracked by the IVI statistics. However, because of the abundance of inflated and outdated profiles, LinkedIn’s popularity has declined dramatically over the years as has Twitter/X. Hey, I glam my LinkedIn up as well, but I haven’t heard from a recruiter in years.

Advertised job classifications

The claim by businesses that surveyed vacancies are 35% above advertised positions appears dubious. If 35% of the total 402K positions indicated in the poll are not easily accessible for public scrutiny, we must wonder what kind of job market is being concealed from the public? It will almost definitely not be general labourers (5.8%), drivers (5.3%), salespeople (7.3%), or community workers (10.7%). (see Figure 3). The service industries, which have been complaining about being “desperate for workers,” will promote heavily. There are 76K jobs in that small group, which is distributed across Australia’s vast brown country, with 18 cities, over 100K inhabitants, and 1700 towns with populations ranging from that to a thousand people. The math suggests that if there are more than 40 job vacancies in a given location, you are most likely in a metropolis. If you are in a rural area with fewer than a thousand people, the chances of finding one job in all of those categories are slim. I haven’t even mentioned whether you have the skills to perform these non-professional occupations.

Surveyed position breakdown

Professionals, managers, technicians, and clerical and administrative staff vacancies (which make up the great majority of posted jobs) that require expensive higher education are the most likely categories to find unadvertised job vacancies. If you disagree, take a look at Figure 4 for a breakdown of the ABS survey of positions by industry.

The meeting of jobs and unemployed

Close but no cigar lit

Just consider the media excitement that occurred when for once, the surveyed job vacancies (not the advertised vacancies) and the ABS “measure” of unemployment nearly equalled. The Australian Financial Review reported a decline in job vacancies in June 2022, with the ABS unemployment rate falling to a new 48-year low of 3.4% in July. “For the first time on record in Australia’s history, there are more job openings than unemployed people to fill the vacant positions”. Technically, the ABS’s May 2022 quarterly survey recorded 476,900. The AFR rounded this up to 480K, but it had fallen to 460,400 by August. However, unemployed people (seasonally adjusted) were 488,800 in July, which is technically higher than 480K vacancies. Fairly close if you don’t consider that surveyed jobs were falling and had been doing so for two months before the ABS came up with the 480K. This had fallen to 460K job vacancies by the following month (see Figure 5). I can tell you that in July 2022, the ABS listed 90,600 gig employees as having no hours of labour and no compensation.

The ABS considers these people to be “employed” despite no pay or work because they have “job attachments”. I can also tell you that Jobseeker had a hard count of 892,066 people for whom they paid unemployment benefits. But, “for the first time on record in Australia’s history…”, the ABS and Job Surveys numbers came somewhat close to one another, loosely speaking. The hullabaloo from the MSM press was extraordinary. I so want to say FFS, but that would be unprofessional.

NON-Numeric employment obstruction

Roy Morgan’s annual workforce numbers have been steadily increasing over the last 16 years. These figures show an average of 222,000 new individuals added per year. Because Australia’s population is concentrated along a 35,821-kilometer-long coastline, job searchers are unlikely to live in areas where there are suitable vacant positions. When evaluating assertions of “labour scarcity,” it is essential to take a more comprehensive approach, taking into account the substantial rise in the number of individuals actively looking for employment, limited economic diversification, and the decline of Australia’s secondary trophic economic level (Manufacturing).

Factors exacerbating the scarcity of employment opportunities in Australia include:

• socio-demographic characteristics;
• geographical location;
• job suitability;
• employer discrimination;
• accessibility limitations;
• skill and education levels;
• competition;
• financial constraints;
• literacy levels;
• inadequate remuneration;
• restricted working hours;
• employer exploitation;
• job conditions;
• domestic violence;
• health concerns; and
• transportation issues.

The media and the government have been hesitant to engage in a more detailed and nuanced debate on this topic. The media has issued propagandistic critiques asking that the unemployed “just get a job” or that “people lack the desire to work.” The unemployed are portrayed as intellectually and mentally inferior. Employers who exploit their employees and express irritation with the scarcity of susceptible individuals to fill low-wage temporary positions demonstrate a similar level of contempt.

Skills required for future employment

Skill levels continue to be important in meeting future employment needs, but Australia’s policy decision to impose huge educational debts on young people in return for a degree may be viewed as a disheartening display of policy short-sightedness. A more pragmatic solution, akin to Gough Whitlam’s educational policies, could be to develop higher education programmes tailored to expected future demands. (See Figure 6)

Long-term limits on actual employment development in Australia, as well as the persistent dissemination of misleading information claiming low unemployment figures, are all obstructions. Employers report difficulties in hiring candidates for roles that lack appeal at all skill levels. Unemployment, job markets, economic complexity, interest rate policies, corporate-driven inflation, income disparities, austerity measures without social support, and educational demands must all be addressed in Australia’s economic future. Governments, the media, and economists must address these difficulties head-on rather than hide behind the propaganda of flawed metrics.

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES and Independent Australia.

By John Haly

The burden of supplying job vacancies falls on the government and business sectors. Instead, the government and media typically blame the unemployed, portraying them as unmotivated, parasitic welfare recipients. This is despite, by any unemployment measurement, there are more unemployed than open job positions.

This suggests that the real issue is a lack of jobs in the public and private sectors, and the market – not the unemployed – is to blame. If the RBA utilised more accurate unemployment estimates to evaluate unemployment instead of the ABS subset, it would never have a reason for hiking interest rates.

The ABS subset of unemployment data shows that the neoclassical assertion that unemployment is too low (and must be used to offset inflation) is pure propaganda. The ABS data fails to account for the larger share of domestic unemployment.

Exchange Settlement & OPA A/cs

This has not stopped the RBA from inflating your interest bills to benefit bankers’ profits which appears to be their only “success,” although they would not boast of it. None of the RBA’s publicly-recognised strategic goals appear to be progressing well. They have not regained management control of interest rates since March 2020. Interbank loans are a fifth of what they once were, with much of it sitting on deposit with the Reserve Bank and a consequential interest being paid less than interest received. Inflation has responded to supply changes, not the strategy of interest rate rises. All of this is despite attempts to boost lending by increasing banks’ Exchange Settlement Reserves during the pandemic (see Figure 1), which didn’t work either. Consequently, substantial overnight loans at these inflated interest rates are rarer (see Figure 2).

InterBank Market transactions

Governments, businesses, and central banks all make political decisions regarding unemployment. The corporate capital class employs it as a tool for pressuring working-class compliance with exploitation. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) believes that the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) must be offset against inflation. The desired unemployment rate has been a highly flexible and shifting target percentage rate for decades. Even though post-World War II Western nations, including Australia, have had 2% to 3% unemployment for decades without significant inflation. Still, this zombie economic notion refuses to die. Remember that 2% unemployment occurred when gig jobs were virtually nonexistent?

Our current RBA governor believes that “full employment” is at 4.5% unemployment, and that our current rate of 3.7% is dangerously low. According to the ABS, the rate is 3.7% (Oct 23). Even though the Jobseeker and Youth Allowance count each month has been somewhere between 1.6 and 1.9 times that, over the last three years. That doesn’t even consider the harsh consequences of excluding Jobseekers from aid. For example, 502,698 jobseeker payments were suspended between July and September of this year. This averages more than 160,000 per month. Keep in mind that, according to ABS, the number of unemployed has been stable at roughly half a million for the last two years (see Figure 3). So, keep reading if that makes you suspicious that something isn’t quite kosher.

Multiple measures of unemployment

The ABS’s reported unemployment rate of 3.7% does not accurately reflect the domestic reality of unemployment as it affects the real numbers of people who are jobless. The media, capitalists, and political elite rarely, if ever, discuss what purpose the ABS statistics genuinely serve. It serves two fundamental functions:

1. comparative analysis on an international scale and
2. the interests of capitalist class exploitation.

The ABS approach to assessing employment by ILO methodology has been criticised as “imperfectly realised” (Pg 78-85). It does not consider internal or domestic unemployment in a country, a lack of employment opportunities, or decent welfare compensation. I have addressed the international comparative function before, so I will shift to the second aspect. The ABS’s primary domestic purpose is to gauge the unhindered accessibility of labour to employers, and as such, it is not a complete set.

Despite Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers’ declared goal of attaining full employment, the September 2022 Job Summit failed to progress this. Instead, Chalmers advocated increasing the Permanent Migration Programme planning level to 195,000 for the fiscal year 2022-23. This is expected to relieve some skill shortages. Free higher education is still in place in many less economically advantaged European countries. Opponents believe that free tertiary education is financially unfeasible. However, free education has to become a higher political priority for spending.

Jim Chalmers recommended providing funds for the free provision of TAFE courses in 180,000 spaces in 2023. This barely registers as an impact on the ABS unemployment estimate of 473,000. Keep in mind that the ABS estimate is far lower than the counted number of people granted “JobSeeker” benefits. The Labor Party’s attitude lacks sincerity. The boost in immigration coincides with the interests of their corporate capitalist funders, who gain from cheap immigrant labour. The ABS approach benefits employers rather than the general public or government policy. Individuals who may not be immediately available, even if they have had NO work and NO pay in a month, but have a “job attachment” in the gig economy, are in family businesses, or are busking on the streets. Foreign workers who have been here less than four years, those registered in government-sponsored jobless work programmes, and those who are unable to provide active evidence of seeking employment are excluded. This alone disqualifies thousands of people from being considered unemployed. The ABS description does not give the public an accurate picture of Australian domestic unemployment. Including unpaid persons with gig job affiliations would significantly increase unemployment, approaching the Reserve Bank’s NAIRU threshold of 4.5%, effectively demolishing the rationale for interest rate hikes. (see Figure 3)

The Australian Reserve Bank’s (RBA) monetary policy framework does not use a precise unemployment count (rather than an estimate) like Jobseeker’s account. Doing so would imply an unemployment rate higher than 5.6%, negating any justification for raising interest rates. The opportunity to have the country with one of the world’s highest household private debt to GDP ratios (112% in 2023) shift money from the debtors to wealthy financiers and banks would be wasted. It is strange that, in a neoliberal society that worships markets and the private sector, the government and media are refusing to accept Roy Morgan’s estimate of unemployment, which was at 1.5 million in October and has stayed continuously high over the past two years. The conservative establishment’s stance remains mostly anti-private-sector research in areas that do not agree with the Reserve Bank’s objective. The government and media frequently cite underemployment. However, Roy Morgan’s “disreputable” private enterprise model for unemployment has maintained these ABS subset numbers at levels that are roughly half to one-third lower.

I chose October 2023 statistics because they were all available when I started writing this paper. Over the last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has consistently recorded unemployment at around half a million (currently 2/3rds of the JobSeeker count and 1/3rd of the Roy Morgan estimate). Even the seasonally adjusted labour force increase claim varies greatly, which any statistician will recognise affects the percentage estimate for unemployment.

The difference between the September and October workforce measurements is 780K, more than the number of unemployed ABS claims. If that difference worries you, consider that Roy Morgan’s aggregate estimates of under and unemployment were at least twice as high as ABS’s (1.44 million), totaling 3.12 million. That corresponds to 20.1% according to Roy Morgan’s workforce numbers (15.5 million), but 21.19% if ABS’s estimate of 14.7 million is accurate. Although this is a fascinating statistical game, the fact that neither the private sector nor the government will step forward to provide relief, has an impact on people’s livelihoods.

RM Under and Unemployment & Job Vacancies (ABS & Dept Emp’)

The gap between the needs of the under and unemployed and the available job vacancies in the market is so large as to be insurmountable (see Figure 4). Both measurements of job vacancies posted and claimed via surveys conducted, respectively, by the Department of Employment and the ABS, plainly reveal the dismal provision of work by both the commercial and public sectors. I have already explored this and will do so again in a subsequent article. It demonstrates that governments have done little to improve the plight of the unemployed in the last half-century compared to the prior quarter century.

Finally, the graph in Figure 3 reveals that Roy Morgan’s estimates are the most probabilistically feasible. The ABS unemployment estimates and zero-hours figures outperformed the JobSeeker numbers from August to October 2021. Recognising JobSeeker or Roy Morgan’s prominent unemployment figures would indicate that the Reserve Bank’s interest rates should always have remained at the 0.1% level. Every step made by the RBA to raise interest rates is subsequently boosting inflation and living costs despite their intended goals, and is based on the presumption of low unemployment. Every claimed goal for their strategies is based on a total economic fabrication.

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES and Independent Australia.

By Dr. Martha Knox-Haly and John Haly

The failure of the Coalition’s Voice to Parliament has been an unusual congruence of events. No doubt some of you will think we made a mistake in that first sentence. The Uluru page was created in 2017, during the Coalition Government’s tenure. The now resigned coalition minister, Ken Wyatt, as Indigenous Affairs Minister, submitted a final report in July 2021, to the Morrison Government, who designed and funded the Voice with $7.3 million. The Morrison government, under Josh Frydenberg‘s direction, subsequently included $160 million in the 2019 budget for the voice referendum, assuring Australia a referendum within three years. Frydenberg openly supported the voice and expressed confidence that it would succeed. “There is a willingness to enter into the debate to ensure our Indigenous Australians – our First Australians – get the recognition and the outcome that they deserve,” he said.

The Coalition government was not in power in 2023 and so the Labor party took up the baton the Morrison Government handed over, in what looked initially like a carte blanche endorsement of this as a constitutional change. And yet, with the shattering defeat of the referendum, the Labor party appears to have either dropped the baton, or it was knocked out of their hands? How did the 60% support, which had been reasonably stable for a number of years, plummet in just 5 months?

Peter Dutton announced that he would actively campaign against the Voice by April 5, 2023. In April 2023, the No campaign launched a ferocious media blitz through Advance Australia. The impact on Indigenous mental health would be devastating, according to 13Yarn tabling data, where calls reporting racism and abuse increased from 1286 in 2022 to 2124 in the current year to September 2023. Suicide calls and requests for assistance have surged.

Digital campaigners observed patterns of social media activity never before seen in an Australian political context. So, what precisely were these activists witnessing?

On September 27th, Alice Dawkins, the executive director of Reset.Tech (a non-profit organisation that advocates for stricter restrictions on digital threats to democracy), reported that a small number of new accounts distributing repurposed information content received an overwhelming amount of shares in their first days of operation. Dawkins expressed concern that users of X could no longer select politics to identify falsehood in tweets. This could only be intentional, allowing X to continually reject the AEC’s attempts to remove tweets marked as disinformation encouraging a No vote. The comparable and repeated misconceptions across these tweets, according to Ed Coper, Director of Populares, are a “telltale clue that these are organised networks.” Associate Professor Timothy Graham’s research demonstrates the amazing distributional potential of the X social media platform. Graham, an associate professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology, studied 246000 Voice-related tweets between March 2023 and May 2023. A highly concentrated number of accounts generated no campaign content, with the top 100 accounts sending out one out of every ten tweets regarding the referendum. YES-campaigners attempted to counter falsehoods in the early months, but found themselves in a digital tarpit attracting more views of the NO-campaign material. The top NO-campaign tweets were highlighted by disinformation regarding the proposed constitutional amendment’s provisions, as well as a focus on racism and racial divisiveness in order to instil fear about the Voice. As the referendum date approached, the number of accounts advocating for a no-vote climbed substantially faster than those advocating for a yes-vote.

Digital manipulation was also seen on non-English social media like WeChat. The Conversation examined Chinese voter’s WeChat habits. One user, Yamie Chew started posting No campaign clips instead of pet photos at the end of September. Within 24 hours, the initial video had 10,000 reposts and 1800 likes. In contrast, the AEC video garnered 25 views. Concerns about the Voice’s impact on Australia’s Constitution by no-vote propaganda included racial apartheid, Indigenous privilege, racial inequity, Chinese voters losing their homes, and additional taxation to fund the Voice.

It is currently impossible to determine who the genuine proprietors of these personas and accounts were, and there would have been multiple stakeholders spreading misinformation. However, a review of the official No campaign organisation is instructive.

The AEC penalised Advance (the principal organisation for the No campaign) in 2019 for misrepresenting Independent candidate Zalli Stegall. According to Dr. Jeremy Walker, Advance is funded by conservative think tanks such as the Institute for Public Affairs, Liberty Works, CPAC, and CIS, as well as the Atlas Network. Beyond what Dr. Walker wrote in Independent Australia, he wrote a far more extensive report in UTS ePRESS that can also be found on Researchgate.

Dr Walker stated that the No campaign ‘shares characteristics, aims and methods of the long standing Atlas Network backed disinformation campaign on climate change, motivated by fear that this will strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and parliamentary democracy.’ The Atlas network’s purpose is to create thinktanks that generate a constant stream of disinformation. The overarching goals are to further capital’s political goals, abolish wage arbitration and unions, create climate disinformation and policy obstruction, delegitimize Indigenous self-determination consensus, and blame this on social welfare and collective land title. The Atlas Thinktanks advocate harsher penalties for climate change campaigners while opposing elections as a means of undermining democracy.

Mathew Sheahan, Vicki Dunne, and Laura Bradley are Advance’s three directors. Sheahan, Dunne, and Bradley are also directors of Australians for Unity, which featured Warwick Mundine and Jacinta Price as joint spokesmen for the No campaign, according to ASIC documents. Price formerly worked for Advance. Advance’s website claims that they are not a charity and do not take government support, despite the fact that they are registered with the Charities Regulator and have accepted the Government’s offer of tax-deductible donations.

Official No campaign organiser Advance shares a post office box with the Christian Marriage Lobby. Advance was helped by Whitestone Strategic and RJ Dunham & Co., digital businesses. Whitestone registered former Australian Christian Lobby Head Lyle Shelton’s website and worked for Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party. According to its website, Texas-based RJ Dunham & Co. helps Christian non-profit ministries with marketing and fundraising. The Australian Christian Lobby, the Bethel Church in California (which prayed for the resurrection of a two-year-old kid and claimed online prayer could treat covid symptoms), and the Prestenwood Pregnancy Centre in Texas were all former clients. These consultants were part of the environment that influenced evangelical Americans to support Trump.

Advance’s campaigns are reminiscent of an Atlas network think tank. These included strategies that exaggerated differences between groups (e.g., inner-city educated elites versus the rest of the country), fueling the perception of disunity within Indigenous communities (Jacinta Price was featured opposing Marcia Langton, who was instrumental in developing the Uluru Statement from the Heart). A common tactic by Advance was to raise doubt on the integrity of the electoral system. We witnessed this personally when a NO campaigner in Hurstville, Sydney, agreed with an older white male voter that postal voting and amending the constitution were unconstitutional.

The material from the NO-campaign has been described as misinformation. However, the NO-campaign tactics are consistent with the Atlas Network’s objectives, meaning that the campaign was established on purposeful coordinated plans to misinform voters. For decades, the Australian Atlas Organisations have worked with the American Atlas Organisations to undermine climate science’s legitimacy and create the impression that there is a lack of scientific consensus on climate science, even though 97% of scientists agree on the role of dirty fossil fuels in global warming.

Advance Australia sponsored two distinct Facebook campaigns: Referendum News, which featured right-wing commentary masquerading as neutral news, and “Not Enough”, which was directed at progressives. The Advance Campaign included Jacinta Price (as Fair Australia’s voice) and Warren Mundine, while the Progressive Campaign featured Lydia Thorpe. By supporting extreme conservative and progressive perspectives, the objective was to deplete support for the middle-of-the-road option based on incremental change, and to create the perception of a division among the Indigenous population. Price and Mundine’s continued presentation by Advance as representatives equal to the 250 Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander leaders who had consultatively worked for a decade to craft the Uluru Statement from the Heart was breathtaking and callous.

Walker asserted that restrictive disclosure laws conceal Australian Atlas network funders. He highlights fossil fuel companies like Exxon, Santos, and Western Mining provided foundation funding for the Atlas Campaign. ‘The “No” campaign can be safely assumed as being conducted by proxy on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century’, he claims. The top ten contributors, who provide 30% of Advance’s funding, have no publicly available fossil fuel ties.

However, the source of 70% of No campaign funding remains unknown. One thing to note is that Dutton’s decision to campaign against the Voice mirrored the West Australian Liberals’ approach in a state dominated by the mining industry. The pattern of digital platform manipulation shows a coordinated disinformation campaign, and that the baton was definitely knocked from Albanese’s grasp. It implies that Australia should follow in the footsteps of the British and American governments, who conducted extensive investigations into the names and culpability of digital consultancies during the 2016 hotbeds of radical right populism represented by American presidential elections and Brexit.

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES

By John Haly  

The threat of Artificial Intelligence effectively doing jobs has raised fears that tomorrow’s world will be increasingly jobless. There are competing proposals to resolve the societal fallout of a jobless world.

One proposal is a Universal Basic Income (UBI) which entails the provision of a consistent and unqualified monetary allowance to every member of a given society, irrespective of their financial standing, employment situation, or any other relevant considerations. It has had several well-known advocates, from Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang to tech billionaire Elon Musk. Variations on the UBI have been trialled, such as in Finland recently from January 2017 to December 2018, where 2,000 unemployed people in Finland received an unconditional monthly payment of €560 ($634) instead of their usual unemployment benefit. The results were mixed and not the solution people were expecting. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) research on Basic Income holds significant value due to its nuanced and comprehensive analysis of nations that have implemented this policy.

The other proposal is a Federal Job Guarantee. The concept of a job guarantee (JG) is where the federal government provides a publicly financed employment opportunity to individuals willing and able to work but unable to secure employment within the private sector. The government assumes the role of the “employer of last resort,” guaranteeing employment opportunities for all individuals seeking work. The program’s primary objective is to achieve both full employment and price stability to provide a sustainable solution to the dual problems of inflation and unemployment. This is accomplished through the establishment of a buffer stock of employed individuals who receive only the minimum wage. These individuals are engaged in a range of socially beneficial activities, which are determined and organised at the Federal, State and Local levels. Examples of such activities could include infrastructure projects, community services, and environmental initiatives.

This article does not delve into the intricacies of a job guarantee. Instead, it critically evaluates the UBI as the labour market policy of choice. Ten vectors of evaluation are presented within this article.

1. Lack of Inflation Controls and Productivity Enhancement

The absence of inflation controls in a Universal Basic Income (UBI) contrasts with the counter-cyclical nature of a job guarantee. The job guarantee is highly effective in mitigating the adverse effects of deflation and inflation. Therefore, it has been maintained that a UBI inherently contributes to inflation due to its injection of funds to consumers, which is not productivity linked to the economy. An equivalent increase in the production of goods and services does not accompany a UBI. The primary recipients are low-income individuals, as the existing capitalist system has already generated significant inequality. These individuals are more likely to spend the additional funds in the economy but may not contribute to producing goods and services. The prominence of financialisation in economic crises has already led to a rise in debt obligations without effectively enhancing the real economy’s production capacity in sectors that can be used to service the mounting debt. This phenomenon is particularly evident among affluent individuals who accumulate and horde income in offshore facilities. The provision of income to individuals with low incomes that do not effectively enhance productivity, unlike a Job Guarantee program, compounds these failings. Consequently, this approach may result in inevitable economic price increases, as corporate entities will likely exploit the increased income. This was evident in price gouging long after pandemic supply shocks abated.

2. Reinforcement of Structural Under-Class and Inequity Issues

Universal Basic Income (UBI) fails to promote job preparedness effectively and may contribute to prolonged unemployment. Protracted unemployment presents challenges due to the social and psychological consequences associated with extended periods of unemployment. Peter Warr outlines the detrimental effects on mental well-being, “typically described in terms of increased anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritability, lack of confidence, listlessness, and general nervousness” (Warr et al. Pg. 53). Clinical depression can manifest as early as three weeks, and individuals experiencing it for an extended period may exhibit declining and suboptimal psychological functioning.

It is worth noting that the government does not explicitly commit to achieving full employment, and even when it does strive for “full employment,” it does so within the confines of the flawed concept that restricts it to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s NAIRU (A predetermined level of acceptable unemployment purported to offset inflation). Parallel to the prevailing circumstances observed in Western societies, this phenomenon forms a hierarchical subpopulation dependent on a governing body’s benevolence, akin to individuals’ reliance on NewStart/JobSeeker in Australia on the “benevolence” of federal governments. The government and media often stigmatise individuals who rely on welfare as NEATS (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) and dole-bludgers, implying that the unemployed have willingly chosen not to seek employment. Universal Basic Income (UBI) aligns with the prevailing neoliberal discourse by acknowledging the existence of structural unemployment and insufficient salaries, thereby perpetuating ongoing inequality.

3. Subsidy for Private Businesses and Wage Deflation

Implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) does not exert any pressure on the private sector to enhance wages for the limited number of available jobs. The Job Guarantee compels the private sector to engage in competitive wage offerings to attract workers. On the contrary, a UBI could be perceived as a form of government assistance provided to private enterprises. Companies may reduce their labour expenditures due to the government providing a ‘basic income’. Implementing a UBI can result in wage deflation since companies may exploit this policy to justify decreasing employees’ compensation. Corporations motivated by the objective of increasing profits may promptly reduce remuneration to the labour force to minimise costs associated with their factors of production. Wage stagnation poses a significant concern in numerous Western nations, as the growth of wages has become disconnected from productivity advances over an extended time. Implementing this policy could potentially expedite the “Uberization of jobs” phenomenon since it would substantially subsidise companies. Consequently, employers may experience diminished incentives to provide a salary that ensures a decent standard of living relative to the inflation a UBI would trigger.

4. Insufficient Poverty Reduction and Neglect of Specific Needs

The effectiveness of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in reducing poverty is not guaranteed, and the potential inflationary consequences discussed earlier could diminish the purchasing power of the income provided. In most nations, social welfare programs are often designed with means-testing mechanisms and are specifically aimed at assisting specific disabled individuals who are determined to be in need. Governments will typically treat Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a financial welfare replacement for targeted welfare programs that specifically cater to individuals requiring costly disability mitigating measures.

The unemployment rates among individuals with Downs syndrome are typically above 80%. A UBI does nothing to encourage them to seek employment opportunities where they so desire actively. A UBI could exacerbate their disability because it is insufficient to deal with needs inherent to mitigate their physical or social disadvantage. The UBI fails to adequately address the intrinsic needs that are more expensive. Inadequate payment will result in a heightened level of relative poverty for the receiver without the alleviation that an individual without disabilities could experience as an improvement to their standard of living. The long-term sustainability of an inflationary Universal Basic Income (UBI) is doubtful, even for those without disabilities. The UBI is not a poverty buffer stock like a Job Guarantee. Although not as significant, it can have implications for some income groups since it may result in a movement of individuals within higher taxation thresholds.

5. Lack of Dignity and Meaningful Engagement

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is characterised by treating individuals solely as consumption units. This reflects a perspective reminiscent of neo-liberal ideologies. In contrast, a Job Guarantee program offers a more dignified approach. It expands our societal understanding of what constitutes a paid occupation and assigns social significance to those now deemed unemployable by the private sector. The implication is that a UBI can be considered discriminatory since it creates divisions within society based on individuals earned or supplied income. The media often employs derogatory labels such as “Dole Bludgers,” “Welfare Queens,” “Freeloaders,” or “Lazy Bums” to refer to individuals receiving unemployment benefits. However, it is essential to note that the current economy does not offer adequate private job opportunities to accommodate the unemployed population, let alone those who are underemployed. There is a lack of evidence within societal and media contexts to suggest that these attitudes will undergo any transformation for the better.

6. Unconditional Income and Its Effects on Job Market

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is disbursed to individuals without any stipulation for employment or the need to be willing to work. The absence of conditions attached to UBI may result in certain persons declining employment opportunities due to its assurance of financial stability. The circumstance above may not necessarily be considered a drawback in workplaces with inadequate wages or workplace dysfunctionality. However, it is essential to note that implementing a minimum wage job guarantee exerts pressure on companies to offer improved salaries and working conditions. This motivation is comparatively diminished under a UBI system. Consequently, the economy may see a decline in productivity, potentially leading to inflationary pressures. This decline can be attributed to a subsequent reduction in the labour force and a fall in the availability of goods and services, resulting in a diminished social surplus within the market.

7. Psychological Benefits and Social Well-Being

Psychological benefits can be associated with active participation in a Job Guarantee program, which entails providing community-based employment opportunities sponsored by the federal government but deployed at the state and local levels. It can be tailored to the talents and preferences of the individuals involved. A paid, personally rewarding and socially appreciated job offers psycho-social advantages that a UBI cannot supply. When individuals are left to rely solely on their own resources and have minimal financial means, even though it may enhance their ability to survive, it may not enhance their willingness. A UBI without work can also contribute to a social disconnection that increases the likelihood of engaging in a lack of self-worth and drug and alcohol misuse. Engaging in regular job duties within a professional setting mitigates these challenges and fosters an enhanced perception of personal value, a facet that is not achieved through implementing a UBI.

8. Hobbies vs. Contributions to the Community

The concept of work pertains to activities performed on behalf of others, while hobbies refer to activities pursued for personal fulfilment. The proposition of utilising Universal Basic Income (UBI) to finance one’s pastime is argued by some proponents. It can be contended that this approach fosters self-indulgence without necessarily providing individuals with sufficient compensation for their societal contributions. Implementing a job guarantee program involves individuals in significant community initiatives, as the employment opportunities are specifically designed and executed within the local community context. Work is a contribution that has the potential to offer meaningful work opportunities, even to individuals who may face disadvantages. Various social enterprises, like Anglicare, Big Issue, Endeavour Packaging, and Clean Force Property Services, among others, exemplify these opportunities. The effectiveness of a UBI in facilitating socially inclined individuals to participate in beneficial community activities in a financially feasible manner will be contingent upon their capability, stability (both financial and otherwise), and inclination. The convergence of these characteristics to promote the societal benefit of UBI is expected to be more limited than normalised.

9. Dependency on Government Goodwill to address Inequity Issues

A Universal Basic Income (UBI) relieves the central government of its need to ensure substantial work opportunities, instead relying on the government’s benevolence to sustain fair payment levels to alleviate poverty. An analysis of the NewStart/JobSeeker program, pensions, and other social payments reveals a lack of willingness among Western governments to adopt these measures. The UBI has limited efficacy in addressing social and financial inequities due to its constrained potential for productivity growth, inflationary implications, and the potential for social exclusion. Moreover, there is a significant probability that the UBI may be implemented at a level below the poverty line, as evidenced by numerous existing welfare programs.

10. Universality versus Dignity-based income.

One of the primary contentions against implementing a UBI is providing financial resources to individuals who don’t require it. Instead of advocating for universality, it is argued that the provision of any basic Income should be subject to limitations. By implementing a “Dignified Basic Income” (DBI) primarily aimed at individuals who are physically or psychologically unable to engage in employment, the program can effectively prioritise assistance for those most in need of a social safety net. This focused strategy guarantees that resources are allocated to individuals with authentic requirements, hence diminishing income disparity and augmenting the overall effectiveness in mitigating poverty. By directing attention towards a Dignified Basic Income aimed at persons unable to participate in the workforce, it becomes possible to enhance the program’s cost management efficiency and ensure that resources are allocated to those who require them the most. Implementing this focused strategy enhances the program’s long-term sustainability by allocating resources towards individuals with distinct needs. This category encompasses those who experience severe disabilities, chronic illnesses, or other problems that impede their ability to engage in conventional forms of employment.

The proposition of a Job Guarantee or “Employer of Last Resort” (ELR) program is frequently advocated by heterodox economists to achieve complete employment. A DBI program designed for individuals who are physically or mentally unable to engage in employment can be a valuable addition to such a scheme. An accompanying focused DBI acknowledges each person’s inherent worth and significance, encompassing those unable to participate in employment. One potential benefit is the mitigation of social stigma commonly linked to receiving unemployment or disability benefits. The promotion of inclusion and compassion within society can be achieved by providing a decent income to individuals who cannot engage in the job market owing to actual constraints. Job Guarantee is for involuntary unemployment. It is imperative to establish a clear distinction between incapacity and unwillingness. A social welfare program such as a DBI should not be designed to support those who, of their own volition and without any mental internal or external constraints, opt in a parasitic manner (as might be typical of the leisure class) not to seek employment. This is yet another reason it should never be “Universal”.

Conclusion

Numerous esteemed individuals have passionately advocated for the potential benefits of introducing a Universal Basic Income as a viable remedy for the inadequacies of Newstart/Jobseeker and other subpar welfare initiatives. The objectives for these actions are rooted in progressive agendas that aim to address poverty and uplift individuals from the lower echelons of society. The objectives and devotion to the larger societal welfare are deserving of applause. There is a valid argument in favour of advocating for the augmentation of Newstart/Jobseeker allowances and social welfare payments and the reduction of substantial subsidies provided to wealthy people to foster a more resilient labour market. Nevertheless, asserting that a Universal Basic Income is how these objectives may be securely accomplished is a formula for disillusionment.

Journal References:

Warr, Peter, et al. “Unemployment and Mental Health: Some British Studies.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 44, no. 4, Jan. 1988, pp. 47–68.

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES

By John Haly  

In July, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced an independent review of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and in September, the Bank Review panel released Issues Papers and calls for Public Submissions. The Review Panel – comprising Renée Fry‑McKibbin, Carolyn Wilkins and Gordon de Brouwer. As I said to the panel, I have written it as though writing to Treasurer Jim Chalmers. The closing date was the 31st of October, and because this will make for a long article, I will simply say, what follows, is my submission.

* * * * *

Dear Minister Chalmers,

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this review of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Themes

This submission covers Monetary policy frameworks such as adherence to the NAIRU and neoclassical “gold standard” mentality over that of monetary sovereign fiat economies. It covers RBA and Government communications about the Finance Franchise myths on Banking, in general. It is critical of the Board composition based on bias in inappropriate neoclassical education and the selection of business representatives instead of economists trained in the issues of fiat economies. Finally, it reviews the Interaction of monetary and fiscal policy with respect to RBA’s performance in applying monetary policy where fiscal policy is more appropriate. As a former employee of the Reserve Bank, I have some knowledge of the inner workings of the Reserve Bank.

I understand the review of the Reserve Bank of Australia is underway to improve monetary policy and its success at realising its goals, governance by the Board, culture, leadership, and recruitment practices. Such a broad range of objectives has yet to be approached since the smaller incidental 1981 Campbell inquiry and before that, presumably at its inception in 1960.

Curtin

Over the last century, Australia’s Central Bank and economy have undergone many changes. In the previous World War, the Curtin Government asserted Commonwealth power over banking, which led to Ben Chifley’s later decision to legislate to nationalise the banks, effectively asserting Commonwealth control over money and credit as per the Commonwealth Bank Act of 1945. However, such nationalisation was later defeated in 1949, as the book “Curtin’s Gift” by John Edwards says on Pg 141.

“Though the postwar Menzies Government amended Chifley’s central banking legislation to reintroduce a board, the Commonwealth’s last-resort power to direct the bank was retained in the legislation and remains today. The Commonwealth Treasurer has conferred on the bank an independent authority to make monetary policy, but it is a conditional independence to pursue a policy of low inflation, sustainable output and employment growth.”

Curtin had also argued for two other changes,

1. Commit to a full employment policy to improve living standards and raise national development.
2. a floating exchange rate to free Australia from the fixed exchange rate with the British pound

Ben Chifley implemented the Full employment policy following Curtin’s full employment paper being submitted to Cabinet in March 1945. Until the rise of Neoliberalism in the 1970s, unemployment would remain dominantly at 2% (notably without substantial inflation).

Unemployment rate and NAIRU

This leads to the Reserve Bank’s first failure, which is its commitment to the NAIRU. Interestingly Albanese’s claim of the Job Summit was to seek a “Full Employment Summit”. But unfortunately, the neo-liberals of both the political Party and the Bank adhere to the conservative myth of the NAIRU. Instead of a NABIER – as a better alternative perspective, the Bank incorrectly suggests we are already “fully employed”. [See Prof Mitchell’s analysis: Never trust a NAIRU estimate]. A goal that has been achieved if you conclude ABS measures domestic unemployment, which, as you can see from the graphs and my articles covering what should have resulted from the Job Summit [my article and graphs: Stagnating Summit’s Shortfalls]. This is why “what gets measured” is essential. I will not go into detail about the shortcomings of the ABS statistics as they are probably already well known, and if not, the article aforementioned herein, should inform you.

Raising interest rates as a strategy to deal with inflation is problematic at best. The link between spending and interest rates is unreliable and unpredictable. Interest rates affect both supply and demand. Economic modelling of “supply and demand” is only relevant to highly atomised markets with many participants, like the primary sector. Secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy follow different models. Changes in interest rates can have a reverse effect on inflation. Higher interest rates only affect people with variable interest rate debts. They don’t affect fixed interest rate debt and people with no immediate financial obligation. Higher interest rates increase the income of creditors and redistribute income to the wealthier, rentier class, exacerbating inequality. Fourth, higher interest rates reduce the incentive to undertake debt and may cause “distress borrowing” to service existing debt or keep businesses afloat. The resulting Ponzi balance sheets do a disservice to the economy, and all of the above, risk yet another recession. The government should be applying fiscal, not monetary, policy to these issues rather than letting the Reserve Bank’s adherence to a disproven NAIRU theory collapse the economy into greater inequality.

FIAT economy

Paul Keating’s floating of the Australian currency in 1983 meant Australia entered a new economic space. We became a monetarily sovereign, fiat economy no longer tied to another currency or a gold standard (which even America had abandoned with the collapse of the Brenton Wood decisions in 1971). The implications of which even the Bank of England acknowledges even if neither our government’s political rhetoric nor Reserve Bank acknowledge. [Bank of England video: Money in the modern economy: an introduction – Quarterly Bulletin].

Instead of shifting into this new space and engaging with this new paradigm of fiat economies, the neoclassical economic conversation stayed with the decades-old “gold standard” economics model. Still, neoclassical economics guides the decisions of the Reserve Bank’s mission to “pursue a policy of low inflation, sustainable output and employment growth.” [“Curtin’s Gift” by John Edwards pg 142]

Problematically, even Board members of the Reserve Bank need to understand the basics of a modern monetary system. [Prof William Mitchell: The RBA has no credibility and the governor and board should resign]. The Reserve Bank’s role as the currency issuer for the government has been misunderstood by business board appointees blinded by the tunnel vision of their experience as currency users in the business community.

Most of the Board are business people (five in number), three are neoclassical economists (Dr Lowe, Michele Bullock, and Ian Harper), and Dr Steven Kennedy is economics adjacent given his Doctorate was in the Economic Determinants of Health, which is not precisely about the Banking systems. None of the Board has any formal training in the economics of fiat economies or Modern Monetary economies, although that isn’t to say their experience on the Board has yet to give them insight. Some suggest the RBA is best served with Board members selected based on expertise in modern monetary fiat economics rather than as political appointees because of their relationships with former Prime ministers.

To this day, neoclassical economics still guides the decisions of the Reserve Bank’s mission to pursue a policy of “low inflation, sustainable output and employment growth” but has universally failed to achieve what Curtin (and even Menzies) did for nearly three decades.

Banking is widely misunderstood as a heavily regulated franchise industry acting as an intermediary between scarce private capital and borrowers. Modern finance is relatively scarce, and depositors are the source of money supplied to borrowers. [Cornell Law School paper: “The Finance Franchise”].

Misperceptions

This is among many common public and media misrepresentations of the banking system. In these areas, it should be incumbent upon the government to educate the public through public broadcasting so that the expectations upon the Reserve Bank are properly evaluated. These myths include:

• Banks can only lend out money they have from depositors.
• Credit is an extension of a money multiplier based on deposit reserves.
• Quantitative Easing is printing free finance into the money supply.
• Federal Treasury deficits are a liability to taxpayers.

At a Keystroke

Money in Australia’s economy has two sources. First, that which the Government Treasury supplies through its fiscal agent, the Reserve Bank. In short, that money is spent into existence by the Federal Government. This money is called “Vertical” money, which exists as an Exchange Settlement Account between the Reserve Bank and the Private banks. As the public is not a joint holder of that account, it is not available for lending to the public. Its only purpose is for interbank transactions.

Secondly, a larger pool of credit via lending is generated “ex nihilo” in the economy through private banking, referred to as “horizontal” money. [Also, the Bank of England video: Money creation in the modern economy – Quarterly Bulletin]. When banks lend, they create deposit IOUs within that bank. Bank’s customer deposits are their liability, and the loan is their asset created by keystrokes. Deposits are fundamentally an IOU from the bank. Similarly, when a bank makes a loan, they generate an IOU deposit for the lender at that bank. The complementary asset for the bank is the loan. Banks create money for borrowers and profit (the interest) for themselves.

Unlike the banking franchise myth, deposits or reserves do not create or limit loans. The perpetuation of this myth in public debate and political pronouncements does a disservice to the public good.

Deposits/Reserves relevancy

Credit creation is simply about a bank finding a credit-worthy customer with whom it can create a digital deposit as an account with that bank with the expectation of future interest payments. The loan to the borrower becomes a bank asset, with an accompanying liability created by a computer entry, which generates the deposit for the borrower. None of the aforementioned Bank reserves is touched, and neither are deposits. The exchange settlement Account reserves are used only when the borrower spends that deposit in another bank. The reserves held at the Central Bank of the lending bank are transferred to the account of the person being paid in the other bank. This is how all bank transfers work; by using the central bank’s reserve accounts.

Instead of adequately describing this in High School and economics education, the government needs to explain how the monetary system works adequately. The government and a properly educated Board of the Reserve Bank need to address these realities.

Regarding my familiarity with this, I worked at the Reserve Bank between September 2001 and October 2002, where I worked on both the operations and technical security teams at the Reserve Bank. In that capacity, I aided reversing the RITS system’s previous outsourcing of AlphaServers operating OpenVMS, previously managed by AustraClear/SFE. Back then, the money churned between banks via their reserve accounts oscillated between $9 to $16 billion daily. The monitoring of that transfer between private bank accounts is the RITS system at the Reserve bank running on an Alpha-VMS mainframe that monitors all account exchanges between banks, which is the system I helped bring back in-house.

Quantitative Easing

In a financial crisis – such as the Pandemic – excessive needs for Exchange Settlement Reserves become evident. The overused strategy of Central banks globally during the Pandemic has been Quantitative Easing. Despite the talk of “printing money”, that is a red herring. Printing money depends on the demand for cash in the private sector – generally around 3% – and never reaches a point where it even approaches a small portion of the digital money supply. Hard currency demand during the Pandemic reached 17%. Digital money is the normality between the Reserve Bank and the private banking systems.

Quantitative Easing affects the money supply by increasing the banks’ ESA reserves at the Reserve Bank. This is done by the Reserve Bank repurchasing Treasury bonds from the private non-bank sector (i.e. pension funds and asset managers) and the private banks. The purchases from the private banking sector rise in digital money extend the ESA reserves. Many private sales of Government Bonds mean more money is circulating in the private sector that may be used to pay off bank loans, reducing the likelihood of borrowings. Technically, increased reserves, while facilitating extensions of interbank transactions, have no direct impact on any credit creation expansion.
Precisely what area of the economy Quantitative Easing serves is also of concern, as “employment growth” wasn’t one of them. The inequality of protecting financialised assets amongst the wealthy ruling class financial markets rather than the working class who lost jobs in the millions. As Adam Tooze, in his recent publication, “Shutdown”, observes

“For the central bank, that meant holding interest rates down. Once again, it came down to financial markets. As far as anyone could figure out, QE worked by driving government bond prices up and yields down. Lower interest rates helped to encourage borrowing for investment and consumption. Lower yields also prompted asset managers to reallocate funds from Treasury markets, where prices were driven up by central bank buying, to riskier assets, like equity and corporate bonds. This boosted corporate borrowing and the stock market. It increased financial net worth and boosted demand.

The supportive cooperation between central banks and treasuries in the common struggle against the coronavirus was thus, the central bankers adamantly insisted, no more than an incidental side effect of their frantic and clumsy efforts to manage the economy by way of financial markets. Despite the relentless accumulation of government debt on their balance sheets, the central bankers insisted that this had nothing to do with financing public spending. Their priorities were to manage interest rates and ensure financial stability, which in practice meant underwriting the high-risk investment strategies of hedge funds and other similar investment vehicles. Rather remarkably, they insisted that tending to financial markets was a more legitimate social mission than openly acknowledging the highly functional, indeed essential role they played in backstopping the government budget at a time of crisis.” [pg 149]

When Financial markets become more important to the Reserve Bank than the well-being of the vast majority of Australians, then the bank’s philosophy is served and managed by too many businessmen and women with a neoliberal ideology to serve the interests of the few above that of the whole economy. As Curtin espoused, the Reserve bank’s original social mission is to “pursue a policy of low inflation, sustainable output and employment growth”. This mission has evidently fallen, by the way, because of the people chosen to run the Board of the Reserve Bank.

Taxpayer’s money?

Finally, It can be demonstrated simply by viewing the balance sheets (irrespective of the accuracy of dollar amounts) of the entities known as

• the Treasury,
• Reserve Bank,
• the collective private banks and
• the collective non-bank private sector

that the federal deficit of the Treasury is the surplus of the Australian economy’s private (and foreign) sector. Deficits are just the government’s way of provisioning the private sector. If a government wishes to pull the spending of an economy back and throttle the growth of an economy, it pursues a surplus for the Treasury, depriving the private sector of funds. John Howard, for example, achieved that when he throttled back the economy to provide the Treasury with a surplus. Consequently, the private sector, desperate for money, borrowed heavily from the Banks. Private debt expanded considerably under John Howard. [See here: The Howard impact or here: Debt, home repossessions portent for Australia poll]. But of course, Mr Chalmers, you should already know this.

Simplified Australian monetary system

Taxpayers are not on the hook for a government’s treasury deficit as that deficit just boosted taxpayers’ finances. The government’s debt is your problem, not ours, since the Treasury and Reserve Bank issue the dollar (which taxpayers don’t because that is a crime called “counterfeiting” with which you would charge us). The currency-issuing government can pay their debts off any time they choose by issuing the dollars to cover them. Admittedly the wedging by political opponents and the Murdoch media would require of this government political courage, not financial inability.

Knowledge is power

The problem is, if submissions for a public review of the functions of the Reserve Bank are to be effective, it is incumbent on the reviewers to have a realistic appreciation of how the banking system works and the Reserve Bank’s role in our financial system. Holding to the public franchise myth, the NAIRU myth, and the Taxpayer funds myth, as many in the media (and possibly members of the Bank Board), will limit the usefulness of any submissions. Providing faulty recommendations to politicians who frequently use the analogy of a household budget to describe how fiat economies work is a recipe for disaster and subsequent legislative policies that will hamper the workings of the Reserve Bank to aid post-pandemic financial recovery.

So we need governors and heads of departments within the RBA who know and understand inflationary causes, recognise the differences between supply vs demand causation and know that raising interest rates is an over-zealous intervention that cures symptoms by killing the patient.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit this letter for your review.

Yours sincerely,

John Haly.
(Auswakeup Media)

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article was not “absolutely pedantic accurate” as inflation from 1945 to 1970 was so small compared to what followed, as to be negligible, but as it wasn’t nonexistent, the phrase at the end of the section on Curtin has had the word “substantial” added.]

By John Haly  

Labor is seeking to have business and unions cooperate in spurring wages forward. This is despite decades of companies benefitting from increased productivity gains that have not resulted in increased wages for workers. This begs the question, what does Anthony Albanese think will improve wages, if productivity gains haven’t been doing that? More Visas, better skills training and fairer wage bargaining are considerations, but even Ross Gittins worries we won’t get it all from Labor’s Job Summit.

Strong Economy?

Wage stagnation coupled with the rabid supply-side inflation emanating from the war in Ukraine and the pandemic has meant real wages are falling, and solutions are thin on the ground. The economic inheritance left to the Labor party was described by the outgoing Liberal Party Prime minister as “strong”, despite:

• rising inflation,
• unrevealed reports about the pending rising cost of living issues,
• rising variants of Covid-19 worse than in previous years,
• impending tax rises for most Australians and $243B in tax cuts for the wealthy,
• diminished public service to handle the mixed successes and failures of the pandemic.
• Hiding a damning environmental report indicating the environment was in unsustainable decline.

So the Job summit has potential, but only if we correctly measure Australia’s problems. To quote my accountant father’s frequent refrain: “What gets measured, gets managed” conversely, “if you’re not measuring it correctly, you will not manage it appropriately”.

The only significant “success” the Liberals could point to was, the lowest unemployment figures from the ABS we have seen in decades.

“But while Labor will focus on wages and inflation, Mr Morrison will hope two sets of employment data due between now and election day – April 14 and May 19 – deliver him the lowest jobless rate since 1974”, reported by the Financial Review in April.

Productivity is booming so why aren’t wages?

International vs Domestic

On the surface, there is no word of a lie that ABS has reported lower unemployment figures since. The question is, are the ABS figures worth the paper they are written on (or perhaps, in this day and age – worth the hosting cost of the website they are published on)? ABS estimates its unemployment figures based on the ILO standards for a methodology of measurement that are internationally accepted to facilitate international comparative analysis.

For that purpose, each nation must conform to a standard everyone follows. The standard facilitates a common and verifiable point of comparison. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate decreased to 3.5% in July 2022. In England, the Office of National Statistics UK unemployment rate was estimated at 3.8%. Whereas in Australia, it decreased to 3.4%, according to the ABS. Therefore we can conclude that Australia is doing better than our fellow western allies in the USA and UK. However, we need to ask whether, despite the comparative issue, do any of these numbers reflect the actual unemployment status inside the nation? It turns out the methodology of measurement that distinguished between international and domestic measures excludes hundreds of thousands of people who struggle with real unemployment inside each country.

As an Australian writer, I wish to focus on why it is the ABS does not, and certainly not in decades, measure real domestic unemployment in Australia. The fact that both media and political pundits represent that the ABS’s figures convey the domestic/internal measure of unemployment, as opposed to an internationally competitive figure, does the public a disservice and misrepresents the truth.

ABS a small subset of every other unemployment measure

To a limited extent, the public is not unfamiliar with the ABS’s methodology’s shortcomings. One has only to look to any social media posting about unemployment and find someone who angrily points out that “people are ‘employed’ if they work one hour a week”. The problem with this “shortcoming” is that it is easy and unnuanced to understand for the statistically illiterate. It is not entirely accurate or as significant as people think. I have previously dealt with the “one hour a week” misrepresentation in my article “Unemployment numbers likely worse than projected”, so I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, there is also the significance of the impact compared with people who have a “job attachment”, to use ABS’s terminology, but – because of their uncertain status in the GIG economy – have zero work and pay (90,600 in July – see graph). It isn’t folks who get a few hours on a shift once a month but people who get nothing and are still registered as “employed” by the ABS because of their “job attachment”. During the pandemic, the numbers in this class were significant (higher than one million – see graph), but they have dropped to the level of people working the equivalent of a single shift for a month.

Zero to nine hours of work with job Attachments all still “employed”

For example, in July 2022, there were only 54,900 people who worked between 1 and 9hrs in a month as a standard work arrangement. In addition, 66,200 worked similar hours because there was either “no work, not enough work, or stood down”. On top of that, in July, another 41,600 people had their working hours reduced to as few as 1-9hrs for “other” reasons that did not involve any form of leave (annual or otherwise), sickness, injury, maternity, plant breakdown or bad weather. These are all accordingly counted as “employed” by the ABS. Considering them as “employed” is technically accurate, although significantly underemployed. One certainly can’t be earning a living on less than nine hours of work a month.

Irrespective of where you put your cutoff point on working hours for registering someone as unemployed (and surprisingly zero, isn’t it), numerous other exclusions preclude people from being counted as unemployed. This fails the “so-called pub test”. I have listed these in my article “Frydenberg’s Maths problem”. The result is that, even if you added people who had a “job attachments” – but zero hours of work – the ABS estimate is smaller than, people receiving Job Seeker (let alone adding Youth Allowance – 15 to 22yrs – into the equation). There was a three-month period last year when that wasn’t true, which tells you that not all unemployed people register for JobSeeker. (Explained in “Josh’s Jobless Jargon”).

Real Domestic Unemployment

The real job gap for the under & unemployed vs job vacancies

These statistical anomalies leave Roy Morgan’s estimate as the best likely accurate reflection of domestic unemployment in Australia at 8.5% (or 1.2 million people). But of course, the Job Summit is unlikely to admit real unemployment is more than twice what ABS’s international comparative measurement standard, claims. As such, the Job Summit only acknowledges a subset of the genuinely unemployed, as the problem area. In that case, it is no wonder they are grooming us to believe that Job vacancies are rising to the point where there are close enough to absorb most of the unemployed. One supposes you have already read these “excited” claims in the media. In that case, the unacknowledged aspect is that they’re admitting there have never been enough jobs previously to absorb the subset of the unemployed that ABS claims. This renders all the previous admonitions to the unemployed to “just get a job”, pretty hollow.

Job vacancy breakdowns into industry & job type according to ABS & Dept of Emp’

That raises two questions:

1. What is the actual gap between job vacancies and the under and unemployed
2. How compatible are the job vacancies with the skills available in the community for the unemployed to be absorbed?

Zooming in on the industries with job vacancies

Now there are two measures of vacancies available. The Department of Employment’s internet vacancy index (IVI), and ABS’s quarterly survey of vacancies claimed by businesses. The IVI was more significant in previous decades than the ABS’s claim (see Roy Morgan graph). This discrepancy has changed in recent years, which I explained in “Vacant Claimants”. The fact is that even taking the largest count, the gap between job vacancies and Roy Morgan’s realistic unemployed figures is enormous. The opportunities for people with limited skills (lacking expensive university education) are just as limited now as when I wrote “The myth of Jobs Growth”. As you can see from the graph of divisions of jobs and industries where vacancies exist, most of them are still only available for the professional/educated market.

Farmer’s Plight

Instead, we still focus on the smallest unskilled end of employment opportunities, as depicted by the article this week, “Nobody wants to work: Fruit left to rot leaves, farmers feeling sour” page 8 of Tuesday’s (30th Aug) SMH. I long ago addressed this in “Low hanging Fruit”. Alternatively, the government could develop a comprehensive agricultural industry labour market policy. This policy should include government means-tested subsidisation of core wages at an adequate level, paying members of the agricultural workforce, with less profitable (but still essential) farmers providing monetary incentives to promote performance. This should include government coordination with Tafes and Universities and agricultural employers to provide a clear career path spanning entry-level agricultural roles to agriculture science and management qualifications at degree and post-grad levels. The package should include the government providing business coaching and mentoring to agricultural employers to build their capacity to be “employers of choice”. Adding offerings such as a cafeteria-style remuneration package of transport, accommodation, meals, training, on-the-job components of vocational credentialing and performance-based pay.

The contemporary issue, as usual, is poor pay and conditions, which the Job Summit needs to handle. The solution on offer is more migrants who will work for a pittance. This is in the face of over a million people unemployed in Australia and over another million underemployed. This statement is largely true of any month in the previous decade, with minor exceptions for underemployment before 2017 when it fell as low as 917,000.

Full Employment Summit?

The long-term perspective on employment and unemployment

Interestingly Albanese’s claim of the Job Summit was to seek a “Full Employment Summit”. But unfortunately, the neo-liberals adhere to the conservative myth of the NAIRU instead of a NABIER, which suggests we are already “fully employed”. A goal that has been achieved if you conclude ABS measures domestic unemployment. This is why “what gets measured” is essential. But, of course, if you want more realistic “full employment” policies, look at that instigated by the Curtin Government from 1945 to 1974. During which unemployment was dominantly measured at 2%. Then we would have the beginnings of a proven policy that survived decades until the introduction of neo-liberal policies under Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. For an informative reading on that, get a hold of Elizabeth Humphrey’s 2020 book, “How Labour Built Neoliberalism”.

The framework of a Federal Jobs Guarantee and what it could achieve for wages and workers has evolved from Curtin’s conception to a far more robust framework than that of the 1940s. Dr Steven Hail’s paper on a Job Guarantee is among the architects of alternatives. However, given that 30% of the attendees of the Job Summit are from the Business community and 30% from Unions, I very much expect such solutions will not even get a hearing in a barely two-day conference.

Given the minor target nature of political reforms exhibited by Labor to date where:

• they raise the minimum wage but not Jobseeker,
• send one family of refugees home but don’t address the rest,
• talk about addressing climate change but allow further gas mining,
• limit debt-related deductions for multinationals but refuses to concede an end to stage three tax cuts,

it is evident that state capture by industry donors is still a problem.

Hence we should expect far more modest recommendations from the Job Summit, which will involve more migrants, claims about needing even more productivity and further capitulation to vested business interests.

Real solutions

I don’t doubt that concessions will be generated from the Job Summit, but they will be bandages rather than solutions. But what would serious reform of the jobs market include?

1. Restoration and widening the scope of the public service/taxation/health/education/industrial relations departments.
2. Reviewing agricultural policy that subsidises agricultural employment – subject to annual review of employee conditions – to maintain viable, essential food security and attract Australians to farms. (As outlined above).
3. Nationalising private employment agencies and implementing ambitious public sector-driven active labour market programs comparable to what exists in Scandinavia.
4. An end to TAFE & university education fees to facilitate a more highly educated public that can reduce the growing professional job vacancies.
5. Establishment of technically based career paths from entry-level positions to professional and senior executive roles.
6. A return to centralised wage-fixing such as what existed in the 1970s.
7. A decrease in the exploitation of migrant labour by increasing random fair work inspections of workplaces backed by substantial legal penalties.
8. Expansion of cadetships and apprenticeships, and graduate programs in public service departments.
9. End costly Public Private Partnerships infrastructure projects to staff public sector expertise for infrastructure development fully.
10. A Federal Job Guarantee linked to career paths.
11. Implementing a Green New Deal where energy and transport infrastructure is wholly returned to the public sector.

I am confident I can predict none of these, especially the re-conceptions of the public sector, will come out of this week end’s Jobs Summit. The reason is necessary, and fair reform isn’t on the agenda. Besides this, the way they measure Australia’s unemployment and the issues and focus on what job vacancies matter is misdirected.

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES.

By John Haly  

“Climate change takes centre stage in Australia’s election” was proclaimed in 2019, but then the party of Climate scepticism took the stage. The polls failed to predict the election outcome on the 18th of May 2019, and “climate” wasn’t on the agenda. Even more of a climate denialist than Tony Abbott, denialist Scott Morrison held all the Aces and dealt Bill Shorten a knockout blow few saw coming.

Here we are in 2022. The French are casting an eye across the Indian Ocean, where once submarines they might have manufactured were to travel to their final destination in Australia. France 24 proclaims, “Australia’s federal election: Climate change becomes top concern for voters“. They noted, “The environmental crisis is high on voters’ minds, and smaller parties and independents are gaining momentum by riding a wave of disillusionment over the conservative coalition’s lack of climate action.” But, after suggesting minor parties succeeding and hung parliaments are the future of the Australian parliament, one must wonder, do these minor parties really have the policies that could shake the foundations of our nation?

Single issue agendas

It is easy to find articles that review how the major parties will address Climate change. But perhaps less so conspicuous is the position of all the parties. But pick an issue that you rate as necessary, such as Queer Rights, and you can find a particular interest group ready to “dish the dirt” on your favourite issue. So, is there someone in your circle of associates prepared to do it on various topics? If you are looking for that someone, you have come to the right article and the correct author.

Multiple Parties and Issues

The political Compass reading of Australia political positioning in 2022

Think again, though, if you thought one should give any credibility to the ABC’s vote compass. I have previously addressed the errors of the ABC tunnel vision in my “Voting values” article. I refer to the international perspective from “The Political Compass“, which does it for every national election in western democracies. They represent their analysis of the classic Right-left / authoritarian-progressive abscissa and ordinate graph. Their results for Australia in 2022 came out recently. They placed the main parties in that two-dimensional framework for any party that has previously received a seat at the political table.

These evaluators did not look at every party that sought a guernsey at the political table (irrespective of their likely success).

The AEC informs us that, fundamentally 37 registered parties are seeking to place candidates into parliament. When the Morrison government introduced legislation that lifted the membership threshold for registering a federal political party from 500 to 1,500, some 40 parties found themselves in trouble. Some parties ceased to exist, such as the Australian Workers Party, which I evaluated as having the best range of progressive policies in 2019. Other parties (Science, Pirate, Secular, and Climate Emergency) deregistered their original name and formed their own coalition as the new Fusion Party. Others like the TNL (The New Liberals) went on a successful membership drive. So just like the last election, I began the long task of assessing the policies of 37 parties, some of whom did not exist when I last devoted myself to this task. Some old parties developed new guidelines there were no signs of three years ago, and others dropped policies I had assumed were entrenched from 2019.

In this election, I evaluated 24 specific ideological premises, starting with Climate Change mitigation and ending alphabetically with Worker’s Rights. The list of issues I evaluated from each party was:

1. Climate mitigation
2. Drug Reform
3. Economy
4. Education
5. Employment
6. Energy
7. Environment
8. Gender equality
9. Government accountability
10. Healthcare
11. Housing and cost of living
12. Immigration & refugees
13. Indigenous
14. Industrial relations
15. Infrastructure
16. LGBTQ rights
17. Media Management
18. Monetary principles
19. Poverty and inequality
20. Public transport
21. Security/ Foreign & Domestic
22. Social justice
23. Superannuation & pensions
24. Worker’s Rights

The ABC’s Overton Window on politics in 2022

Some of these issues came from a list of policies generated by ABC’s vote compass analysis of what participants were interested in from back in 2019. I then added a few other policy agendas or, in some cases, split issues. For example, I split climate issues into direct mitigation separate from environmental issues.

I documented how I defined each of these with a series of questions about each issue and assessed the contents of each party’s policies. You can find that at: http://auswakeup.info/issues/election-issue-2022.pdf.

Another table was created with columns for 37 parties with 24 rows for each issue.  From this, I began writing notes or abbreviating the lists of policy positions each party gave to that issue. That took a good while, as parties don’t necessarily neatly describe their policies in the categories I generated. In some cases, they had policies whose classes I didn’t evaluate. The PDF for that is at http://auswakeup.info/issues/party-comments.pdf, but you will have to zoom in to get all the detail. Don’t try examining this on your tiny smartphone screen. It is important not to mislead you. I have not listed all the party’s policy positions, and I may have missed some. Some party’s policies are very comprehensive, and when I realised I had enough to make a reasonable assessment, I moved to the next issue. It took me over a week to do what I have done, so I did not wish to get bogged down in extraneous detail.

As I completed the assessment to the point where I had a broad summary for each party, I scored the results and moved to the next party’s website.

Pecuniary Interests Register

First off, I should address my allegiances. As a Journalist, I am a current member of a registered political party that, while still in existence, has no stake in the federal election. I am a founding member of the Arts Party. They voluntarily deregistered from the national sphere well before Morrison changed the rules. They are still registered at the State level, where the executive decided to focus their efforts. I also spent two and a half years on the executive of the Real Democracy party developing and building it. It was a social democratic party that based its economic policy on Modern Monetary Theory. In 2019 we gave up on the hope of ever getting it registered.

My philosophical framework

I would consider myself a socialist, although the family that brought me up, would be better described as “Small-L” liberals. When at 18 I went off to vote for the first time, my Father, after telling me how they voted for the local Liberal candidate, asked me for whom I voted? My disrespectful reply was, “Well, at least I cancelled out one of those votes!” My Father was aghast but fortunately loved me enough not to disown me.

This is the lens through which I evaluated and scored each party. You can take my notes and re-evaluate how you might score them per your own principles.

Scoring

I rated each party’s position on the 24 issues from minus one to three.

• -1 : my assessment of the party’s position is that I hold it is deleterious to our society, economy and country. For example, climate denial/recalcitrance always got a minus one, as did evident anti-vaxxer ideologies and support for the crime of offshore refugee detention positions.)
• 0 : means no policy was mentioned on this issue or was either relatively insignificant or aspects were so mixed between deleterious and reasonable as to cancel one another out. For example, Katter’s lousy policy on creating a new class of Blue Card that applies only to Indigenous communities. Still, he also has an excellent approach to inalienable title deeds issued to First Australians.)
• 1 : represents the bare minimum or basically a reasonable approach but nothing to write home about. For example, Kim for Canberra says, “religion should not be used to discriminate against others in any context” which, while good, is the bare minimum for Social Justice issues)
• 2 : it means good but needs improvement or doesn’t cover the entire scope of the issue. The Reason party has good pro-renewable energy policies and divestment from fossil fuels. Still, there are no specific strategies around subsidisation, phasing from one to another, and energy security, which is a commonly missing aspect.
• 3 : a great set of policies for this area, perhaps complete or so little missing as to suggest the party would likely progressively fill any gaps in the future. For example, the comprehensive policy for Indigenous people comes from the Indigenous Aboriginal Party of Australia.)

Integrity

Evaluating a policy position has to assess the integrity of the claim. If the party lacks integrity or has a record of lying to gain a political advantage, that has to discredit their claim to a policy. So, for example, when the Liberal party claims to have a policy to “back small businesses with tax incentives”, I have noted that is not so if they are removing the Low and middle-income earner tax offsets. If you want a good laugh at Josh Frydenberg trying to spin it, watch Richard Denniss disassemble his claims on YouTube.

An alternate example might be the new housing policy for young first time home buyers to use 40% of their superannuation. I noted in my matrix that Morrison had already “allowed superannuation depletion by 3 million people” when he permitted people to access these funds during Covid in lockdowns rather than funding them through Job Keeper. Now Morrison suggests taking even more out of superannuation to support the housing crisis. Which even the “Investment Magazine” thinks is a bad idea. They expressed their concerns in their article “Deposit dipping into super not the answer to housing crisis” Sufficient to say, despite what Morrison claimed was a good policy, on the issue of “housing and cost of living“, I awarded the Liberals a negative one rating.

Weighting the results

In addition to direct scoring, I have weighted my scoring also. I have doubled my initial scores for four policy areas I believe are crucial for this election. Those four areas are:

1. Climate mitigation.
2. Economic monetary principles (MMT).
3. Corruption and accountability management.
4. The Rights of the Working Class.

This should be the climate election; 2019 was not. Catering to the neo-liberal economic principles based on the Monetarism theories of economic models developed by Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and promoted by Alan Greenspan, Robert Murphy, Paul Krugman and Jonathan Hartley is deplorable. It fails to recognise that we are an economically sovereign nation that issues our currency that everyone else uses. Instead, we should be following the post-Keynesian theories based on John Maynard Keynes and regenerated as the Modern Monetary models promoted by Prof Bill Mitchell, Stephanie Kelton, Pavlina Tcherneva and Warren Mosler. Books to read on this include “Doughnut Economics” as espoused by Kate Raworth, Stephanie Kelton’s “Deficit Myth“, “Reclaiming the State” by Prof Bill Mitchell and “Job Guarantee” as written by Pavlina Tcherneva. Corruption in politics costs society and business, and a Federal ICAC with teeth and divestment from corporate political donations are research subjects my wife specialises in and about which she has written extensively. As for Worker’s rights, well, I am, after all, a socialist, so I think that is important. However, while no Australian party declares the workers should seize the means of production as they did in Spain in 1936. Some of us see the value of a less violent uprising that might achieve that goal.

My results

So now that all my caveats, preferences, prejudices, etc., are loudly proclaimed, here are my resulting scores. Presented both with and without my weighting, which is published in the PDF located at http://auswakeup.info/issues/party-policy-scores.pdf.

You can print it off, and using the data in http://auswakeup.info/issues/party-comments.pdf, you can restore it in accordance with your own values. (Note: you will need to print the latter on A2 sized paper for it to be readable)

Preferences

Some results were unexpected. Parties I scored highly in 2019 have dropped better policies for poorer ones, by which I was disappointed. But then parties that were fair before have lifted their game in 2022. Due to this exercise, I have changed my mind about which parties and the sequencing I will vote for them. “What gets measured, gets managed“, as my small-liberal voting Father often said. He was right in some things, and I honour his memory by respecting that advice.

Use the power of preferential voting

The last warning or advice from this article is, for heaven’s sake, Australians, stop being so lazy as to abdicate your choices to party preferences, and choose your own preferences – number all the boxes. Understand how preferences work and use them to your advantage. Even if your best choice doesn’t receive a place at the political table, they might get enough funding from the AEC to keep going. Your preference vote will move to the next party in your choice of preferences until it settles on a winning party. That is the power of preferences, so don’t buy into this propaganda that you can’t vote for minor parties because this is a crucial election (they all are). It is not necessary to vote first for a likely winning party as that constitutes bandwagon voting and diminishes the power of your Australian preferential vote.  Your vote will still get to that party! With all the potential corrupt corporate donations, the duopoly of Labor and Liberal doesn’t need the AEC money, but a smaller party with better policies does.

Summary

My three highest-scoring parties, irrespective of my weighting (but also including it), are TNL (The New Liberals), Socialist Alliance and the Reason Party. Conversely, the three lowest scorings, all of which have accumulated a negative score over 24 areas of evaluation, are Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the Nationals and the Liberal Party.

Saturday the 21st of May 2022 is upon us this week. Choose wisely!

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES.

By John Haly  

Josh Frydenberg is spruiking the coalition’s accomplishments claiming, “Our Govt’s economic plan to create more jobs is working”. However, his statistics based on these claims crumble under scrutiny.

In essence, there are five claims he tweeted recently.

• Unemployment has dropped to 4% in Feb,
• 77k jobs created
• The participation rate is at a record high
• Female unemployment is at a 48 yr low of 3.8%
• 375k more Aussies in work than pre-COVID

Real Unemployment

Despite an attitude of incredulity at the idea that we have such a trim level of unemployment, Josh boasted of unemployment being “the equal lowest in 48 years”. The government is very proud of its apparent economic credentials. So are we to believe that unemployment is the lowest in years with, ascending rental rates and the cost of living, escalating petrol prices, but for obvious reasons wages are stagnating? ABS reported seasonally adjusted unemployment approaching this figure, last in August 2008 (4.1%) and February 2008 (4.0%). So 48 years ago Josh? My maths is not what it used to be.

So employment is better now, only a couple of years out from cataclysmic bushfires that caused over $100B in damages amid a continuing pandemic and massive floods damages? We are also just out of a politically recognised “drop-in-real-GDP” recession but still in the per capita recession that began in mid-2018 (acknowledged in 2019) and showed no real prospect of improvement. Does anything about our Economy ring right?

ABS’s absent considerations

Cracks are showing when it comes to the ABS unemployment statistics, which the government is quoting ad nauseam. Social media is replete with scepticism. There is a lack of credibility in employment stats when one hour’s work represents employment. It is not one hour a week; as they review the previous three weeks from your reference week. Go read my June 2020 article titled “Unemployment by COVID exploded” under the subheading “6.2%? Really?” for the explanation.

The issue is not just the one-hour criteria. It is the zero-hours criteria that should also concern you. People in the Gig economy who have been given zero hours and zero pay should not be considered employed. Yet that is precisely what ABS does for reasons that have nothing to do with it being a measure of domestic internal unemployment. The ABS states: “The term ‘labour force’, as defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the international standards, is associated with a particular approach to the measurement of employment and unemployment.”

International or Domestic terminal

ABS follows the ILO methodology measures, for international comparative purposes. The methodology was never designed to measure the domestically internal unemployment of any country, because it excludes too many people. The integrity of a domestic measure of unemployment has to be questioned if, for example, it discounts the numbers of people just because they work in the Gig economy under zero-hour contracts. Gig workers are still counted as employed by the ABS even when given zero hours and zero pay.

Every other measure of unemployment is far larger than the ABS’s measure. Still, people are largely unaware of the size of the alternate and more accurate measurements of domestic employment. It is not merely that adding the 130,800 people on zero-hours to the ABS measure of 563,300 unemployed – for international comparative purposes – would raise the 4.04% figure for global comparison to 694,100 or 4.98%. There are more extensive assessments. For example, the sheer number of JobSeeker stats has only recently dropped just below a million people.

At 949,937 people on Jobseeker in February – a number Josh Frydenberg has demonstrated familiarity with – it stretches credibility that 949K versus 563K are simply relegated to margins of error.

Beyond these numbers, there are the estimations made by Roy Morgan, which indicate that 1,227,000 people were unemployed in February 2022. ABS and Roy Morgan’s unemployment figures are estimates based on surveys. At the very least, Jobseeker is a hard count of people receiving a benefit. To review the history of all these numbers, post-recession, I have charted them in Fig 1.

Fig 1.  various unemployment measures in Australia post-recession

Crossing lines

My reasoning for choosing any measure requires accepting the reasonable postulate, that any internal measure of unemployment should minimally accept that people who have worked zero hours should be included as unemployed. ABS does account for zero-hours workers. So if the current ABS figure and zero-hours workers were added together over the last two years, the graph reveals an interesting anomaly. There are two periods in which that combination exceeds the value of JobSeeker, and that is why Jobseeker by itself – although a hard count – does not represent domestic unemployment numbers.

The combination of ABS unemployment plus Zero-hours numbers exceeded the Jobseeker numbers twice in the last two years. The first occurred in April 2020, and then again for the three months from August to October 2021. Now the first one, to be fair, is at the recession’s start, and it is reasonable to ascribe that to the chaos of the time and errors in measurements. I have previously pointed out how often ABS altered at random intervals their unemployment measures reflecting much uncertainty in my aforementioned June 2020 article. But a sustained series of measures over three months draws different conclusions in a calmer time.

Crossing lines

My reasoning for choosing any measure requires accepting the reasonable postulate, that any internal measure of unemployment should minimally accept that people who have worked zero hours should be included as unemployed. ABS does account for zero-hours workers. So if the current ABS figure and zero-hours workers were added together over the last two years, the graph reveals an interesting anomaly. There are two periods in which that combination exceeds the value of JobSeeker, and that is why Jobseeker by itself – although a hard count – does not represent domestic unemployment numbers.

The combination of ABS unemployment plus Zero-hours numbers exceeded the Jobseeker numbers twice in the last two years. The first occurred in April 2020, and then again for the three months from August to October 2021. Now the first one, to be fair, is at the recession’s start, and it is reasonable to ascribe that to the chaos of the time and errors in measurements. I have previously pointed out how often ABS altered at random intervals their unemployment measures reflecting much uncertainty in my aforementioned June 2020 article. But a sustained series of measures over three months draws different conclusions in a calmer time.

Crossing lines

My reasoning for choosing any measure requires accepting the reasonable postulate, that any internal measure of unemployment should minimally accept that people who have worked zero hours should be included as unemployed. ABS does account for zero-hours workers. So if the current ABS figure and zero-hours workers were added together over the last two years, the graph reveals an interesting anomaly. There are two periods in which that combination exceeds the value of JobSeeker, and that is why Jobseeker by itself – although a hard count – does not represent domestic unemployment numbers.

The combination of ABS unemployment plus Zero-hours numbers exceeded the Jobseeker numbers twice in the last two years. The first occurred in April 2020, and then again for the three months from August to October 2021. Now the first one, to be fair, is at the recession’s start, and it is reasonable to ascribe that to the chaos of the time and errors in measurements. I have previously pointed out how often ABS altered at random intervals their unemployment measures reflecting much uncertainty in my aforementioned June 2020 article. But a sustained series of measures over three months draws different conclusions in a calmer time.

It indicates the absolutely unemployed with not even an hour of work for each month exceeded the Jobseeker’s hard count. However, that anomaly doesn’t factor in all the other reasons ABS undercounts people as unemployed, such as:

• exclusions for unpaid work in a family business, or paid busking or street vending;
• exclusions of short-term foreign workers through the 12/16 rule;
• exclusions of persons unable to take up immediate work;
• hiding unemployment via the government PaTH program;

So what measurement methodology addresses these weaknesses and exclusions?

Answer: Roy Morgan’s employment and unemployment estimates!

Now the reasons for the gap between Jobseeker and Roy Morgan I previously explained in my article titled “Frydenberg’s maths problem”. So what does Roy Morgan show us regarding underemployment and unemployment? What does either ABS’s quarterly measure of Job vacancies or the Department of Employment’s monthly measure of internet Job vacancies tell us about the jobs available for folks looking for work?

The graph of those figures [Fig 2] shows the harsh reality of a paucity of job opportunities and a frightening level of underemployment and unemployment. But, unfortunately, this government has done little to rectify that plight. Frankly, when you consider their dismissal of the public service and their deliberate undermining of manufacturing, it has simply exacerbated the situation.

Fig 2. Under and unemployment in Australia 2013 – 2022 vs Job Vacancies

Solutions and reassessments

There are solutions to the unemployment crisis, such as a Federal Job Guarantee. However, there is a complete ideological unwillingness to implement such solutions because it would end wage stagnation. The private sector would have to compete with the government for workers by offering better wages and conditions.

So what does Roy Morgan say is the truth compared to Josh Frydenberg’s list of accomplishments with which we started?

• Unemployment has risen to 8.5% in Feb an increase of 26,000 from January,
• Employment fell by 163,000 to 13,216,000 in February, driven by a fall in part-time employment
• The workforce dropped 137,000 in February
• Female unemployment is also at 8.5% despite being a smaller proportion of the workforce [see Fig 3]
• Employment is 344,000 higher than it was pre-COVID-19 (13,216,000 – 12,872,000).

Fig 3: Female Unemployment measure variations in Australia from 2019 to Feb 2022

The conclusion about Frydenberg’s claims leaves us with two options. That the man delivering the budget for the whole of the Australian economy has either

1. no idea what the actual state of the economy is, or
2. is a _ _ _ _ (well, I don’t want to be the one to say it – these guys are litigious, and I can’t afford it).

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES and Independent Australia.

By John Haly  

From THAT women’s network logo to a corseted perspective where he can only understand women through the lens of his wife or daughters; Scotty from Marketing can’t recognise the inequality, bias and dangers that women face.

Trying to defend himself, he ran the following list past Kymba Cahill during an intense interview on Perth Radio show Mix94.5. [See Fig 1.]

Scott Morrison raised these points asserting that the coalition had made significant progress on:

• women’s employment and unemployment,
• Women in executive roles and gender pay equity,
• domestic violence funding.

Fig 1: Extract from News article on Morrison’s actions on behalf of women

Women’s Employment

Using unemployment figures from the ABS is a dubious exercise, as I have noted previously, but this will be the data to which Scott is referring [see Table 1]. According to ABS, Females employed in the workplace in Australia in Feb 2022 was 6,407,730 (Men were 6,964,2820). This left 256,378 of the female workforce unemployed. That is a 3.85% unemployment rate for women in the workforce. I will dispute this claim later.

In the meantime, the lack of inclusion of zero-hours workers (which the ABS calculates) in the unemployment percentages is a blatant misrepresentation. People with registered employees (usually in the Gig economy) offered zero hours of work in a month and zero dollars for pay, while considered “employed”, are not segregated by gender in the ABS stats. However, people in employment are segregated by gender. So calculating the ratio of women in the workforce to men at 47.9% in February 2022, provides a reasonable basis for extrapolation. Zero-hours workers for February 2022 were 130,000 people, and multiplying that by 47.9% for February gives you an estimate that 62,678 workers were likely female.

Adding zero-hours female workers back to ABS’s unemployment numbers means that 319,056 women (or 4.79% of the workforce) are without paid work. That means women in employment dropped to 6,345,053. Making the same relative month-by-month calculations over the last three years generates a female ratio that varied between 49.9% and 46.4%, resulting in the Fig 2 Graph.

Another consideration is that since our Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, claims our economy has recovered to pre-pandemic levels (i.e. 2019). Commencing with ABS stats from the beginning of 2019 will allow some trend analysis. Of course, other journalists have demonstrated Josh’s claims are fallacious propaganda, but let’s overlook that for now.

Fig 2: ABS’s Female Employment estimates in Australia 2019 to Feb 2022

Looking at the trends in the Graph for Full-time, part-time and workforce numbers for women, it is evident none of the categories has made a full recovery. Compared to February 2019, the ABS figures claim: 5.996 million women were employed and 314K unemployed. However, it is 375K, if you add back the female proportion of zero-hours “employed” estimated in Feb 2019. That would have reduced our wage-earning employed to 5.954 million. So Morrison seems correct that more females are employed.

Still, it should be apparent that his claiming credit is a misdirection. Over that same three years, the total workforce moved from 6.310 million to 6.664 million. The population of women over 15 went from 10.417 million to 10.687 million. Unless Morrison is claiming credit for population growth or women entering the workforce – both of which are rising at similar levels. Is a rising level of employment, therefore, something for which he can claim the credit? Significantly when they have not even risen to a level that an extrapolation of 2019 figures would predict? What legislative change has Morrison’s government passed that has even achieved this underwhelming rise in employment?

As for “the lowest level of unemployment” for women, the evidence for real domestic unemployment for women demonstrates otherwise. This is where I will review not just ABS data but also include zero-hours data, Jobseeker and Youth Allowance and Roy Morgan’s unemployment figures. These measures demonstrate that unemployment exists at around 8.5% for women. This was lower than current levels for all of the second half of 2019. However, just as zero-hours “employees” are not segregated into gender statistics, neither are Roy Morgan’s estimates. Roy Morgan’s methodology has more in common with the Jobseeker and Youth Allowance as a measure of unemployment. Accordingly, I have used their month-by-month ratio of men and women on both stats to extrapolate the proportion of Roy Morgan’s total estimates, likely female. The results in the following graph [see Fig 3] and accompanying sources and internal explanations demonstrate why Morrison’s claim is inaccurate. Please see my articles here and here if you want further explanations concerning this multi-data analysis.

Fig 3: Female Unemployment measure variations in Australia from 2019 to Feb 2022

More women on Boards and gender pay gaps

I assume Morrison boasting of more women on Government boards doesn’t include former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate, who is still waiting on his apology. It should be noted that “more than 50%” of women on government boards is larger by a factor of 0.2%. In short, it is 50.2%. The history of that climb resembles a long and tortuous effort. Not unlike Morrison’s appointment of women to his cabinet – another point he raised.

This may be true for a tiny percentage of women who represent the country’s government executives. Still, many social and economic issues for women who are non-board members (i.e. the vast majority) remain unresolved. Women’s Agenda publishes a range of these issues, like sexual assault through to women’s career anxiety. As for Morrison’s claims about the gender pay gap, beyond some minor fluctuations, it has sat around 14% for the last three years. Taking credit for a recent 0.4% drop is hyperbole when you consider it depends:

1.  entirely on what State and with whom you are employed,
2.  and the changing state of employment and unemployment. [see Figs 2 & 3]

One doesn’t have to take a human’s claim that falling gender pay gaps are fallacious in a volatile employment economy with stagnating wages. Even internet bots are pointing out the disparity.

Domestic Violence funding

The Domestic Violence Package of $1.1 billion announced by the Minister for Women’s Safety, Anne Ruston’s media release from October 2021, is full of self-congratulatory praise for their “landmark” contribution to DV.

Keep in mind that the DV funding was not considered sterling before this point. Monash University’s assessment in 2020 was that previous funding arrangements for women were woefully inadequate. Although the subsequent $1.1 Billion in the following budget might improve on previous efforts, “it does not yet reflect the level of investment so desperately needed to address, interrupt and ultimately prevent what is a national crisis.” according to two Violence prevention experts. Other critics have noted it is hardly enough, and falls short of the need.

In truth, all this expenditure is a transparent effort to put a bandage on the gaping wound left in the wake of

• Brittany Higgins’s allegations,
• Grace Tame’s public condemnation of Morrison,
• the former Liberal MP Julia Banks’s confession or Industry Minister Karen Andrews’ complaints,
• Morrison’s disparagement of Christine Holgate,
• the Jenkins review,
• Gladys Berejiklian’s and other’s texts,
• Coalition staffers masturbating over the desks of female MPs, and
• the innumerable stories about the misogynistic predators in Parliament, such as Barnaby Joyce, Christian Porter and Andrew Laming.

But while that was a long sentence, no sentences of any length have been applied to any of the misogynistic male perpetrators responsible for these abuses.

Despite the massive protests by women over these issues, not even the Minister for Women, Marise Payne, showed solidarity by attending “March 4 Justice” at Parliament House. And I suspect we all recall Morrison’s bullet point based response in Parliament to that protest.

Assessment

So yes, Morrison has poured in more money into domestic violence, but it isn’t anywhere near enough to deal with the scope of the problem. Yes, employment has risen but so has unemployment amongst women. Yes, the ruling class women at the height of the government echelons have enjoyed more executive work. But, in contrast, the non-executive women (known as the vast majority or working-class) are still increasingly unemployed, poorly and unequally paid, compared to their male counterparts.

So if this is Morrison’s idea of “action” in response to women’s needs, dare I suggest his “action” is quite definably “small” and “inadequate” to meet the real needs of women in Australia?

This article was originally published on AUSTRALIA AWAKEN – IGNITE YOUR TORCHES.

By John Haly  

Was Banjo Paterson’s 1889 poem “Clancy, of the Overflow”, acknowledging a country of flooding plains? In not, Dorothea Mackellar’s “Sunburnt country” was in her 1906 poem about “drought and flooding rains”. Floods have long been a dominant feature of the Australian landscape, so much so, that “100-year floods” have been featured in recent decades every half dozen years or so. The apparent expectation of a lead-in like this is it’s a conversation on climate change. But, seriously, so many scientists and meteorological experts have spoken of this ad nauseam (see the 6^th IPCC report). There is not much this journalist can add to what’s already been said. The latest flooding on the Eastern coast of Australia speaks volumes. Ignoring the need to mitigate Climate change has only two protagonists.

1. The most recalcitrant of ideologues in media and political circles who are bribed by corporate lobbying of fossil fuel interests or
2. The psychologically stunted individuals are driven by a  Dunning-Kruger misperception of their intellectual incapacity.

So if you fall into one of those categories, I will not waste time addressing your issues.

Climate change has created two very typical states of environmental disasters in the Australian landscape. Fires and Floods! The rescue of Australians from either disaster has different primary responder workforces.

Attitudes to the Flood Crisis show the contempt with which Rural Australians are held by former Liberal Party president.

Fire Management

Fire Brigades in Australia, began in the NSW colony in 1820, consisting of soldiers trained to use fire fighting appliances. By 1836 the Australian Insurance Company established a Fire Brigade, manned by local volunteers with buckets, ladders and axes. By 1884 the Fire Brigades Act created the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. By 1910 that Act was extended across the NSW state. In 2011 that Fire Brigade became known as “Fire and Rescue NSW”. Nowadays, paid professional and volunteer fire fighting bodies are funded in every state. However, the NSW fire mitigation bodies suffered significant funding reductions in the years leading up to the 2019 fires. Gladys Berejiklian’s government instigated the cuts, but only the alternative media outlets covered this failure of oversight and management.

Flood Management

Flood management, on the other hand, had an even poorer history. European settlement in New South Wales recognised the risk from the flood hazards as far back as 1788. However, the 1810 Hawkesbury River flooding and 1867 floods of Pitt Town and Windsor, resulted in differing strategies by the colonial government. By the 1870s, volunteer ‘water brigades’ arose. This, in time, developed into the State Emergency Service (SES) in 1955. The only professionally paid body associated with flooding is the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology. The under-resourced original SES had no mandate for Flood mitigation. It was not restructured till the emergence of the State Emergency Service Act 1989. Chas Keys, the Deputy Director-General, NSW State Emergency Service, wrote in a paper in 1999:

“Half a century ago, the management of Australia’s most serious natural hazard was very largely a matter of community self-help. Science was not brought to bear, there was little or no prior consideration of potential ways of handling flood problems, and the government was barely active except in after-the-fact relief endeavours.”

While Chas Keys claimed this had changed, recent events demonstrate effective real-time flood management still eludes the government and SES. The SES is still dominantly a volunteer organisation covering a wide range of emergency scenarios from fire, storms, floods, road crashes, as well as alpine, bush and abseiling search and rescue. There is training nowadays for all of these events, but it’s largely dependent on individual interest from the volunteer. At the end of 2018-19, NSW SES had a full-time equivalent workforce of 352 staff but 27 times as many volunteers.

Government reluctance

The State and Federal Government’s response to cries for help by flood victims has been woeful. The Federal Government, in particular, has demonstrated a consistent reluctance to step up, in any emergency, whether that be a pandemic, economic recession, bushfires or floods.

The Liberal Party’s previous reputation of being notoriously marred by climate-denying recidivists manifests as a reluctance to admit the consequences of Climate Change. So there is a foreseeable reluctance to acknowledge the existence of the symptoms. This follows a consequential hesitancy to act quickly to mitigate a flood crisis. Hence the slow and reluctant response from the Federal Government to the current floods. Considering the American experience of harsh public criticism of George W Bush over Cyclone Katrina flooding, the even slower response by the Australian Government draws understandable outrage. As does the continued reluctance to spend emergency funding of around $4.7 billion sitting idle in the bank! While eventually the ADF was assigned to the task, the perception of their commitment to the flood victims was marred by the need to create photo ops and filmmaking. This only drew further enragement on social media.

Army not trained

Beyond the SES, the Australian Army Reserves have been solicited to provide community aid during the 2010 and 2011 floods. ADF Reservists called upon to assist communities during a flood crisis is problematic, because, as David Littleproud claimed, ADF personnel “aren’t trained in the immediate response”. Still, Army Reservists are called upon more frequently to assist in fire, flood and pandemic situations as they did during the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season. But the reference to a lack of adequate training was implied by the ADF’s flood response in 2022. ADF emergency support was marred by a week-long delayed response and the apparent order to conduct photo ops and training films many saw as a priority above saving lives. The Defence Force’s defence of their filmmaking drew further enragement on social media, but few stopped to query why the defence force thought the training was needed.

SES not ready

The SES found themselves battered by a “natural disaster of unprecedented proportions” and subsequently demonstrated they were under-resourced and overwhelmed. The capitulation of government to reliance on volunteers to respond to natural disasters was admitted to by Premier Dominic Perrottet on Tuesday the 8^th in a Press statement. Perrottet acknowledged people felt let down by emergency services, overwhelmed by the scope of the crisis.

If the Federal and State governments, SES and ADF are not up to the task required of them, for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise, perhaps we need a more focussed body to deal with floods. Although, there is no dedicated, professionally paid specialist “Flood Brigade”, despite flooding being an interstate issue of significant frequency, resulting in large scale relocations, property damage, and even deaths.

Once in a Century?

The history emerging in the 21^st century, complete with lives lost, began in the 2007 Hunter Valley/Maitland and Gippsland Floods. This was followed by the 2011 Queensland floods and again by Victorian Floods, till finally later that year, Gippsland again. A year later, in 2012, Eastern Australia and Gippsland suffered floods between February and March. 2013 saw Eastern Australia Floods in Queensland and NSW. While we got a break in 2014, 2015 saw Hunter Valley/Central Coast/Sydney Floods and South – East Queensland, in which 13 people in total died. Tasmanian Floods in 2016 only killed three, and one died in the Central West and Riverina Floods. After the Western Australian Floods of 2017, Cyclone Debbie caused flooding in Eastern Australia. Townsville floods in Queensland killed five people in 2019. Tropical Cyclone Damien in Karratha in 2020 caused flooding in NSW, but it was one of few floods where there were no deaths (although plentiful damage).

Such good luck wasn’t maintained the next year when widespread flash flooding across Gippsland in 2021 killed two people while 200 homes were evacuated in the Latrobe Valley. That flooding occurred only three months after widespread flooding in the Sydney basin, and the Mid North Coast of NSW had already killed three folks.

Shane the disaster tsar in charge of Emergency Disaster fund.

In 2022 Australia’s Eastern coast has been inundated with rain, and the current score – as of writing – has been 21 lives between Queensland and NSW. New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet described the extreme weather as a “one-in-a-one-thousand-year event“.

Describing these floods as the one-in-a-one-thousand-year event (or “one-in-500-year” as Morrison did in Lismore) is not only wholly delusional and contrary to every scientific flood report, but also contrary to the lived experience of Australians seeing floods occur year after year. For example, with extensive Brisbane floods increasing in frequency from 1974, four lives were lost, and some 8,000 householders were affected. From 2011 and on to 2022, the comparisons are startling, given all the flood mitigation work done in between. As for Shane Stone, the disaster relief chief and head of the National Resilience and Recovery Agency blaming the victims for their choice of residency, that says much about Morrison’s hand-picked disaster tsar.

Politicians depicted this as a once in a century event, only to experience more in the coming years, stretching their credibility and the public’s resilience with each flood.

Who’s to blame?

Some elements of the government have been prepared to acknowledge how “unacceptable” emergency flood response has been. Others, especially in the Federal Government, are looking to direct blame elsewhere. Blaming the Bureau of Meteorology for an inaccurate forecast only gets you a day’s grace, not a whole week. These disasters have been consistently predicted. The Australian Rainfall and Runoff report: “A guide to flood estimation” notes on page 22:

“There is also mounting evidence that longer-term climate processes also have a major impact on flood risk.”

It goes on to describe La Nina events and interdecadal pacific oscillation, and after “investigating a range of sites in NSW”, it found floods were 1.8 larger than “normal”. (see the report page 22 for a more nuanced explanation of “normal”) Notably, Wilsons River flooding to Lismore in 2017 has no specific mention in the report, unlike the Hunter, Clarence and Woolomombi because most of the data relied upon only extends to 2015. While this report has some 2016 updates, its release in 2019 does not mean the fallout of 2017 mass flooding is included. It may be time for a revision in 2022. That said, making excuses for why we were not ready in the face of all this data – including all the reports preceding the 2022 IPCC report – is a little pathetic.

Alternative?

As the existing system doesn’t work and will become increasingly dysfunctional in the future, we need a complete regime change. Volunteers in Fire Brigade, SES, and Army Reservists (some of whom operate in a mix of either, some or all services) should continue as separate entities. Given that these disasters cross the State lines, funding should be federal at all levels. The temptation for tight budgets at State levels to be a reason to cut back on these services, should be dissuaded by shifting these to a federal responsibility. Professional crewed Fire Brigades and Flood Brigades bodies to manage mitigation, rescue, and recovery for these disasters need launching! It should transition all current State-based professionals. These brigades’ immediate responses should be based on predictive science measuring environmental changes and preparing for the worst.

To have these federally funded bodies respond to these emergencies far faster than this government and ADF have reacted to people in need in Lismore, Coraki, Girards Hill, Southgate, Mullumbimby, Picton and many others, we need one more change. We need a federal government that will not simply announce its intentions without any measurable, functional outcomes or run off overseas or hide from public scrutiny, but act promptly to produce results in infrastructure and finance in the towns that will preserve our communities. But, unfortunately, that government is not our current incumbent, whose leader only now, weeks after the start of the floods, while visiting Lismore, indicated an “intention” to declare a “State of Emergency”.

This article was originally published on Australia Awaken – Ignite Your Torches.

By John Haly  

Predictably the crises of climate change and the pandemic highlighted deficits in health services, markets, welfare and education. Both have accelerated a predictable economic recession. 

To understand the early signs of an economic downturn, we need to go back to when politically acknowledged signs of a faltering economy appeared. The GDP downturn in the third quarter of 2016 was preceded by nearly three years of a per-capita recession.

The retail boom of the last quarter (Christmas) saved us from an official recession. However, by the end of 2018, Australia re-entered a per-capita recession. “Australia’s economic output shrank 0.2pc per person in the fourth quarter of 2018, after a 0.1pc decline in the third”. 

By mid-2019, economists predicted a recession as employment growth was slow, unemployment high, and wages were stagnating. Then, by the end of 2019, as Australia was literally burning down due to climate change, a global pandemic hit, and the pack of cards came tumbling down, and the recession we were always going to have, hit us.

Fig: 1 – Australian GDP Per-Capita for last decade.

Our strollout

The political response to the health crisis, lockdowns, quarantine handling, welfare support, vaccine strollouts has been underwhelming. Yet despite Government mismanagement, we moved from the least vaccinated nation in the OECD to a position by early November 2021 with 80% vaccination rates. Although we still had thousands of active cases, hundreds of newly acquired cases and hundreds in hospital. It isn’t over, but considering the state of other Western countries, we could be worse off.

The Federal Government celebrated some States opening up and criticising those that did not. Our Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had been spruiking our “recovered” unemployment numbers as the ABS claimed we had unemployment around five per cent. However, despite apparently rising job vacancies and falling unemployment (relative to 2020), business sector elements have complained that they can not find staff to fill jobs on offer.

Zero-hours

So let’s explore the nuances of these circumstances where businesses claim they cannot fill vacancies despite insufficient jobs in the economy and millions without adequate levels of work. That assertion in itself is a reasonably broad claim, so let’s establish its bonafide. First, the ABS has stated that unemployment is low, although it has recently risen to 5.2% in October from 4.63%. This is only because the methodology for the measurement ignores several factors I have discussed previously, including and certainly significantly the thousands of people who have “worked zero-hours” in any given month of 2020/21.

If you define employment as widely as the ABS does and unemployment a narrowly as it does, then the dictionary meaning of employment is lost in the equation. 

From Wikipedia: “Employment is the relationship between two parties, usually based on a contract where work is paid for, where one party, which may be a corporation, for-profit, not-for-profit organisation, co-operative or other entity is the employer, and the other is the employee.” So if you’re not paid, and you do no work then by any definition (except that of the ABS) you are not “employed”. The ABS stats do not reflect Australian domestic unemployment (Figure:2 below).

Every other measure out-strips ABS

Jobseeker payments shown in the graph vastly outstripped the numbers classified by ABS as unemployed. It makes a farce out of the misuse of ABS’s statistics as a valid measure of internal unemployment. As previously explained, Roy Morgan’s more accurate assessment becomes more evident when ABS plus zero-hours numbers – has of late – been larger than even jobseeker and youth allowance combined.

Fig: 2 – Variant unemployment measures for 2020-2021

Vacancies and job guarantees

The question is now, what do poor Job Vacancy measures indicate? There aren’t enough vacancies to cater to the overwhelming majority of unemployed by any measure. This has been the case for decades and is the failure of conservative governments and the private sector. The Government could easily provide a Federal Job Guarantee but is ideologically opposed. Similar opposition was prevalent when Prime Minister John Curtin, postwar, established a not dissimilar mechanism resulting in unemployment remaining beneath 3% in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, successive governments have diminished the public service by privatisation, undermined manufacturing and “deter investment” in renewables. Ross Garnaut, who produced two Climate Change Reviews for the Australian government, wrote the book “SuperPower”. In it, he notes we have squandered an enormous economic advantage. Worth reading unless you are susceptible to depression at discovering how the “fog of Australian politics” has obscured tremendous economic and employment potential for our country.  

Separation of vacancies

This aside, there are two recently diverging measures for job vacancies. The Department of Employment generates the IVI stats for internet job advertisements. ABS does a quarterly vacancy survey amongst businesses. When I first began writing about the anomalies of unemployment stats, the variation between these two figures was negligible enough to be ignored. For example, in 2016, I wrote, “The ABC reported in January that “…newspaper ads rose 0.4 per cent last month, but now make up less than 5 per cent of employment advertising…”.” So I focused on IVI statistics because newspaper advertising, shop windows ads, and private networking recommendations for applicants appeared to be statistically irrelevant.

Increasingly in the internet age, jobs recruitment can occur on various sites: Seek, CareerOne, Australian JobSearch, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The problem is that there is no government break-up in the last three like the IVI does for the first three. (Figure:3). However, private recruitment agents, “shop window” ads, or boutique specialist websites are applicable for the local low-skilled workforce expected to find work in rural areas for labour, like fruit picking.  

Fig: 3 – Variant Job Vacancy figures 2019-2021

The ABS survey reported smaller numbers than the IVI statistics over a decade ago. That period aside, there was no significant divergence between ABS and IVI until the last four years. You can see the change in Figure 4. While we can’t blame pandemics, it is worth referencing the coincidental timing of the economic falterings discussed initially. 

Fig: 4 – Roy Morgan employment stats and both Job vacancy measures.

Businesses shifted from under-reporting vacancies over a decade ago to reporting more vacancies than were reported as advertised. This is partly due to recruitment alternatives arising in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube that are not included. The most recognised recruitment platform, LinkedIn, is becoming drastically less popular because of stats on how many LinkedIn profiles are exaggerated and out of date. Despite Linkedin’s internal exaggerations, according to Jobvite surveys, the number of recruiters using LinkedIn has dropped from 92% in 2017 to 77% in 2018 to 72% in 2020 to 65% in 2021.

Pre-pandemic economic faltering in Australia meant companies relied on natural attrition or dismissal to shed employees they didn’t replace, sometimes even modifying the job description to force people out. They overworked the ones they employed, but didn’t want to finance their overtime. This became evident as companies were increasingly being outed for wage theft for unpaid overtime. Corporates lobbied to have conservative governments undercut penalty rates on the spurious claims to pay for more employees. Basic maths reveals this was not applicable for anything but a small number of large companies with significant numbers of employees. (Figure:5) Such companies shed employees when penalty rates dropped, and nobody got more work. So jobs continue to be shed.

Fig: 5 – Employment capacity required to benefit from penalty rate changes.

Businesses reported more contingent vacancies than they appeared to advertise, and then the recession hit. Demand bottomed for all but the largest enterprises, people stayed in lockdowns, the economy recessed, and unemployment rose to nearly a quarter of the workforce. Finally, however, its slowly returning status of between 1 to 1.5 million unemployed of 2019 has emerged. From mid-2021 onwards, unemployment settled between 1.2 and 1.5 million. (Figure:6)

There has undoubtedly been higher average unemployment for 2021, but for the last six months, it hasn’t exceeded the boundaries of 2019. So there are – to be fair to the conservative political commentary – grounds for saying employment has recovered to the range of pre-pandemic levels. Just don’t look at the figures (Figure:6) or the relative range too closely.

So now, business is over-reporting vacancies to the ABS that they do not advertise or intend to fill without a demand surge. Yet even advertised vacancies have gone up. (Figure:3/7). So why might specific labour markets be advertising more? Does it represent an increase in new jobs, or does loss of employment markets contribute?

Fig: 6 – Under and Unemployment and variant job vacancy stats.

Considerations

Due to international border closures, consider the loss of migrants, pacific Islanders and backpackers coming to Australia – on visa conditions that require rural employment. Consider the access to work of migrants who, out of economic necessity, live in crowded low socioeconomic LGAs with higher exposure to the Covid-19 virus to jobs in external LGAs that had travel restrictions. Third, consider how travel restrictions and lockdowns restricted high-end recruitment that previously used in-person networking meetups or travelling to interview overseas. Fourth, consider that net migration away from cities has accelerated during the recession and remote work opportunities, which has fuelled the rise of alternatives in smaller towns with lower living costs. Finally, consider that the absence of visa workers revealed an entrenched culture of exploitation and inadequate financial compensation in the farming and service industries. 

The results of these considerations are two-fold.

1. This has generated much of the employer claims that they are “struggling to find suitable staff to fill job vacancies”.
   
2. The realisation that low wages you can get away with for migrants, poor conditions, and exploitation will not be acceptable jobs for Australians. Farmers and Restaurants are now forced to engage with better educated Australians who expect better pay and are more aware of their rights as employees. So it is no surprise they have been less successful in filling jobs.

As localised markets for exploitable employees have dried up, businesses have had to advertise outside their LGAs. Figure 7 shows that according to the Department of Employment, rises in advertisements for labour with the only significant dips in recruitment across all industries were during the Covid-19 Delta outbreak. However, this does not necessarily translate as a rise in real jobs. Instead, some portion likely reflects the need to expand advertising into previously unutilised media, with further reach than LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Fig: 7 – 2021 Lead up to October’s advertised job vacancy by role classification.

Recruitment for hospitality, manufacturing, warehouses, leisure sectors and farming industries relied on a willing pool of locally exploitable, low-skilled, migrant labour on tap. This has vanished for all the aforementioned reasons. Moreover, constrained reach advertising via social media might have limited scope to attract Australians. Many don’t want to work for the exploitative conditions or the low wages on offer.  

Lazy Aussies

The political and MSM dialogue to cover the exploitation hasn’t changed in years. “Lazy Aussies just don’t want to work” was an excuse to hire cheaper, exploitable 457 visa migrants when Abbott was PM. Under Morrison, “Laziness” and “JobSeeker is too generous” are the absurdities brought to bear. These diatribes never address the wage rates or the conditions, and employers will lie about them, while politicians facilitate labour exploitation. Corporate Australia seeks to frame this as a “labour shortage”.

In contrast, the ACTU and other Unions call it a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, or a shortage of non-discriminatory, non-toxic management. So instead of being responsive to the needs of Australians in a time of crisis and expanding public sector employment, welfare or active labour market policies, the government are facilitating a gig economy. One complete with exploitation and underpayment and ensuring labour mobility and wage growth are at an all-time low.  

Money for mates

In the face of a recession, the recent history of record-breaking under and unemployment levels, stagnating wages, a surge in the part-time and gig economy, the Liberal Party’s solution is support for bringing “up to 160,000 foreign workers and students a year into Australia”. So how do they facilitate this amid a global pandemic? Via a private quarantine scheme recommended by DPG Advisory Solutions, “linked to former deputy NSW Liberal Party director Scott Briggs”. The scheme “was awarded a $79,500 “limited tender” contract by the Home Affairs department to provide “consultancy services”. Also, the founder and director of DPG is David Gazard. A close associate of Scott Morrison and former ministerial adviser. The Department of Home Affairs chose these private quarantine reviewers without government tender.

This is the quality of solution for a federal government that had till now avoided building quarantine facilities, as “carefully vetted” consultants are brought into resolving the issue of businesses – who, despite massive unemployment numbers – are “struggling to find exploitable employees”. This deliberately cast illusion of economic prosperity hides the poverty suffered by millions in Australia and is challenging to maintain with the recent GDP drop – the largest on record. It leaves real solutions of federal job guarantees, active labour market policies, and adequate welfare support in the dust. Is this the land of the “fair go” we want Australia to be, or is that just a myth we abandoned generations ago, if indeed such an ethos ever existed?

This article was originally published on Australia Awaken – Ignite your Torches.

By John Haly  

Dear Gladys,

Our relationship has curdled, and I am concerned about your mixed messages. Despite maintaining it was finished between us (the voters, not Daryl), you remain in the house. Using our joint account to pay $10,000 a day for your expensive addiction to lawyers. When lovers tell each other it is over, they separate as soon as possible. We have moved on to Dom “Opus Dei” Perrottet. Our heart has changed allegiances; once we realised you were representing Daryl, and not us.

Obviously, we need to rethink this, adding a little candour to how our relationship has transpired. Yes, we (NSW) voted for you in high hopes you would be better for our economy (as you always promise but don’t deliver). You’d think we’d learn that, but like Charlie Brown, we want to hope Lucy isn’t lying to us, and we have another punt at that ball. Your words were beguiling, and we always fell for it. Some friends warned us, but we are all too forgiving in 2019. Just look at how heartbroken we were in 2021 when you said you were leaving us. Then you didn’t leave, toying with our feelings.

Deep down, we know it hasn’t been working well for years. Some of us had misgivings only a year ago. Both Bernard Keane and I expressed our doubts in October last year, three days apart from one another. OK, I admit I was a lot harsher than Bernard, as he seemed to think your most prominent sin was cheating on us with Daryl Maguire. But, even lately, Bernard has not been as tough or honest with you as he should be. Instead, Bernard sugarcoats it as “two remarkable misjudgments” as though they were your only ones, which “until 2020, was a glittering career”.

Are we dating the same woman?

#Koalakiller tag burnt into our memory.

Bernard and I must be “dating” different women named “Gladys”. I don’t want to dwell too long on matters raised before, so I will be quick. I thought we both loved koalas, but instead, others gave you the tag #koalakiller because of your environmental policies on logging forests. You promised me public transport but gave us tragically built ferries not designed for our bridges and trains not made fit for our tunnels. You said you valued our cousins in the public service. But you spent all our money on pay rises for 65 coalition politicians and a police commissioner and refused to fund public service workers. You said you were good with money, but there were overpayments for some properties and underpayments for others. Was it just empty promises when light rails, stadiums and museums were under-costed or facing undisclosed financial discrepancies?

Your cuts to Rural and Urban fire services and de-staffing fire management officers and National Parkes and Wildlife, all before the most extensive bushfire in NSW. All despite having been predicted a decade earlier. The dodgy water trading, fracking and conservation failures, all while you hid MP’s water interests and were not straight with us. You switched on the desalination plant in Kurnell when water ran out in country towns and Dams were contaminated and then made us pay the subsequent price rises. Westconnex did well, while we saw the prospect of rising toll road costs and lost properties to compulsory acquisition. So, Gladys, you just needed to do a little planning. Then you put our lives at risk via the Ruby Princess and Aged care deaths under the management of Aspen Medical despite the fraud associated with them. But Bernard thinks you made only “two remarkable misjudgments”. Really Bernard, how could you overlook all this? Love, really is blind!

Her “glittering career”!

Climate Chaos is now unavoidable, but NSW corruption, unnecessary!

Look, Gladys, I was really hoping we could all move on to “a glittering career”. But the end of 2020 and 2021 hasn’t been covered in glory, have they? Barely had I finished talking about our relationship concerns in October 2020, then the “Stronger Communities Fund” pork-barrelling to coalition local councils showed up. You tried to hide your infidelity by shredding documents relating to those councils’ $252 million grants scheme. Even Scotty from Marketing could have told you that you don’t go on TV and refer to pork barrelling as the “common parlance” and at least try to look a little contrite.

Before the month was out, we discovered you’d previously given Wagga Wagga $40K worth of Grants out of a discretionary fund and to nobody’s surprise, it was Daryl’s electorate. (You’re our representative, not his.) True, the Premier’s fund was at your sole discretion, but you were not very discrete (as ICAC has the tapes). Daryl got millions for projects without business plans or discussions of substance. You seemed to “just throw money at Wagga” to benefit him. In November, the Upper house voted to refer you to ICAC for failing to disclose your relationship with Maguire.

By December, the ABC was reporting your involvement in the project for new headquarters for the Australian Clay Target Association Daryl Maguire championed. You have to admit Gladys he always one with an eye for a profit which ICAC tapes revealed you knew, despite seeking to maintain plausible deniability coyly with, “I don’t need to know about that bit“.

While the NSW government defunded it, the people clamoured for it.

In March 2021, ICAC confirmed they were still investigating Daryl. The highway running past his properties in his electorate came under scrutiny, as did your meeting over it with him. His Airbnb plans for his Ivanhoe properties didn’t strike you as a conflict of interest issue? Really, Gladys, really?

By May, when the upper house voted to provide for ICAC’s $7.2 million budget shortfall due to their declaration that its annual funding had been below inflation for most of the 30 years since its inception, but your friends in the lower house voted it down. It doesn’t help sell the image of integrity for someone for whom “all proper processes were followed” to underfund the very organisation that could establish that. If you have done “nothing wrong”, why undermine the one organisation that could prove it?

Daryl resigned from the party in July of 2018 over those scandals, and despite this entire sordid history, he remained on the crossbench. Does either of you understand the concept of “resignation”? Despite “quitting”, he stayed till August of 2018. Despite that, did it never occur to you to break it off with him and serve your constituents? Why wait till September of 2020 when the further announcement of ICAC investigations transpired?

Meanwhile, Wagga Wagga was doing very well, from their $12m cycling complex to their Australian Clay Target Association. Wagga Wagga seems to be the epicentre of sport in NSW. No surprise that more people in Wagga Wagga voted for the Liberal Candidate than for the Independent that won via preferences. Pork Barrelling works because the public is gullible and shallow.

Corrosive Covid

But enough of corruption charges, let’s look to your handling the pandemic and how you developed your competencies following the early mistakes of the “Ruby Princess”.

By June 2021, our attention moved on, as had yours. Your new beau, Arthur Moses, stepped up, being one of many who offered support. The AMA advised you to lock Sydney down when the Delta Variant made its way to Sydney. But you didn’t take the help they prescribed and relied on “business advice” for matters related to a virulent disease that had killed millions in India by June. Your own report coinciding with the Bondi cluster starting June 16 mentions “business” 21 times and “health” three times. Although “businesses” were still upset! You knew what happened when Dan delayed locking down the first time, yet you waited for School holidays to start a soft lockdown? Afterwards, you listened to medical advice. Who suggested that was a great idea, given you locked down the Northern Beaches during the previous Christmas over similar numbers? You waited another four weeks after the school holidays to get serious about a lockdown for what reason? How did this demonstrate your competence? Indeed, the 408 people who died from the virus before you resigned will never know.

So our infection rate rose over 1500 a day, Nurses and Doctors ran themselves ragged, and even though Morrison offered you the lion’s share of vaccines, NSW struggled to serve communities from the beginning.

The legacy of Gladys.

The other Eastern States provided their resources for contact tracing because you weren’t coping independently, but the public was told your State was the “Gold Standard”. You even needed help from the military to enforce lockdowns. Still, some people believed you were better than a Premier that had to break his back before he stopped doing public briefings. Whereas you stopped doing so because you needed time to run the State? To do what exactly? To open up around August/October when we still had hundreds of cases which seems a little contrary to the idea you expressed that “the number of positive coronavirus cases infectious in the community must drop to “as close to zero as possible” for the shutdown to be lifted”. But, of course, our new Premier, Dominic Perrottet, disagreed with that as a policy as the State recorded 477 new COVID-19 infections and six deaths on the weekend before restrictions were eased the following Monday. That was October 11, and you had resigned nearly two weeks before but were (and are, as of writing this) still a fully paid member of Parliament.

When are you leaving us?

So now I am writing the letter we should have written earlier if only we’d had the gumption and realised just how dysfunctional this relationship was. Instead, the media and public mourned your departure like it was a Shakespearian tragedy. I have never witnessed so significant a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Like the victimised battered wife who excused everything he did, outsiders are left wondering, why we didn’t leave long ago? All the indicators were there even from a year ago, yet too few remembered or noted.

Onset of Memory Loss upon exposure to ICAC.

But you are still in Parliament, you are still charging the State taxpayer for your legal fees, and you haven’t left yet. As a result, most days lately, we hear about your memory loss, despite a previous reputation for maintaining a detailed memory with “meticulous focus on every minor policy detail “.

You said you were going, Gladys. Put the money back you have taken from the State coffers and leave! There is only so much corruption, pork barrelling and taking advantage of us that we can stomach.

Curiously wondering for how much longer before you pick up your toothbrush and go!

Regretfully,

The NSW Public.

This article was originally published on Australia Awaken – Ignite your Torches.

By John Haly  

Much is made of the 21^st century being a post-truth world. Many identified it when presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway defended White House Press secretary Sean Spicer’s fallacious claim about attendance numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Kellyanne Conway infamously referred to Spicer’s assertions as “Alternative facts“. This became a catch cry of satirists, comedians and news broadcasters reflecting the absurdity of presidential lies and fallacious propaganda. However, political manipulations of the “truth” are older than the writings of the ancient Chinese military treatise of “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu.

Populist lies

What does mark the 21st century is not the strategic lie of clever politicians but the blatant lie of the Populist. The blatant lie has replaced clever self-serving lies that take time and nuance to unravel. It’s an appeal to a demographic wanting the smallest of justifications to rise in the insurrection at the Capital or organise a packed, mask-less protest rally during a pandemic.

Great swathes of humanity descend into the 21st-century rabbit hole, emerging catatonic and confused into a world of irrationality, conspiracy theories, and QAnon. Framed by shameless populist’s admonition, whose goal is greed, popularity and personal gain/power at any cost to society. However, the political class has always been tarred with the brush of falsehoods by the public. Those goals aim to serve ideological or personal ends, but for the population, the falsehoods of this century have more dire consequences. These blatant lies blind us from the existential threats to us all, such as COVID-19 pandemics, climate change and biodiversity collapse.

Post-truth world equals Pre-Fascist realm

We should ask ourselves both why and how “alternative facts” (or, to put it bluntly, “mendacious lies”) dominate and hamper the cultures of the modern world and warp our perspective of the truth.

Here are my ten reasons why “alternative truths” hold sway.

1. Political advantage

Manipulating the populous through algorithms

Contemporary manipulations of the public for political gain are outsourced to the private capital of organisations such as Cambridge Analytica that resulted in the election of Trump and other populists. The data mining and psychological manipulation on behalf of Trump were detailed in the whistleblower’s book, “Mindf*ck” by Christopher Wylie. The broader European perspective of “This is Not Propaganda” by Peter Pomerantsev explores the dark world of influence operations run amok. It is a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots and alternative fact propagation. This would include Firecrest technologies, Emerdata and SCL Group companies and even i360. The latter aided the conservative political gains in the South Australian elections but were abandoned despite protests from state branches by the evident lack of digital nous exhibited by federal Liberal Party operators. Nevertheless, it is a global phenomenon with many agents producing propaganda in social and mainstream media.

2. Media power and control

The dominance by organisations like the Murdoch press, OAN, and Fox News engage us in divisive propaganda instead of news and accurate journalism. Instead of holding power to account, the Fourth Estate is more frequently complicity with power. This is not merely an opinion but the legal defence used by Fox News to defend their hosts. Legal complications over the lack of veracity in reporting have long plagued the Murdoch press, but its power over parties and electoral influence is also a matter of record.

3. Cultural complacency

Cogitative progressions and the death of reasoning

There is a culture of acceptability for political lies and even allowing the lies to slide by with populist politicians. Manipulative social media posts that appeal to emotional or perceptual biases are propagated. “People feel free to make unsupported claims, assertions, and accusations in online media,” said Vint Cerf. As Dan York also notes, “The ‘mob mentality’ can be easily fed, and there is little fact-checking or source-checking these days before people spread information and links through social media.”

Not only do we disparage fact-checking and frequently could not be bothered to check political veracity, but partisan “fact-checkers” also have weaponised “fact-checking”.

4. Experiential evaluation

There is a cultural belief in the fluidity of truth in which opinion and anecdotal expressions are given identical or greater weight than fact-checking and well developed and robust methods of statistical analysis. Cognitive Research states, “People are also more persuaded by low-quality scientific claims that are accompanied by anecdotes and endorsement cues, such as a greater number of Facebook ‘likes’ as well as prior exposure to misinformation. In particular, the presence of anecdotal evidence can serve as a powerful barrier for scientific reasoning and evidence-based decision-making.”

5. Underfunding education

The defunding and elimination of free university education has resulted in an inferior quality of education for the Australian/American/British populations. As John Biggs and Richard Davis’s paper on “The Subversion of Australian Universities” concludes, “Today, our tertiary system is no longer able to fulfil its proper function in the community.” The deteriorating quality standards in Australian Universities leaves many graduates unequipped for the working world. Academic bodies have for years petitioned against the cuts to higher education to increasingly deaf ears in parliament.

It is not just tertiary education in Australia that is suffering a decline. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports that high school test scores have been plummeting for years.

The deteriorating education results in a plummeting of quality standards in Australian Universities. Access is based on economic capacity to afford education and the resultant financial pressure to pass mediocre students. Instead of passing students based on individual intellectual demonstrations of academic quality, a culture of grading on a curve is the acceptable standard.

6. Irresponsibility

A list of Rabbit-holes to dive down

People have not been held accountable for the results of their inane opinions, whether they range from:

• anti-vaxxers,
• the divinity of Trump,
• the benignity of Scott Morrison,
• refugees are terrorists,
• that conservatives are better economic managers,
• selfish wealthy freeloaders hoarding franking credits at the expense of the government,
• climate change denial,
• arsonist claims on bushfires, etc.

These people have largely been able to get away with their foolish choices and claims that have generated destructive results for Australian society and civil liberties as a whole.

7. Poverty

The paucity of resources available for adequate discernment or investigation of the truth is underscored by the crushing weight of surviving poverty. Ill-equipped communities, schools, and teachers have to scale inter-generational poverty and abuse that impact brain development, breadth of opportunity, material resourcing, and starting education at an expected time and age. Economic disadvantage is linked to chronic tardiness, lack of motivation, and inappropriate behaviour in school children and follows them into adulthood. Eric Jensen documents this in his book “Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids’ Brains and What Schools Can Do About It.” This is before we even contemplate the issues of remote and regional education in the vastness of Australia. Underfunding public schools and TAFE and tertiary education have a long history in Australia. Extracurricular activities such as music, languages, travel/excursions, and etc are only available to children of wealthy parents or private education as public education has suffered multiple ongoing budget cuts that date back decades.

8. The “means” of production

Beyond poverty, the working class and the demands of their labour, of time and energy in terms of excessive working hours and inadequate wages and working conditions limit their socio-political awareness. One’s financial needs for personal and family obligations leave little time or energy for contemplation into the truth of State propaganda and media bias. Moreover, juggling more than one job to meet the financial demands of survival depletes time and resources for contemplative thinking. The ABS reported recently, “Filled jobs increased by 73,700 in the March quarter, 56,100 of which were jobs worked by people as a secondary job.”

9. Dismantling opposition

Diminishing critical public resources results in the inadequate assessment of proposals and developing ideas. The data necessary to evaluate deteriorating social and economic business concerns vanishes. This has been exemplified by defunding and closure of legal advice, research facilities and a raft of labour market monitoring (specifically during Abbott’s reign) along with compromising formerly independent bodies such as:

• Productivity commission with compromised business executive,
• Climate monitors stacked with fossil fuel executives.
• CSIRO being compromised with Gisera vested interests in Gas and Coal, and
• fact-checking units within public broadcasting.

The result is that critically based research becomes more inaccessible. Misinformation is easier to find, and the partisan media spoon-feeds that to the masses by the bucketful.

10. Illiteracy

Literacy is a surprisingly large issue in Australia; as Benjamin Law wrote some years ago, “…an OECD study surveyed Australians aged between 15 and 74 and rated them on their literacy skills. The results were shocking: 43.7 per cent had below-proficiency-level literacy.” Some indicators since then have seen improvement but as Helena Burke in the Australian noted: “According to the OECD, one in eight Australian adults are functionally illiterate, reading at an OECD Level 1 or below.” Unfortunately, though, she continued to say, “At present, there is no national adult literacy policy within Australia.”

Infotainment or Knowledge

Broadsheets to YouTube how conditions have worsened

Criticism of relative illiteracy notes how many in the community get their knowledge base from YouTube videos rather than reading and comprehension. Short podcasts and videos provide a superficial education with little by way of citations to follow up. In pursuit of easy to digest snippets of short-form, educational content (infotainment) provides an ephemeral intellectual reward and a diminished perspicacity. As a freelance journalist, I am aware this article exceeds the Guardian’s word limit of 800 words and Independent Australia’s at 1200. Long read articles are a small specialist market for a limited audience as the response of the larger public is usually conveyed by the acronym “TL;DR”. So even for the literate, reading can be viewed as onerous. Ask yourself when did you last read a non-fiction book? While the Australian Council for the Arts determined that 92% of Australians self-identify as ‘readers,’ the time spent doing so averages 6 hours and 18 minutes a week. That put our country in 15th place in the world.

These ten factors contribute to the ongoing undermining of truth in society.  We often seek simplistic answers to complex questions. Too many of us will not spend the time reading and examining the nuance and subtleties of issues. (Especially when they can be breezed over in a five-minute video.)

Too Long; Didn’t read!

Still, you are here reading this article. Did you just scan it quickly out of idle curiosity? Did you click on even one embedded link out of that curiosity to further your knowledge of something herein written? Perhaps, I got something wrong, but would you know from reading the link’s contents? Was that “reading”, or did you skim over what was written quickly because it was a bit long and … hell … who has the time, education, or philosophical inclination for in-depth understanding?

This article was originally published on Australia Awaken – Ignite your Torches.

By John Haly  

Morrison announcement of “permanently increasing the rate of working-age payments by $50 a fortnight from 1 April 2021” received a lacklustre response. The Australian reporting about the lead-up to this said, “The base rate of JobSeeker is currently $570.80 a fortnight. But pressure has been mounting on the government to raise the rate with the $150 coronavirus supplement for welfare recipients ending in late March.”

Small bickies

The Australian Council of Social Service’s disappointed response reported that they would have preferred $25 extra a day rather than a week. The cheapest coffee I can buy around in my suburb is $4, an extra $3.57 a day is hardly enough. It has, although, lifted our unemployment allowance from 37.5% to 41.2% of the national minimum wage. That means we will no longer have the lowest level of unemployment benefits as a percentage of the average salary in the OECD. Fifty dollars lifts us above Greece to second-last place. Mind you, the original Covid Jobseeker supplement incrementally lifted the unemployed for the first time, above the Henderson Poverty Line.

Paying such low levels “under the false pretence of encouraging more unemployed Australians to look for jobs” has no evidentiary basis. The international market demonstrates it has the opposite effect. Higher unemployment payments internationally are more often correlated with lower unemployment rates. More money flowing into Jobseeker generates spending in the economy, and drives demand. The multiplier effect of which, our country in recession has shown it desperately needs to boost the economy. 

Australian Welfare no longer in last place.

Training?

Despite the Coalition undercutting higher education, Michaelia Cash supported the idea that after six months on Job Seeker, recipients undergo training to help them get a job. Department of Employment figures show the smallest job market in January were the unskilled labourers (8.1%), Sales Workers (7.7%), Machinery Operators and Drivers (5.9%). This collection of low skilled jobs (37,975) are in rare supply in the Australian economy. Therefore, any Jobseeker training to elevate them to the skill level needed to widen their prospects would require extensive TAFE/University level education; well beyond “approved intensive short courses.“

Job vacancy classification breakdown

Dob ’em in

These were not the only changes Morrison implemented to job welfare. That Australian article also reported, “Under a raft of welfare reforms, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash said employers would be able to dob in unemployed Aussies who don’t take up jobs they are offered.” A move even Business groups denounced, let alone the welfare groups and unions. Social media references to “Dob a bludger!” accompanied curiosity as to the probability of emerging hotlines for “Dob in a wage thief” for businesses that were “accidentally underpaying workers“. Further suggestions provided ideas to establish hotlines for dob in a rorter, silencer of whistleblowers, white supremacist and sexual predators. It is tantamount to licensing abuse and employee exploitation which already occurs in industries like farming, retail and service.

Get off the couch!

The prevalent attitude towards the unemployed by politicians suggests that the unemployed are dominantly lazy, and distracted by Netflix as Nationals leader Michael McCormack claimed, or on drugs as our currently on leave, Attorney-General Christian Porter claimed when Social Services Minister. Several Federal ministers like David Littleproud MP, Senator Michaelia Cash, Senator Gerard Rennick, and Colin Boyce MP attacked the unemployed demanding they “get off the couch”, and get farmhand jobs that Australians discovered were not available. Others would suggest this patronising attack on people who, because of a recession and the pandemic, are without work, is merely targeting “low hanging fruit“. These Federal Ministers all would have us believe jobs are plentiful.

They are not alone in spouting propaganda that jobs are readily available. Minister for Families and Social Services Anne Ruston, in a Triple J Hack interview with Avani Dias on the 23rd of February, repeated the fallacious claim. That there are “plenty of jobs” in her region. This was demonstrably wrong. Based in Renmark, her territory in the Murray had 8,364 people on Jobsearch in Jan 2021 but only 626 job vacancies (13 times less than the people looking for work). That ratio is better than the national average (approx 18x), so perhaps she might have had something to boast about if she had only bothered to tell the truth.

Job Vacancies in Murray District, SA

Unemployed in Murray District, SA

What jobs?

It isn’t easy to be finding a job in our economy, as reflected by any measure or methodology:

– jobs claimed by ABS (254,400 jobs), Dept of Employment (175,100 jobs), Seek (182793 jobs);

verses

– the unemployed registered by Jobseeker (1.236M people), ABS (877,600 people) or Roy Morgan (1.68M people). [All Stats currently published as of the end of Feb 2021 for January 2021]

These measures demonstrate that irrespective of what stats you accept, there are far more unemployed than available jobs. Beyond understanding the basics of how unemployment is measured, it is crucial to understand what some methodologies do not appraise.

The difference between ABS and Roy Morgan’s stats are considerable, and while the government and Main-Stream Media lean heavily on the ABS measure, we should appreciate what it represents. I have for a long time explained the ABS’s shortcomings from its

• exclusions of anyone doing any work in a month,
• exclusions for unpaid work in a family business,
• exclusions of foreign workers through 12/16 rule,
• hiding the increasing gig / part-time economy,
• exclusions of persons unable to take up immediate work,
• hiding unemployment via the government PaTH program.

Statistical variations of Unemployment reported.

Subsets

These exclusions mean that what the ABS measures is not our internal domestic unemployment, but a subset of the numbers of unemployed for reasons of international comparison. A long-time economic analyser of ABS statistics, Alan Austin, expressed similar conclusions, to that of my recent article on this subject.

To be clear, ABS measures a subset of our internal unemployment, as are JobSeeker numbers. The disparity between them illustrated in the variations graph depicts the entire period over which Job Seeker has existed. ABS’s subset, guided by the ILO methodology, facilitates international comparison, but does not measure any country’s national unemployment numbers. These stand in stark contrast to Murdoch and Nine Media’s claims that unemployment is a single whole digit percentage rate. Roy Morgan reveals unemployment hasn’t been under 10% since February 2020, and neither has under and unemployment been under 20%.

Under and Unemployment vs Job Vacancies

So ABS’s claimed 877,600 unemployment numbers are a subset of the domestic reality. Similarly, ABS claimed a 2.08 million subset of under and unemployed. Alan Austin and I are in enthusiastic agreement that “It might be time for the unemployment rate published by Australia’s Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to be put out to pasture.” Alan continued affirming “the steam engine that is Roy Morgan’s real unemployment rate”. Roy Morgan shows in January 2021, unemployment is 1.68 million people, and adding underemployment reaches 3.118 million souls looking for a decent job. The Department of Employment’s IVI job vacancy report for January reveals that over three million people in Australia are competing for 175,100 jobs. Nearly 18 people for every job advertised, and we are not even beginning to deal with the logistic issues of job searching.

Location, location, location

Beyond Australia’s 19 cities, over 100K population, there are 1700 towns with populations between that and a thousand people. Spreading 175,100 jobs across a continent representing 5% of the earth’s landmass, when the towns are dominantly coastal, represents the first challenge to job seekers. An “off the back of an envelope” averaging for any given town/city would tell you that more than 100 jobs in a given population centre mean you are probably living in a city. Which might mean less than ten jobs advertised in that region will be for unskilled labour (8.1%). That’s not a nuanced presumption, as industry and commercial activity vary considerably from place to place, and I’ve given no consideration to rural areas. Still, one might understand that job locality has to be one of the most considerable obstacles for the unemployed.

The government’s expectation announced on the 23rd of February is “job seekers will be required to search for a minimum of 15 jobs a month from early April, increasing to 20 jobs per month from the 1st of July”. Purely considering the subset of the unemployed on Jobseeker (1.236M people) generating 15 applications per month creates 18 million letters and has the potential to cover every advertised job in Australia 105 times until July, when it will be 141 times. Given the likelihood of the number of jobs existing in your city or town as aforementioned, just how long will it take any given unemployed person to run out local employers?

Limitations to employment are locality and factors such as job requirements for education and/or skills, competition for work, financial limitations/burdens, physical/mental impediments, security clearances, pay awards not commensurate with needs and employment discrimination and/or exploitation.

Nobody in the coalition government is prepared to concede they are failing the unemployed. The party of “Jobs and Growth” has in reality been expanding “Unemployment and Recession” for years and no policy the government has implemented in Morrison’s $9B Social Security Safety Net seems capable of changing that path.