Violence in our churches

We must always condemn violence. There must be no tolerance for brutality,…

Treasuring the moment: a military tattoo

By Frances Goold He asked if we had anything planned for Anzac Day. "A…

Top water experts urge renewed action to secure…

The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) has today urged…

Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your…

On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian…

Of Anzac Day

By Maria Millers   For many the long-stablished story of the Gallipoli landings and…

Media statement: update on removal of extreme violent…

By a spokesperson for the eSafety Commissioner: Yesterday the Federal Court granted…

Why I'm Confused By Peter Dutton And Other…

I just realised that the title could be a little ambiguous. It…

Not in my name

By Roger Chao  Not in my name In this quiet hour, I summon words,…

«
»
Facebook

Oh Ye of Little Faith!

Well, you thought he couldn’t do it; you thought that Tony Abbott was indulging in intemperate exuberance [or telling fibs] when he said in 2013 that during the first five years of his reign as Emperor of Australia, he would create one million new jobs.

Well, you would have to eat your words now, wouldn’t you? Because not only did he achieve his goal, he did it mostly from the back-bench and that’s not easy. One million new jobs, WOW!

But, as frequently happens with our former Prime Minister’s moments of triumph, there is always some smart-arse lefty statistician running around ready to prick Tony’s balloon with annoying facts.

In this case the party-pooper is none other than Chris Richardson of Access Economics, annoyingly  using Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data to support his comments, by saying:

“Check out ABS Labour Force figures over the last 15 years. They show, on average, 200,000 new jobs have been created each year.”

Those of a mathematical persuasion will notice that 200,000 new jobs a year translates to one million new jobs every five years for the last fifteen years.

So what’s going on? The coalition wouldn’t be spinning yarns would they? Surely, that nice Mr Turnbull wouldn’t be selling us porkies [as well as stealing Tony’s moment in the sun] would he?

Well it seems that Tony’s achievement was not such a big deal after all; some would say he just had to keep the ship of state on an even keel and he would reach a safe harbour and be home and hosed, whatever. He could have spent his time chasing female staffers around the ‘monley-pod’ to have achieved the same result – or is this just the prerogative of National Party leaders?

In coming months we will be told ad-nauseum that the coalition created one million new jobs over the five years from 2013, which we now know to be a furphy. Even former coalition Treasurer Joe Hockey said on more than one occasion that government’s don’t create jobs, businesses do. This is the same Joe Hockey who, incidentally, on the subject of housing affordability offered this insight:

“The starting point for a first home buyer is to get a good job that pays good money.”

He also noted, when defending proposed changes to the fuel tax in his 2014 budget that the increased fuel tax “will hit higher income households harder, as poorer people don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far”.

Not surprising that the coalition shortly thereafter helped Joe pack his suitcase and sent him off to graze in the ‘long paddock’ of Washington DC.

So remember, whenever coalition politicians say, in coming months as they surely will, that they have created a million new jobs over the last five years that, by their own reckoning, Labor did a spiffing job over the period of the GFC in maintaining relatively high employment. Or, you may think that none of them ever created any jobs at all, which is probably closer to the truth.

9 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Roma guerin

    They speak with forked tongue.

  2. LOVO

    Terence, Wonderful explanation of the absurdity of the ‘eleventy’ economics in play by the coalition… 😤
    And one must not forget how immigration has given Pauline a job…for life, no less… (talk about job creation.) …sigh 😝

  3. Glenn Barry

    Hmm, take something effectively unavoidable, virtually axiomatic, then claim both intent and responsibility, then compose a truism around it and somehow be both disingenuous and dishonest in the process and the result.

    I think that is perhaps the LNP’s only talent – dishonesty

  4. Wam

    We have eaten rabbott pie since the greens fed him the greenhouse grass at the end 2009 liberally covered in murdoch media sauce to disguise the lousy taste.
    Hopefully they have gone a woman too far?
    Sadly this has been put in context by gerard sadsack’s observation that many of the grass roots who voted against women are women. Cleverly, he points out that women are to blame for number of women in the LNP government.
    Still another long arrow to bill’s short bow.

  5. Bert

    In the mean time the population has grown by approx 1 million so jobs are only keeping pace with population growth.

  6. Peter F

    The sad part about it is that this disinformation repeated ad nauseam will help these liars in the next election.

  7. listohan

    Do people in work, the vast majority, really care about job creation if they have one already? This does not stop the mainstream media reporting the figure as a welcome achievement ad nauseam.

  8. etnorb

    Not only does this inept, lying lot of obscenely over-paid so-called liberals tell porkies about the number of jobs they “created”(WTF??), but I wonder just how many of these “jobs” were actual, FULL TIME jobs & not under employed/casual, or part time jobs, as they always include those thousands in every job “statistic” they sprout! BASTARDS the lot of them!!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page