Unemployment and its management or governance remains a pressing public policy problem in Australia. Australia has continued to have high unemployment and jobless families despite a decade or more of substantial economic growth. There are many old manufacturing regions in Australia where stable, solid working class areas with full time full employment have become, over a 25 year period, areas characterised by high unemployment, job insecurity, extensive part-time or casual work and much poverty.
Unemployment in Australia means poverty since benefits are explicitly limited to discourage welfare dependency. It is the old moral Protestant discourse (Weber's Protestant ethic) of 'individuals standing on their two feet' now being expressed in the market language of economics.
Continued high unemployment represents a major failure of Australian economic policy from the perspective of public opinion. One of the most devastating indictments of current economic policy in Australia is the number of families with children under the age of 15 who have no breadwinner in the household. (It is estimated to be close to 20% of Australian children). It is the assumption of many Australian citizens that the state remains a powerful institution and a central determinant of comparative economic outcomes in a ‘globalised’ economy. Something can and should be done beyond mutual obligation of work-for-the-dole.
Howard’s Liberals and their Labor rivals tacitly agree about the broad neo-liberal direction of economic strategy, thereby leaving social issues as the only arena for partisan difference. The tacit bipartisanship on the economy means that more Australians express their disenchantment with the whole farcical spectacle of politics by turning to minor parties. The Senate provides an effective outlet for these possibilities. The finger can be pointed at the policy economists for their failure to address the hardship of families and the social fallout of fractured families. They talk in terms of frictional and structural adjustment, voluntary unemployment and trickle down growth.
The finger of indifference to unemployment can be pointed at the neo-liberal economists because their embrace of free market policies has shown a lack of concern for the professed public policy goals of equality and social harmony. Unemployment has fallen unequally across Australia, since higher rates and longer unemployment has traditionally been found amongst those with lower skills and education and in particular regions.
Do we leave the unemployed to their fate? Those neo-classical economists who have a social conscience said no. Something can be done.
In the late 1990s, for instance, 5 of them sent a public letter to the Howard Government. These 5 public policy economists had a plan to reduce unemployment from above 6% to around 5%. The 5 points of their plan were:
---a steady fiscal and monetary policy and continued micro-economic reform to ensure strong economic growth;
---a wage tax tradeoff to give tax credits for low wage earners in low income families instead of increases in the award wages safety net;
---a long-term commitment to reduce the effective marginal tax rates for low to middle income families;
---a systematic approach to labour market programs.
---upgrading the education and training system over the long term.
It would appear that the wage/tax tradeoff was seen as a key, with this proposal attracting the most attention. The idea is that a tax free credit of around 2% would be paid as a supplement to that wage of low income wage earners. How would this help? If you hold the line of minimium award wages for a period of time, then inflation would reduce the real wages, employment would be increased and unemployment would be reduced.
It's a policy designed to fit with Australia needing to be competitive in the global marketplace. The subsequent ddebates were over the numbers.
It leaves us with 5% unemployment and the tight links between poverty, increasing inequality and socially excluded from social and job networks. In particular regions of Australia this can have devasting impacts on cities and neighhoods and communites. There is little in this policy to enable those in economically depressed regions, who have been left on the sidelines and become socially excluded, regain a foothold in the labour market.
The consequences are becoming evident. Our cities are becoming more and more polarized with more and more young pepole feeling marginalized from the mainstream. Some are turning to crime as street kids. The costs of unemployment have been borne by households.
Current government policy accentuates inequality and the concentration of poverty and unemployment. Thus cuts in education and subsidies for private schooling has meant that public schools becoem disciplinary centres of disadvantage, as more affluent students go to private schools. The increasing cost of university education has also meant that the possibilities for working class students being able to use a university to secure stable employment is fast disappearing.
I find it ironic that a declared supporter of the Greens should be expressing concern for the welfare of blue collar workers, and especially their employment prospects.
From what I can gather of the Greens policies, the Greens would prefer that all blue collar workers should be unemployed.
It's not that they mean to put us all out of work, it's just the effect of what they would do. This is like aiming a gun at a guy, and accidently squeezing the trigger.
Posted by: Scott on December 11, 2003 12:02 AMScott, that's politics for you. So full of contradictions.
Yeah,I know the standard line by all market populists. Placing a ban on the clear felling of native forests in Tasmania for woodchips puts the loggers out of work as it closes down the mills.
Let's leave aside the destructive practices of the forestry industry.
Why not retrain the forestry workers so they become more skilled. Bring them into the information economy?
Give them a future.
As I understand that's what the Greens are saying.Brains not brawn is the pathway to Tasmania's future.
From what I can read that is what the right wing bloggers and journalists always ignore---deliberately ignore from what I can see.
Thats market populism for you.
Because you can't just 'retrain' people like that, Gary. What do you do with people who are 50 years old and have been doing the same sort of work for thirty years.
Or, I put it to you this way- imagine taking your good self and putting you in a factory environment. Do you think you would thrive? Do you think you would even cope?
That is what you are actually trying to advocate in reverse for industrial workers.
Also, you assume that IT/Information economy can produce enough work to hire everyone. How do you make such an assumtion? This 'future' you want to give has more holes then a Swiss cheese.
What about Auto manufacturing? From what I can tell, the greens aren't keen on that either. But people still want cars.
One of the many problems with the Green agenda is that it asks lots of people like me, who are not the most well off people in society, to make sacrifices. It's me, and people like me, that are going to be placed on the scrap heap of permanent unemployment thanks to the Green Revolution, and folks like you are going to make no sacrifices at all.
Needless to say, most people think this is a pretty dodgy offer, which is why the Greens are no closer to actual power then the Democrats ever were.
And that is why people ignore the Green message.
Posted by: Scott on December 14, 2003 02:23 PM