Tristan, if you support Govt banking why not write and article on OLO high lighting Labor's new policy to do so? Labor won't do it because the Murdoch press will go ballistic.

Shadow Minister, Margaret Thatcher was just another puppet of big corporate interests.

Some people are funny they use moral virtues but it comes straight from their hip pockets ! there is nothing moralistic about denying someone a means to survive in an affluent country like Australia ! It is Pathetic to even try to do so, so stop the pretense and air you narcissistic views openly please !

To Killarney.

This "massive increase" in unemployment began with the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1973. Every teenager in my housing commission area (except me) went on the dole and went surfing every day. The Soviet government actually sent a TV news team to Nimbin NSW, to show their incredulous Soviet audiences the how decadent Australia had become. The Australian government paid our youth not to train or to work. The mathematics are simple. You got more on the dole than you got working as an apprentice. To mitigate this, the Whitlam government increased apprentice wages 250% make it economic to get a job and also to buy the "youth vote", despite employers screaming that this would be uneconomic. With employers cutting back significantly on apprentice hiring's, Labor did what every socialist government does when confronted by the consequences of their economic meddling. It created government departments funded by taxpayers to hire apprentices, subsidise their wages, then hire them out to industry. The result is that there are a lot less apprentices today, even though the ones lucky enough to get into the system are well paid.

Labor's next move was to destroy the White Australia Policy that once protected Australian workers from the importation of coolies who would work a lot cheaper than they do. Every petrol station in Australia is now manned by Indians who are contracted in India to work for (what for us) are low wages but which for them are high wages. Incidents at building sites have revealed that the foreign companies importing foreign workers do not bother with trifles like workers compensation, holiday pay, super, or award wages

Labor (and Liberal) figured out that they could make themselves popular by screwing employers to fund social projects. Unfunded pension obligations? Make the employers pay the workers super. Unemployment of building workers? Make building companies create an unemployment fund called MERT. Toss in plenty of goodies the employers have to pay for, like leave loadings, long service leave, and RDO's and you wonder why Australia's major manufacturing is closing down and heading overseas?

LEGO, Unemployment has risen because of the corporate take over of Australia. Tariffs reduced, jobs sent to China and Govt Banks sold off so our inflationary money + money for growth get expressed as debt. Abbott even wants to sell off the mint so even our coins get created as debt.

There are will never be enough jobs because too much money leaves the country to service debt. This country is always starved of money but our bankers always create more than enough for their derivative scams. How can a phoney economy of derivatives be 10 times the real productive one?

... The "poor white trash of Asia" are screaming loud...!

re: Apprentices having no incentive to work because of welfare payments; You would think surely the answer would be to pay apprentices much more! Because welfare payments on their own are miniscule! (and so is pay for apprentices)