Government schemes aimed at helping the unemployed are a lie!
if at the age of eighteen, and after a lifetime in an educational institution which produces an unemployable product, then the problem is not unemployment; The problem is the wasted money on educating the unemployable!
Only an idiot would believe work for the dole schemes are any more useful, other than to bury a problem deeper, by offering a golden handshake to businesses to pretend to help the unemployable!

If all we do is temporarily, place folks in "temporary" positions until the subsidy is exhausted? All we will have achieved is to destroy the dreams and hopes of the "used"!

If we are to subsidise employment opportunities and job training? Then it must result in an outcome! And that's why it should be rolled out as a3-5 years expanded apprenticeship or cadetship scheme! Which should result in a tradesman or certified professional, with exportable transferable skills!

Other than that, conscription that virtually results in the same thing, could be trialed? And where that then results in increased adult unemployment? WE need a proactive government ready willing and able to fund our best ideas, cooperative endeavor and new industries?

Say, like an a carbon fibre electric car, inspired by the the tesla Xover and mind boggling formula one performance and range that sells itself? We won't be waiting for the future but creating it right here!

I mean, we have all the elements right here to build a better battery and lighter car with better power to weight ratios. We have copious lithium deposits and sometimes incorporating rare earths; cobalt and indeed the world's purest commercial reserves of graphene?

And if a single site with independent off grid power supply (a cheaper than coal thorium reactor) was chosen from the get go?

Then we could emulate the mega factory Tesla is building but for completed vehicles not just batteries! Moreover, set up as an employee owned cooperative more than able to compete with any other manufacture anywhere!

Furthermore hundreds of other export oriented industries and thousands of manufactured products, could be rolled out using the very same template!? That not only has stood the test of time as the most fail safe, efficient and productive model, but survived the Great Depression largely intact? Nonetheless, would need to be protected from start up failure by adequate capital and mentoring!

Services are all well and good, but rely on a central other core like manufacturing to make themviable Even where that requires proactive governments to borrow like there's no tomorrow!
Alan B.

This type of government meddling with market forces lacks social responsibility. It offers pretence as a substitute for dealing with the root cause of unemployment: wasting youth in featherbeded life styles in a school system which has, in itself, been transformed from its old glory and social contribution of basic education, and into an unrecognisable industry where profit and ideology predominate as essentials for it's existence !
Unemployed should be living on the street; it's what markets demand,no contribution, no rewards! And starting at fifteen if unemployable! It's called skin in the game!

What stands in the way are ideologues, who are limited in their thinking; to flogging off the national estate and with it, our economic sovereignty!?

Given that is the entire limit of their imagination, when it comes to creating jobs?

And compound the self created problem by putting on a mental straight jacket, by self indoctrinating with monosyllabic moronic mantras and broken record rethoric like, that hoary old chestnut, the government has no business in business! Helped by those other terrible twins, unresolved debt and deficit!

With all due respect, the only way to fix either is to grow the economy, which requires the opposite approach to the preferred austerity! But rather, as a proven approach, by investing in our own people and their better ideas! [The very basis of the hugely successful celtic economic miracle, before the self deluded pigheaded Irish ideologues tried to flog their real estate market off to debt laden foreigners, which then, N.B., killed it!]

And a quite radical departure from all the usual nonsensical excuses, that seem to be quite massively overused just to "avoid taking responsibility" for outcomes that incidentally, also prevent perpetually prevaricating politicians from using the financial levers of office to assist enterprising Aussies getting started, even where that requires quite massive government borrowing!?

When every boy and his dog knows, that's the only remaining viable option other than selling the nation's heritage to foreign owners and control at bargain basement fire sales!

"It's time" to completely can the preventative ideology and replace it with national interest actionable outcomes that put Australia and Australians, plus the true national interest first and foremost! And wouldn't that make an interesting new and novel experience?

If management teaches just one thing, it teaches, there is always a better way!
Alan B.

The SA ex-taxi driver, now Treasurer is pulling the same stunt, with money we don't have. $10,000 to employers who hire one new employee. Putting aside the obvious rorts that we know would occur, given past experiences of giving people public money, the whole scheme is ridiculous. Even a taxi driver should no that employers will not hire if they do not have the work. And they do not have the work. Several small businesses in South Australia close down each week, and we have the highest unemployment figure in the country. Handing out public money and calling it job creation is just helping out crooks in waiting.

Some firms here have actually had to close down because of the cost of electricity - the highest in the country because of ridiculous wind power and massive subsidies to rent-seeking householders who install solar panels. That's the nonsense Taxi Tom should be looking at to create jobs. Denmark, another big windwill crackedocracy, is finally learning that their obsession with windpower was a huge mistake. It is highly unlikely that the SA Labor government, kept in power for 15 years by dopey, apathetic voters, will come to the same conclusion. Much easier to hand out borrowed money to their sleazy mates and pretend that they are doing something.

The rich get richer the poor get poorer.

Business owners UP Taxpayers DOWN.

The cooperative enterprise model is private enterprise and entirely dependant and at home inside a free market paradigm.

Right wing elitists, intellectually crippled by a master servant mindset, don't like it, given it excludes them and their conventional exploitation. Nonetheless, was the only free enterprise, free market model to survive the Great Depression largely intact!

As envisioned, any and all government involvement, would be strictly limited to start up capitalization and subsequent management mentoring! And eliminate the two main reasons for start up failures; under capitalisation and lack of adequate management skills! And at some point in time the enterprise would stand on its own two profitable feet and pay tax like any other free market enterprise!

And given the recipients would be effectively working for themselves, harmed by less than their best efforts and enterprise!

Simply put, when everyone on the shop or factory floor only ever succeeds when the enterprise does and shares in any failure or downturn! The drones, bottlenecks and any and all reasons to fail are quickly eliminated.

We've thrown useless unreturnable billions at unemployment; but never ever given free market free enterprise cooperative capitalism even as much as a look in!

Instead we seem to be doing what we've essentially always done (same old same old) while expecting different results!? And by definition, madness!

We can't pluck jobs and growth out of thin air or just wish them into being, but there's little or no limit on the number of enterprises we can, if we are so minded and intelligently led, create!?

More tea anyone? Nice party, what?
Alan B.

Elements of that PaTH program look like a step in the right direction on some level, though I think the system as a whole still leaves a lot to waste and could do with a lot more fine tuning.

But this system gives incentive to employ the unemployable, rather than making the unemployed employable.

Say I hire an intern and cash in.
Cheap wages, government payouts.
Say the kid does an excellent job.
Still might be better for me to say "Nah, he was no good, send me another."
...Never actually hire anyone at all, "I'll keep this cash cow rolling."
- My stupid business wouldn't even be viable without it. [Chuckles]
The poor kids are demoralised, lose faith in being part of the workforce; employer gets richer, buys wife nicer things and goes on regular holidays.

What if say a young worker does this internship at pittance wages and then doesn't even get proper job out of it?
How does that look on a resume?
The young worker might feel worthless not empowered.

Job networks cashing in for essentially providing nothing of tangible value...
And still doesn't address the useless WFTD system that isn't providing skills, that punishes instead of providing opportunity, incentive and training.

I've been working on some other ideas on my other thread in the General section.
I recognise we need 5% unemployed for businesses to have a pool of workers to choose from.
But I also recognise that a person who is unemployed doesn't necessarily have to be doing nothing, nor does he necessarily want to be.
I like a jobs for skills program that offers people who are willing to work the opportunity to do so earning double their dole, one that involves creating thousands of new jobs directly around a massive infrastructure project.

Great comments today Alan B.
I've been thinking about those Tesla batteries and engines.
Elon Musk is building a truck and bus next.
Those engines put out 400hp, I wonder if they can be used for medium sized heavy equipment?

There was a time When we were the third wealthiest nation on the planet and a creditor one at that! This was a time of unprecedented prosperity and a time when even as much as 2% unemployment was considered shameful. A time when a single breadwinner's pay packet was enough to purchase a home, a serviceable, car an annual holiday for a family, and indeed, house, clothe, feed and educate that same family!

And a time when there was a co-op in every country town and a floor price under milk, wool and sugar. A time when we owned our banks our low cost power supply, airlines, insurance companies a telco and huge government workshops that employed apprentices in their thousands!

A time when clear felling of native forests was unthinkable. And a time when selective logging doubled the available jobs in a sustainable forest industry; and halved the trees felled.

It was a time when pragmatists ran the country and imagined impossible projects like the now fully paid for and profitable Snowy Mountains scheme!

A time when nation building actually occurred rather than along with now massively overvalued over leveraged farms and iconic industries, were sold to foreign owners at fire sale prices; when like our abandoned railways should have been re-imagined, straightened as dual lane systems, repaired re-watered or rebuilt!

Those times are gone forever? Why? Because brainless power hungry and incompetent ideologues were offended or emasculated by them and our egalitarian society, the envy of the free world!

And so, along with our economic sovereignty and the sacrifices that paid for all of it! Have been privatized or sold down the river of no return? And dumbly labeled as progress!

Alan B.

It's called the "paradox of fiction", or "we were sold a pup", is equally applicable! AB.

This example is a blatant misuse of precious taxpayers funds, (funds redirected away from essential and flagging health and welfare services, essential infrastructure projects and the raft of other far more deserving uses of precious public funds), collected through taxes on the working classes, unable, as do many of the businesses offered a dogs breakfast opportunity, to rort these precious funds from under the nose of taxpayers, given unequal opportunity to strip themselves of obligation to pay a fair share of tax by manipulative politicians. this is why many many people in this country are going broke!
We are sold a fiction of a great sunburned country, the land of rolling planes, full to the brim of ANZAC potential heroes,awaiting the call to sacrifice themselves for freedom sake: But the tale is a fiction!
The reality, you state brilliantly!
We are a bunch of losers, forced into subservience to foreign interests, stripped of freedoms once taken for granted, and like a dog returning to its vomit, forced to watch the continual demise of our once great way of life