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