If you are on newstart and doing work for the dole you are employed, if you are on newstart and do 1 hour voluntary work (as you are obliged to do under mutual obligation) you are employed. If you work one hour a week you are employed.

What a crock of crud. Only 60% of men are working in Australia. I suggest the figures don't add up.

Ruawake thanks for clarifying employment statistics methodology.

When employers say they can't find workers they often have quite tight specifications and truthfully there may not be someone with the experience but there will be countless people with the potential to do the job who are overlooked. The people with the experience might be looking for a new role to polish their resume for another challenge.

When Telstra looked for Cobol programmers to update their billing systems, rather than employ forced early retired Cobol programmers they decided to import callow youth from India. Having overheard the conversations on trams the Indians aren't any better than the overlooked Australians.

There are three basic ways which help to build a strong economy. 1st The Government, Employers and our Youth must understand that without education and the development of skilled persons there is no future for our nation. 2nd Employers, Employees and the Unions must work together to produce a win, win situation during negotiations for income and working conditions. 3rd If we do not retain jobs in this country than Employers will have to fit the bill for those left to survive on welfare by way of higher taxes. Remember working as a team we can drive Australia forward in the 21st century

In the last decade potential university students have questioned the wisdom of running up a HECS debt to study into a field where the jobs have been offshored. Although its quite fast to downsize an industry it takes decades to build up an industry, to develop the depth of knowledge and disseminate it through the ranks. There was 30 years investment in IT before it was so hastily dismantled.

The current offshoring regime is destroying Australia's knowledge base.

Just how many salesman can a country support? What use is being a salesman without the customer base able to afford your product / service or the product to sell?

As the unemployment rate is over 5% in NSW I am surprised that WA is a large enough portion of the population to be able to reduce the national unemployment rate. I wonder whether the NSW electorate is percieved to be too sophisticated to lie too blatantly to.

“The current offshoring regime is destroying Australia’s knowledge base.”

This is a glass-half-empty type of argument. While it’s true we can’t afford to have too many salesmen at the expense of productive workers, there is a time and a place for everything, including offshoring. If the Indians can do an adequate job in IT, why not give the work to them if they can do it cheaper? This gives opportunities for ordinary Indians to get jobs (a great life improvement for many of them), while making it more profitable for Australian companies, which can then reinvest in new businesses and industries that create opportunities for Australians to trade in their often drudge jobs for something better.

OK, the knowledge base here is being diluted, but it’s not being destroyed, just exported. Look closely at history, and you’ll see that it’s always been that way. If the Indians do well out of this, it’s just a matter of time before we get a dividend back in some form. The world moves on and if we don’t move with it, it’ll be us who get destroyed.

what you all need to do is read the Australian Constitution 1900.

If you did this then went through the debates

you would know about workchoices.
you would know about the Australia Act

you would know with some research that these people in government have no rights to be there since 2001.

But hey these are your rights that labor and the liberal party are stripping.

Do they know of course they do both sides.

and what are they doing NOTHING

why treat you like mushrooms

and you will accept what they say without making sure it right.

Well i tell you now it is not.

They are acting illegally and frauduantly.

I am Stuart Ulrich
Leader of The Australian Peoples Party.

Why can i say this because i am right and have they acted NO

www.tapp.org.au