The Centre for Independent Studies is a right wing think tank that wants small government . Under the previous government job network providers who criticised policy lost their funding.

Australia does not publish a meaningful unemployment figure. In 2007 Costello said Australia's unemployment rate was lower than Germany. What a pack of lies. In Germany you are counted as unemployed if you have less than 15 hours work a week, in Australia you are unemployed if you have less than 1 hour paid or unpaid in the survey period.

As Peter says the job network system now operating has been modified to remove the corrupt job network providers but I can't see that duplication of backoffice operations makes the whole system more efficient. It must cost to report back to the government and for the government to audit and oversee the providers.

The current job network ethos of any work is better than no work leads social welfare recipients to accepting part time jobs for 5 hours a week, claiming Newstart allowance to supplement their income. Employers who organise their workforce in this manner are having their wages bill supplemented by the taxpayer.

Australia needs to address the concept of full time work, review casual work which suits corporations more than it does workers. The new system needs to rout out corrupt employers that do not pay a living wage. I could name and shame an aged care home.

The job network requirements need to be reorganised so that Newstart Allowance recipients can take on seasonal agricultural work without losing their benefits or engage in massive amounts of bureaucratic palaver. Maybe we should permit people on Newstart allowance to remain in the countryside rather than forcing them to move to the cities to look for non-existent factory work.

Where is the employer's obligation to give a fair go, even if you're not of the dominant, most desirable socio-economic or cultural groups.

Nobody ever would give me a go for anything lasting in line with my skills and qual's because as soon as they see me, its "no way" from their perspective. I've even had offers withdrawn, and a couple of contract jobs axed once the client saw me and he/his staff expressed concern about my status.

It seems that being of opposite presentation to your anatomical or birth sex is a bar to skilled or semi-skilled ongoing employment of any kind.

And the job network don't try hard for you if you are also very hard to place. They are there to control, to push obligation.

How otherwise could I be of above average intelligence, skilled yet over 30 and had not worked for the majority of my adult life. Isn't this disturbing anybody? Is this the country I should be proud of saying is my own, is this the land of the fair go?

Reading POVs like this reminds me that we have not come far from the smug Victorians or the welfare organisations we read about in Angela's Ashes and similar accounts.

The unemployed have no unions to protect them. They are one of the least heard from groups of Australians. They have no power, no voice, no representation. Their numbers may be large enough to be courted for votes but with no organisation or cohesiveness they pose no threat.

Their entire existence depends upon the whim, campaign rhetoric and political tides of people who have never met them and have as little knowledge of them as they do of Hottentots. They are talked about, provided for, governed and organised with no consultation, no understanding of their lives and little contact with reality.

The realities behind such WASP, PWE, and fine-sounding condescension as "Any job is better than no job" and "mutual obligation" are totally unknown by those who righteously mouth such slogans. The unemployed are depicted as uniformly shiftless, illiterate, dishonest, ungodly, criminal, Other. In the them and Us rhetoric they don't even warrant a capital letter. They do not exist when their betters consistently mis-quote their Lucky Country themes.

Yep. Certain organisations indeed have tried to disassociate themselves from schemes concocted over shiny boardtables by more privilleged beings. That's because they are working daily down in the shitepile where the average Aussie has never been and fears to go.

Geez. They don't need more schemes and plans and initiatives being made for their own good. They need to be listened to. But unless or until anyone else knows what its like to walk a mile in thier Vinnies shoes the "problem of the unemployed" is never going to be solved.

BRAVO ROMANY!!

Superb post. But please, PLEASE do not refer to unemployed people as 'the unemployed'.

Your own post illustrates why. My strength of feeling about this came about from a professional situation where I saw a normally strong but reserved human-being who was repeatedly categorized by a colleague as being part of 'the unemployed'.

I saw this in the film "The Elephant Man":- he burst out in utter anguish that he was not THE unemployed..., he was a human being. That he was a PERSON, and should be referred to as that along with all other unemployed people.

I never forgot that. (And I hope the arrogant .rick who opposed me didn't either).

We won.

Peter Saunders author of Poverty in Australia: Beyond the Rhetoric is back on his favourite rocking horse fulminating against the downtrodden and working poor acting as a "cover" for his political cohorts and reactionary counterparts. Saunders is not a naive professor, he understands only too well the agenda the Rudd government intends to carry out. The Financial Review, yes the same paper who published Saunders article)also published a REPORT from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting on March 26, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the eight state and territory leaders, all from the Labor Party, formally adopted a sweeping agenda to implement a new “wave” of free-market measures. These measures will inevitably mean vicious attacks on workers, their jobs, wages, workplace conditions, safety rules and social services. The thrust of the report, after unravelling the 'jargon' or 'cover' is putting the boot into workers, the unemployed, and the disabled and to cheapen labour under a sweeping agenda the politicians and Murdoch laughingly call "brutopia". The reports "enhancing productivity” means driving up the rate of exploitation of workers’ labour power, while “workforce mobility” is largely about ensuring employers’ access to more freely-available supplies of lower-cost labour on a national basis. Under the heading of infrastructure, the report spoke of making reforms that were “critical to enhance Australia’s future economic performance”. Essentially too, the aim is to exploit the decayed condition of basic social facilities, such as roads, railways, water, energy, schools and hospitals, as the pretext for introducing “Public Private Partnerships”, a form of privatisation.
The "good professor for the poor" whilst mentioning "breaching" a soothing government euthemism for putting the boot into the disabled never explains how the government are driving them into substandard work and very high levels of exploitation.
Saunders attacks the notion that "welfare is a right, and it should be paid unconditionally to people who are in need of it." Of course it should! Just as the money is paid for through taxes for hospitals and education and is diverted into the pockets of the politicians and their cronies.

Ginx - ok, got your point. I used to refer to unemployed people as "we" until I left Australia for this job