Lots of to-ing and fro-ing about what sorts of looks a woman presenting issues about body image should have.

Be interesting to put all that aside for a minute.

I wonder if a bloke's social worth, especially as a politician, was judged primarily on looks who the best and worst representatives would be.

Sorry - last post was made to this thread by mistake.

However, just a word on social security issues.

It's an advantage to have a robust and generous social security system because it's like a form of insurance for us all.

None of us have guarantees that we won't suddenly become disabled or be made redundant or go bankrupt when all of our investments bottom out; or that someone we care about won't experience some adverse event that means they can't earn enough to cover their mortgage and maintain their lifestyle.

Nobody sets out in life planning to be a homeless, unemployable bum with emphysema at the age of 50, but none of us are immune to such a fate.

Antiseptic<Is unemployment among male youth a significant problem and if so why>

My spouse and I have also noticed that everywhere you look when going into local shops and businesses female employees are everywhere with only a few males here and there. Even at the local hardware shop, Bunnings, where you think there might be more male staff.

I don’t think women are responsible for this though, in fact it is probably more for the same reason the airplanes always wanted attractive women dealing with their customers(passengers) discrimination against older or less attractive women.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said there are no apprenticeships,construction work or manufacturing jobs. You can blame the privitisation of big apprenticeship training areas like the Railways by the government. Also big businesses that get things manufactured overseas selling out Australian workers for slave labour wages but still seeking to sell at Australian prices.

As for the lack of construction work, why isn’t the government freeing up much cheaper land for the construction of cheaper homes for new home buyers. You can also blame the workers on visa’s. Business and government don’t want to pay to train our youth they’d rather bring in already trained workers from overseas and save themselves the cost of training.

Boys who aren’t academically interested should be immediately put into a trade or apprenticeship upon finishing high school. The government showed a lack of foresight when they privatised the Railways for the sake of a profit. The employment and training in trades of a lot of young males had great community benefits.

I think that Abbott would find a lot of parental opposition to the sending of their sons and daughters to some remote mining town on the other side of the country. Especially their daughters whose safety they would worry about more , for obvious reasons. Don’t mess with middle Australia and their children would be the message to the government I think.

The reality, is that people enjoy having somebody they can be prejudiced against, without looking like an unfair bigot (in their own eyes, anyway). Imagine the uproar and indignation, if the idea was to address an unrelated issue such as crime rates of African immigrants, by sending them off to Western Australia to work in the mines. Unfortunately for the unemployed, they are about the last group of people that everybody gets a free kick at. By the same measure, any person taking such a free kick really needs to take stock of what is missing from their own lives, and why picking on weaker people makes them feel better.

PatTheBogan and the rest of my 'fan club', I have no problems with people who are unemployed, provided they are actively seeking work.

Now you can defend them as much as you like, but, Living in some far away place is not actively seeking work. In fact, in many cases their efforts are expended finding ways to avoid being caught out.

By all means be unemployed, after all it's a free country, but don't expect me to pick up the tab.

Now someone mentioned drug testing at work sites. So why don't centrelink test for drugs? After all, if one has drugs in their system it lessens their chances of finding employment these days.

Is this then making an effort to find work.

You might not really want to accept it, but the reality is quite different from how you would like things to be. "Just dont expect me to pick up the bill for it", well that sounds like the ravings of one on the aged/dsp pension. Centrelink in its previous incarnation, used to run the CES as well, this has been outsourced to private enterprise to run (which is the source of the PM's wifes' money). Suggesting that centrelink conducts drug testing as well might be expecting a bit much of them. A very costly way of finding out what you already know anyway. With the introduction of GST about 10 years ago, we are all paying for it, even those who recieve centrelink payments. Would you travel for 90 minutes each way, to do a days' work? Drive for 3 hours, at your own expense, then have some of your dole taken back when you declare it? there is no benefit of working in that case.