unemployment

Federal Government dictates what happens to Australia? The States are at the mercy of autocratic decision-making?

Dear Premier Napthine, This link refers to 100,000 jobs created since 2010. That is 25,000 per year. It also refers to your plan to create 200,000 more: But Melbourne's population has been growing in recent years at 2.5% per annum. 0.025 x 4,250,000 is 106,250 per year. Over 4 years that is 425,000. Let's assume an average family with two children and either one or both parents employed. That means we need roughly an extra 25,000 to 50,000 new jobs per year just to employ the additional people. "Dr Napthine said the Victorian Jobs in the 21st Century plan would use the Coalition Government's record investment in large-scale infrastructure projects as a springboard to create a diverse, highly skilled and productive workforce that will underpin a strong economy for decades to come." Well 20 years is 2 decades. Based on population growth we are talking about between 500,000 and a million additional jobs every 20 years. And most of these have to be in Melbourne? Doing jobs including building freeways and apartment blocks? And making coffee? Australia's unemployment rate has been growing at around 2.3% per annum for the last decade or more. With such massive growth in population and the corresponding massive growth in demand for jobs, how is all this supposed to work when Australia's trend rate of unemployment growth is almost identical to Melbourne's trend rate in population growth? What is Dr Napthine doing; and why is he doing it? Is he simply reacting to the Federal Government's autocratic decision to continue to use mass migration to achieve what its economic advisors call GDP growth? Annual GDP growth per capita has been less than 1% for over a decade while the annual growth of the Federal Budget has been between 6% and 8% per capita for over a decade. Something doesn't add up; but Government and the mainstream media aren't talking about it.

Kelvin Thomson: Unemployment to Rise - Time to Cut Migrant Worker Programs

The rapid increase in Australia’s migrant worker programs over the past decade has been justified with the claim that Australia is short of workers. This claim is now clearly false. The latest unemployment rise, along with the certainty of job losses at Holden, Ford and Qantas, and projections that the resources industry construction workforce will collapse over the next 4 years, shedding more than 78,000 jobs by 2018, make this clear.

We are now being told that the jobless rate will rise within about 18 months to 6.25% from the current 5.8%, and stay there through to the end of 2016-17!

This means more Australians will be out of work than at any time during the past decade, and far more than during the Global Financial Crisis, when unemployment peaked at 5.9%.

Last month unemployment increased by 3,400 to 712,500. Surely we must give the over 700,000 Australians who are out of work, and the Holden, Ford and Qantas workers who are going to lose their jobs, our priority.

We should reduce both the permanent migrant worker program and the temporary migrant worker programs to the levels they were 10 or 20 years ago. That way the jobs that will be created in the next 5 years will go to Australians who are out of work, or who face losing their jobs.

If we are fair dinkum about reducing unemployment, and fair dinkum about increasing workforce participation, we will cut migrant worker programs and build and use the skills of out-of-work Australians.

Kelvin Thomson

Enlarged graph of Population in December 2009 by age and sex, showing activity together with social and physical dependency



This large graph is to supplement a smaller graph accompanying the main article on a different node.

Sources: Disability, Ageing and Carers: Summary of Findings, Australia 2003, Catalogue no. 4430.0, ABS, Canberra, 2004; Labour Force, Australia, Detailed - Electronic Delivery, Catalogue no. 6291.0.55.001; General Social Survey 2006, Confidentialised Unit Record File supplied by the ABS
Notes: The ABS defines a profound disability as one where the person always needs help with one or more of the activities involved in communication, mobility and self care, and a severe disability as one where the person sometimes needs such help.
The data on labour force participation are for December 2009, but detailed age break downs were only available for June 2009. All of the data have been standardised to the age/sex structure of the population in June 2009.

Graph by Assoc. Prof. Dr Katharine Betts, (Swinburne University, Victoria) author of Immigration Ideology, MUP, 1988 and The Great Divide, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999. She is also the co-editor, with Bob Birrell, of the Monash demographic quarterly, People and Place..

Chickens of energy shortage come home to roost in London stock market

In London the growth economics gravy-train for golden boys is going off the rails and it looks like 10,000 to 40,000 traders may lose their jobs, according to a report on the French news on France2 Info 20h on 28-5-08. London has been known as a world financial capital for a few years now and thousands of traders go to work every day there. The so-called sub-prime crisis, however, and oil prices, seem to be coming home to roost. Since the beginning of the year, 4000 traders have been quietly sacked. The sackings are made discretely, very quickly, to avoid demoralising those still on board. Traders won't risk their jobs by talking about the situation, but it is anticipated that up to 40,000 will lose their jobs by the end of the year. Sheila Newman

Australia's claimed record low unemployment rates

This is a response to a post on an Online Opinion discussion another thread at concerning "How Bad is terrorism" I am putting it here to prevent putting too much off-topic material in the other thread. It also interects another current thread topic "Workchoices the hidden victims" at and the article "What do AWAs really pay?" at Australia's claimed record low unemployment levels has become a catch-all answer to any concern about any consequence of any Federal Government policy decision. Some examples: * A standard response to objections to the removeal of protection against unfair dismissal or any other abuse resulting from Howard's "Work Choices" legislation is that with such low unemplyment any worker can easily leave one job and find another. * Once when confronted by a caller on talk-back radio in late 2005, as I seem to recall, by a woman who feared for the loss of her husband's job in a Telstra call centre due to Sol Trujillo's plan to axe at least 10,000 jobs over the next five years, Prime Minister John Howard responded that the economic propserity and low unemplyment he claimed that his government had brought about would ensrure that her husband had little to fear if his job was lost. Also, hysteria about our supposed 'labor shortage' is also used as an excuse to break down Australia's immigration control. Without allowing skilled migrants into the country, it is claimed that our economic boom will be brought to a grinding halt. As a consequence, the categories of 'temporary' workers allowed in under the section 457 skilled worker visa program have been expanded. Partially as a result of 'skilled migration' under Howard who famously said on 6 December 2001 immediately prior to the Federal elections 'We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come', immigration has rocketed up to an unfficial 300,000 from only 68,000 in Howard's first year of office (See Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald at However, a good many important facts are overlooked when these claims of low unemplyment are made. Many of the jobs that people are forced to take are not the same kinds of jobs that were on offer a generation or more ago. Many occupations are casualised with no career path. The hours are often shorter and unpredictable. Largely, thanks to "Work Choices" provisions for penalty rates have been effectively removed. One category of very unpleasant and work which appear to be booming is traffic controller. The frenetic expansion of road building to cope with our enforced population growth has created the necessity for ever more people to control the flow of traffic past roadworks and construction sites. It would be hard to imagine a less interesting and more unhealthy occupation than to stand at the side of a road in the hot sun for the order of six to ten hours per day breathing in poisonous car and truck fumes. Other categories in our emplyment 'boom' would inlcude telemarketing, delivery of junk mail, casual unloading of containers (low paid work that leaves one physically exhausted after having worked, and been paid for, only four hours). Our economy has largely shifted away from a situation where practically every motivated person could aspire to achieving a stimulating socially useful and well paid job to what we have now. The number of jobs in Australia's now booming mining sector still seems insignificant compared to Austalia's overall population. Also, this industry is not sustainable in the longer term because it depends upon the extraction of finite non-renewable resources and is contributing unacceptably to the planet's grave current environmental problems.