Sometimes you read a piece that makes you want to punch the screen. Today’s effort comes from The Australian’s Nick Cater, who has penned an extraordinary attack on welfare recipients, particularly those on unemployment benefits:
11.6 per cent. That’s the budgeted rise in real spending in social security and welfare between last year and 2018, and the minister will have to crack the whip night and day just to keep to it…
Since state welfare provision is, in essence, the socialisation of risk, moral hazard is unavoidable. Put bluntly, any means-tested welfare payment provides an incentive to be poor…
The first point to make about welfare reform is that it will never produce a perfect system. It is hard to strike a balance between assisting victims of brute bad luck and making victimhood a career choice…
If the welfare industry were doing what it should — building self-reliance — it would be steadily putting itself out of business. Its customer base would be shrinking every year as the defenceless learned to defend themselves and the vulnerable became resilient.
Instead, the cohort of destitute, stricken and forlorn individuals grows bigger every year. The system services their problems rather than solves them. Welfare has come to be seen as a virtue rather than the second-best solution it invariably is…
Sooner or later the welfare industry must realise the game is up. The days of throwing money at problems are over, so long as a fiscally responsible government occupies the Treasury benches.
Quite frankly, I have never read such rubbish in my life. Unemployment is high because the economy is weak, not because workers are “lazy” and sitting on welfare.
Does Nick Carter honestly believe that Australia’s 15-19 year olds – where one-in-five are unemployed (see next chart) – would rather receive Youth Allowance (a pitiful $213 a week if living away from home) than working?
Or that the one-in-ten unemployed 20-24 year-olds would rather receive Newstart – a pitiful $258 a week – than work?
Renowned Harvard professor, Larry Summers, said it best last month with the following:
The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. Unless you’re doing things that have things that are effecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs…
The idea that you can just have better training and then there are all these jobs, all these places where there are shortages and we just need the train people is fundamentally an evasion…
I am concerned that if we allow the idea to take hold, that all we need to do is there are all these jobs with skills and if we can just train people a bit, then they’ll be able to get into them and the whole problem will go away. I think that is fundamentally an evasion of a profound social challenge…
What we need is more demand and that goes to short run cyclical policy, more generally to how we operate macroeconomic policy, and the enormous importance of having tighter labor markets, so that firms have an incentive to reach for worker, rather than workers having to reach for firms.
Exactly. Australia’s unemployment problem has little to do with labour supply (i.e. those lazy dole bludgers) and everything to do with deficient demand for local workers from businesses.
If Nick Carter genuinely wants to help the local unemployed, he should lobby to tighten rules around foreign worker visas, in place of the open-slather approach now being pursued by the Abbott Government.
These visas make it far too easy for employers to import labour in place of employing and training locals. They also add to labour supply at a time when labour demand is soft and there is already a large pool of under/unemployed.
Attacking the unemployed for being victims of a weak labour market and idiotic government policy is not just cruel, but also displays a complete lack of understanding about the causes of Australia’s budding unemployment crisis, particularly among Australia’s youth.
