How will Tony Abbott create the million jobs that he promised before the election? We penetrate the veil to discover some astonishing opportunities.
Acording to Joe Hockey, unemployed youth will have to apply for 40 jobs per month ( SMH ) while other unemployed must apply for 20 or so positions per month. Currently there are some 720,000 unemployed in Australia ( ABS ) competing for about 140,000 vacancies ( ABS ).
These rather ordinary sounding numbers turn out to represent thrilling opportunities, creating the potential for an administration-led recovery that could power Australia’s future.
Because the application requirement is created by fiat, there is no need to be tied down by market forces or be inconvenienced by changes in demand. It’s recession proof!
Some simple maths cracks open the veil on the panoply of opportunities thus created.
100,000 youth producing 40 applications per month means 4 million applications per month. The remaining 620,000 unemployed (20 applications per month) would deliver a further 12.4 million applications each month, giving a grand total of around 16 million applications per month.
With those kinds of numbers each month, the private sector and government will urgently need more staff to process, sort and respond to those applications, as well as keep records in case of Centrelink checking on the individual unemployed. It’s a veritable miracle of job creation.
We can expect the vacancy rate to increase markedly as these requirements hit the private and public sectors. Furthermore if all applications (or even most) were required to be sent by mail, Australia Post and the pulp & paper industry could be saved overnight! If electronic lodgement was used then that would represent a huge business boost for the NBN. By a stroke of Kevin Andrew’s pen.
To review, 16 million applications per month is 192 million applications per year (remember the actual number of vacancies doesn’t matter, what’s important is that there are plenty of unemployed to send applications). If we allow that one person could reasonably review 50 applications per day (less if replies had to be written) or 12,500 per year, that would result in a need for over 15,000 people just to process the applications!!! Each of them would need supervision, management, training, quality assurance, safety and human resources leading to total employment of around 25,000!
If those activities were conducted by the federal government (business might not have the time available) then 25,000 new public service jobs would be created! That’s nearly an 18% increase in vacancies created by the stroke of a pen. It would only take 40 more initiatives of that scope to achieve Tony Abbott’s 1 million new jobs. Add the 100,000 training places needed to support “Earn or learn” and we see a rosy future indeed.
This author is not sure how the government has budgeted for that much growth but whatever the expense it is surely worthwhile if it forces dole recipients to do their darndest to get real work. If budget is a problem, then ‘work for the dole’ recipients could be used to do the work!
Wake up Australia, the future is here today and it is in administration!
DISCLAIMER: This program is NOT an attempt by government department bureaucrats to increase their own budgets, staff numbers, computer systems and power. Instead it is a well considered element in a government wide policy framework to reinvigorate Australia.
• Pete Godfrey, in Comments: Well done Mike, unfortunately there appears to be no one in the Federal Government who are up to your maths skill level. How bloody stupid is that. I am thinking of applying for the dole just so I can write stupid job applications. One example could be: 59 year old bloke, chronic health problems, degenerative spinal problems, poor eyesight, colour blind, dodgy knees. Sorry can’t drive for long because of my congenital lumbar problems, can’t sit for long for same reasons. Sorry can’t work on ladders due to vertigo. Experienced Electrician, Builder, Labourer, Youth Worker, Teacher (Trade) and general handyman. Your company really needs my experience and enthusiasm. Please give me a job.
• Ros Barnett, in Comments: I am asserting that the jobs newstart recipients apply for do not have to be an advertised job as it is the mantra in jobnet offices that there are other ways to job seek, ie dropping off a cv in person to a workplace. So, I am suggesting that we all attend Eric Abetz office in person and hand in our cvs once a week, explaining of course that we could do his job better than him. Or we could apply to be a political advisor to any of the LNP politicians. I would almost be happy to do that as a volunteer.
Pete Godfrey
June 15, 2014 at 12:32
Well done Mike, unfortunately there appears to be no one in the Federal Government who are up to your maths skill level.
How bloody stupid is that.
I am thinking of applying for the dole just so I can write stupid job applications.
one example could be.
59 year old bloke, chronic health problems, degenerative spinal problems, poor eyesight, colour blind, dodgy knees. Sorry can’t drive for long because of my congenital lumbar problems, can’t sit for long for same reasons. Sorry can’t work on ladders due to vertigo.
Experienced Electrician, Builder, Labourer, Youth Worker, Teacher (Trade) and general handyman.
Your company really needs my experience and enthusiasm. Please give me a job.
Karl Stevens
June 15, 2014 at 13:04
They will not need any more staff to throw the applications into a shredder.
John Day
June 15, 2014 at 13:20
Hi Mike . You have not recognized the silly Liberals real agenda – the huge boost to the economy in the additional number of private and public staff needed to read the 192 million application per year, plus the Center Link staff to administer all this.
Steve Biddulph
June 15, 2014 at 13:29
Wonderful article, and its not really satire, because thats what it will take to run that kind of inane administrative burden. Worried about Pete Godfrey though, any osteopaths out there might help?
Dr Buck Emberg
June 15, 2014 at 14:32
Nice satire Mike!
Pete Godfrey
June 15, 2014 at 16:03
Hi Steve #4 my job application is actually a real statement of my health these days. I still work for myself and just do the number of hours I can. I have dealt with pain all my life due to my back so am quite used to it.
Really what I am trying to point out is the stupidity of the government trying to get people like me or who are worse off applying for jobs.
Can you imagine the companies insurance mob saying oh yes he is a good person to employ.
Neither can I, I would have to tell any potential employer of my health status, so I reckon my chances of working until I am 70 are not so good.
Unless I keep doing what I do now, and stay self employed.
I can and have managed my colour blindness in the past and if I get stuck I just ask someone else what colour the wires are. I only have problems with Red, Green and Brown, the rest are fine.
It is pretty obvious that we have the lunatics in charge of the asylum.
PLM
June 15, 2014 at 16:06
#4 worry not for Pete G, Mr Biddulph, he has just been reclassified by an independent assessor as fit and ready for Work for The Dole in a faraway place- perhaps living in a garden shed while working for a very rich person!
john hayward
June 15, 2014 at 17:24
If we had any evidence that Tony has ever read anything, I would suspect that he lifted his idea of tough love from Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, which was to eat starving Irish children.
As Godfrey would be too stringy for that, Tony might have been thinking about sending him to Iraq, or perhaps boiling him down for soap.
John Hayward
T Keane
June 15, 2014 at 18:00
And about time my fat wife got off her lardy arse and went out there into the real world and got a job instead of sponging off me and leaning on the system. Well done Abbott and Hockey. If anyone could pop around and help her with the applications I would be grateful as her arthritis is pretty bad.
Ros Barnett
June 15, 2014 at 21:08
I am asserting that the jobs newstart recipients apply for do not have to be an advertised job as it is the mantra in jobnet offices that there are other ways to job seek, ie dropping off a cv in person to a workplace. So, I am suggesting that we all attend Eric Abetz office in person and hand in our cvs once a week, explaining of course that we could do his job better than him. Or we could apply to be a political advisor to any of the LNP politicians. I would almost be happy to do that as a volunteer.
I congratulate TKeane above on his profound irony although his ironing leaves much to be desired.
Chris Murray
June 15, 2014 at 21:09
and don’t make the mistake of applying for MORE than 40 per fortnight, in the vain hope that you might get credit for the extra applications next month. You will still have to apply for 40 or more again in the next fortnight. As you can imagine it would take centrelink at least 2 full days to check each persons list each fortnight, allowing for unanswered calls and time zone complications …. I can see a black market in lists developing here … yet another job opportunity? …. or maybe companies springing up to generate dummy vacancies and contact details for those desperate enough to take the easy way out.
john hayward
June 15, 2014 at 21:28
Given the necessary funding,( and inclination), the TIC could employ tens of thousands investigating and processing corruption allegations. The work would never end.
John Hayward
Jon Johnson
June 15, 2014 at 23:56
Great work, Mike.
Another stupid thing in Budget2014. Nothing this government has done in 9 months, make sense.
All in favour of the suggestion to flood Abetz office with job applications.
R. Z.
June 16, 2014 at 04:13
This is actually not satire but fact. How else to account for the boom in “employment services” Job Network Providers, etcetera. Also the current salivating about tendering for admin for the Work-for-the-Dole, and the outrageous expense required to administer the Basics Card. There is a whole Poverty Industry structure being built at the expense of the public and those in poverty.
BillR
June 16, 2014 at 04:38
I believe a suitable solution may be found in what I’ll call a ‘job applicant’s co-op’.
What if, say a large enough number of people out of work formed an informal contact site so that although unemployed, they could just ask each other for work every week?
There’s nothing to the best of my knowledge that stipulates jobs cannot be provided by other unemployed people – people do sometimes need casual help for things they can’t do themselves.
I’m also not aware of any provision that requires ‘gainful employment’ to be for a specified minimum sum, nor forbids work for goods-in-kind.
So far as I am aware, the meaning of ‘gainful employment’ is just that – for gain, or benefit.
Certainly apply for whatever genuine jobs are available, but a network like this could not only insulate against the knuckle-dragging droogies of the witless, but foment an alternative concept to the everyday economy.
Jennifer Eric
June 16, 2014 at 13:45
Sadly, what happens now is organisations don’t advertise to stop the influx of unqualified applications. This results in the full field not been aware of the position and perhaps not the best outcome for the business.
Why is this done? Swimming through an avalanche of applications is time and financially consuming. But in the case of our business as we refer to the “centrelink apps”; they for the most part don’t address the selection criteria and are immediately dis-qualified. The process of sending the letters to over 100 applicants say such is a waste of time, money and resources.
A medium sized business with over 90 employees with no HR department or single resource wholly dedicated to this role.
Scott Linden Jones
June 16, 2014 at 15:21
Here’s a slight improvement to this brilliant plan. The applications processing can be done offshore for one ninth of the price of locally.
First-pass applications processing can be done offshore, culling to perhaps one in 20 applications to be viewed back in Australia.
There is already a rapid uptake of government work being done offshore (I’m not joking). It’s actually cheaper to make Australian workers redundant, pay them the dole, and do the work offshore.
Up to the point as which there is not enough taxation revenue to support welfare any more, then we have a teensy bit of a problem.
Mike Bolan
June 16, 2014 at 15:32
Some excellent suggestions and observations here.
R.Z. Spot on and along with BillR starting to reveal the way that Australia is ‘organised’.
A recent article in the Australian showed how billions were allocated to aboriginal housing but hardly any of it ended up as housing. It all went to bureaucracies and contracting firms. A similar problem has been identified in Tassie which has Australia’s fastest growing bureaucracy.
‘Yes Minister’ started as a documentary and failed but succeeded when converted into a humour show.
Being strangled by bureaucracy is something that politicians allow because they either:-
* don’t know how to deal with the problem
* don’t even realise that there is a problem
* rely too heavily on bureaucrats for advice
* don’t have any better ideas themselves
* don’t care as long as they are OK.
In the end the entire system collapses of its own incompetence, slowness and exponentially rising costs (e.g. Soviet Union).
Governments forget that the public service is a player and they have conflicts of interest, needs and wants, biases and so on, just like everyone else that tries to get their hands on government monies. Politicians think of bureaucrats as ‘one of us’ and there is the danger. The taxpayers become ‘them’.
What is also forgotten is that politicians are only around for a short time, whereas pubic servants can be there for generations. If you want to corrupt someone, best try the public service first because they have more clout and will be there longer!
Chris Murray
June 16, 2014 at 16:11
Yet another bureaucratic problem is work for the dole. Over time the incentive for local councils. NGOs, voluntary groups and the likes to draw down on cheap labour through work for the dole schemes eventually gives rise to a sub-culture of quasi public servants who do all the work cheaply and laced with the stigma of being a work for the dole program..
Apart from the mis-match of skills to jobs that this can lead to, potentially resulting in an inferior outcome for the work completed, I guess things worker’s compensation, like sick leave, recreation leave and long service leave (God forbid!!) no longer apply and there would certainly be no union issues.
It seems that there is considerable pressure to expand this concept to the private sector … so we end up with a non-unionised compliant work force by stealth.
All drawing a bit of a long bow but I am sure Work Choice advocates would be happy with the outcome !!
Chris Murray
June 16, 2014 at 16:25
BillR, there is already a concept in play, called bartering, which achieves pretty much the outcome you are describing. I believe the ATO is watching, with interest, just how popular the concept becomes.
Simon Warriner
June 16, 2014 at 21:04
Mike, at the risk of becoming tiresome, with respect to this statement:
“Governments forget that the public service is a player and they have conflicts of interest, needs and wants, biases and so on, just like everyone else that tries to get their hands on government monies. Politicians think of bureaucrats as ‘one of us’ and there is the danger. The taxpayers become ‘them’.”
there is a very simple question we need to ask.
WHY?
Why is it that the people we elect to govern us, through the act of overseeing the activities of our public servants, fail to constrain the ever present urge of public servants to grow the system in which they exist.
Could it be that by allowing party political representatives to dominate we are selecting for people who do not adequately understand conflicted interest, as demonstrated by those individuals acceptance for themselves a position that conflicts their interest between party and constituents?
Mike Bolan
June 17, 2014 at 01:07
#22 Hmmmm…let’s see now…twirl…twist….
Could it be that legally, government has all of the rights while the citizens have all of the responsibilities?
Or perhaps it’s that the most blatant tax bludgers with the biggest culture of entitlement are politicians and their hangers on?
Or could it be a hangover from the Empire when governments were the overlords and their subjects were cringing convicts and other jail bait?
Could it be that the citizens very real powerlessness versus the huge power, money and privileges accorded to government; actually prevents any semblance of democracy from emerging?
Whew…I thought you had me there for a sec.
William Boeder
June 17, 2014 at 01:49
How thoughtful of Eric to dump this scheme upon the poor and needy, he is bound to have had a great deal of input into this multi-pronged attack upon the humble people on the street.
We must all try and understand that this is the sort of strictly disciplined official law-making business that has become a real favourite of our holy minded Senator Eric.
You know I might just travel down to Highbury and visit that part of town that houses this religious stoic then to offer unto him my gardening skills, surely this would free-up more of his time so that he could spend longer and greater hours upon the mount each day delivering his sermons to at least half a dozen febrifuge induced and enfeebled genuflecting Highbury citizens.
I wouldn’t expect to be paid, oh no, not at all, no, no- I would consider myself a lucky old chap were he to offer me my fill of his garden snails and a squirt of water from his rusting cob-webbed garden tap.
Surely there are others who might rally around this once-upon-a-time ‘real-estate huckstering Hobbit of the Cloth’ and show a gentle kindness toward his well nourished and expensively feathered self?
What about you Langfield, I could easily cope with another kind hearted Tasmanian.
Ian
June 18, 2014 at 21:43
Why don’t the unemployed write to each other seeking jobs?
joffa
July 28, 2014 at 14:16
Don’t forget that they also have to work for the dole, so all up they will probably have to put in about 70/80 hours a week for the paltry amount the unemployment benefit pays, plus all the money on petrol, public transport fares, telephone calls etc.
.
Katie08
July 28, 2014 at 15:37
This is all academic because the loathsome, totally inept, internationally despised and reviled LNP have not got a hope in hell of winning the next election! The catastrophic results of the LNP in the recent Queensland Stafford state by-election reveals the depth of hatred and disillusionment by the overwhelming majority of Australians against the Federal LNP! Queenslanders voiced their protest against the swaggering, arrogant Campbell Newman who’s days are well and truly numbered and he KNOWS it!
Mind you, the colossal arrogance and “Born to Rule” mentality of Abbott, Hockey, Pyne, Brandis, Cormann, Morrison is so overbearing that they absolutely REFUSE to listen to ordinary people and continue on and on with their blatant LIES and callous disregard to our most vulnerable citizens. They do this at their own peril because most of us will NEVER forget how many people are suffering under their inane, regressive policies.
steve
July 29, 2014 at 19:23
An organised job seeker only needs to create an interesting one page CV and make a few hundred copies then each day find a company or two they would like to work for and send them this CV asking them for an opportunity of an interview for any suitable jobs they might have going. It wouldn’t take them much time and would satisfy the applying for jobs requirement so not a big problem at all.
Chris Murray
July 29, 2014 at 21:58
Except at 70c a throw, plus stationery the cost becomes considerable for somebody with no income, let alone probably no permanent address … what would you suggest for a return address? … maybe the local centrelink office?
Chris Crooks
August 10, 2014 at 04:49
Hi Mike,
I took your original text and started a conversation with my local mp (lower case because of his ineffectiveness)
If you want a copy of the whole sorry sage please email me at the email address I have given:
[email protected]
If you mark it high importance, I will reply quickly.
Regards, Chris Crooks.