One of the greatest fallacies of the Wuhan pandemic was the delusion by too many governments that they could just “freeze” national economies, turning them off and on like flicking a light switch. As we are seeing with, for instance, the spiralling supply chain crisis, it just doesn’t work like that.
And when you pay people to stay at home and watch Netflix, well, guess what’s going to happen…
Industry leaders held urgent talks with the federal government over worker shortages after data revealed more than 200,000 Australians who entered the welfare system during the first round of Covid-19 lockdowns remained reliant on taxpayer support.
Quelle surprise! Despite the self-serving arrogance of the media-political elite, people aren’t stupid. Given the choice between sitting at home and playing computer games, or sitting in traffic for hours to bust their arse in a menial job, well… what do they think was going to happen?
The Australian can reveal that nearly 30 per cent of the 713,000 Australians who came on Jobseeker at the height of the lockdown from March to May 2020 remain on government support.
There were 937,638 people on Jobseeker on December 31 as the unemployment rate reached 4.6 per cent.
Similarly, National’s Social Development and Employment spokesperson Louise Upston pointed out yesterday that, in the last few years, “the number of people spending longer than a year on Jobseeker has increased by over 50 per cent”.
But, as it happens, this plays nicely for the corporate grifters who are just itching to get their steady supply of low-paid foreign workers back.
As migration and skills loom as major election issues, Scott Morrison on Wednesday urged foreign students and backpackers to “come on down now” to fill shortages in the health, aged care, agriculture, retail, hospitality, food and transport sectors […]
Writing in The Australian on Wednesday, Anthony Albanese turned migration into an election issue by declaring Australia was too reliant on overseas workers. The Opposition Leader’s “train locals first” push came a month after the Labor leader refused to back the government’s plan to bring permanent migration back to 160,000 a year.
While Albanese is onto something here, I wouldn’t mistake it for anything other than rank opportunism. If there’s anything the two major parties have agreed on over the last 50 years, it’s mass immigration. In fact, some of the biggest surges in migration in the past few decades have been on Labor’s watch. So, forgive me for smelling an opportunist rat, as an election looms. As former Labor MP Peter Garrett notoriously put it, “once we get in, we’ll just change it all”.
Still, hypocrisy doesn’t make what Albanese says wrong.
Mr Albanese wrote in The Australian on Wednesday that Australia had relied for too long on temporary migrant workers rather than training locals. “The long-term solution is to train more Australians to meet our own labour needs,” the Labor leader said. “It’s extraordinary that we have a skills shortage at the same time as two million Australians are either unemployed or underemployed.
Mr Morrison defended the government’s record on reskilling the workforce for the jobs of the future, which would require more specialists in healthcare and the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths.
“On skills and training, $6.4bn this year alone is being spent on skills and training,” the Prime Minister said.
“That is double what it was before the pandemic. We have a record number of apprentices in trade training — over 220,000. That is the highest number since records began in 1963.”
Yeah, but all that takes time and money. Easier to just live off the constant sugar-hit of mass immigration.
Business leaders have called for the annual permanent migration cap to be increased from 160,000 to between 190,000 and 200,000 in response to labour market pressures.
The Australian
The only problem with mass immigration is that it’s a literal Ponzi scheme. The more migrants flood into the country, the higher the demand on already-overstressed infrastructure. Training skilled workers takes time, so they short-cut by bringing in yet more migrants.
And so it goes…
