Terry McCrann: Ignore ABS figures, Victoria’s hotel quarantine debacle a jobs killer
Criminal negligence over hotel quarantine in Victoria which has let the virus rip through Melbourne and over state borders will kill people and has stuffed it for the national economy, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Thanks Victoria and more specifically the Andrews Labor government: the criminal negligence over hotel quarantine — which has sent the virus rampaging through Melbourne and also leaping over state borders and, according to the state’s chief health officer Brett Sutton, will kill people — has also pretty well stuffed it for the entire national economy.
Just when the — true, fake — ABS jobs and jobless numbers showed the economy bouncing off the floor after the initial government-ordered lockdown plunged it into recession, along came Victoria to send one quarter of the national economy back into lockdown recession, dragging the rest of the country after it.
The headline from the ABS announced the jobless rate increasing from 7.1 per cent in May to 7.4 per cent in June — the highest it’s been this century.
Now as I have been explaining this is the fakest statistic the ABS has ever produced — yet despite that, the ABS immediately placed it in pride of place at the top of its home page and there it will grossly misleadingly sit for the next month.
This time around, it is in fact doubly misleading, because rather than getting worse the real jobs and jobless state of play actually improved into June.
It went from utterly disastrous to slightly less utterly disastrous; on my “guesstimate” the real jobless rate dropped from around 20 per cent in May to around 18 per cent in June.
In May, over 2.6 million Australians were either actually jobless or kept “officially” in jobs thanks only to JobKeeper. In June, this dropped to “just” 2.4 million Australians. Whoopee.
Now, the ABS measure of what it calls the “underemployment rate” did pick up this improvement. It fell from 13.1 to 11.7 per cent.
This measures those officially jobless according to the ABS definition plus those who do have a job but want to work longer hours.
This is not the same as my “guesstimate”. Mine does not include those who have a job but want to work longer. If I add them on, the real underemployment rate is much higher than the ABS’s claimed figure.
The real underemployment rate sat somewhere between 24 per cent of the workforce (using the ABS measure for those who wanted to work more) and 28 per cent (using the equivalent and more credible Roy Morgan Research number).
This is the real and shocking — and most meaningful and instructive — indicator of just how devastating this has been for so many Australians and their families.
Something around one in four of the entire workforce — between 3.2 million and 3.7 workers — are either out of work, have given up looking for a job, have a job but desperately want to work more, or are in zombie jobs paid for by the taxpayer via JobKeeper.
Again to stress, and as I have explained before, even this figure only includes around 1 million of the 3.3 million in total being paid via JobKeeper — my “guesstimate” of those who would have been sacked but for JobKeeper.
This shows how far we have to come back to anywhere close to a reasonable level of unemployment.
It also shows how utterly critical JobKeeper has been in stopping all this from being even more devastating.
It’s not just the 3.3 million whose wages and salaries are being paid by the taxpayer — the 1 million or so of whom would have been sacked but for it; with the other 2.3 million probably keeping their jobs but at crippling cost to their employers.
It’s also all the jobs — and businesses — that have been saved from obliteration by the spending of those 3.3 million. It shows, most damningly, how the Victorian disaster has taken the entire country right back to the brink. For all this measured that improving state of play as around the middle of June.
Now the more timely and more reliable Morgan jobs data, which we saw two weeks ago, indicated that the bounce back in jobs had flattened in the second half of June.
But that was before Victorian Lockdown 2.0. As I say, the first bad impact will be on Victoria, but just like with the virus itself, after a delay this will start to feed negatively into the rest of Australia from now on.
Heaven help us if the virus leakage into NSW causes that state to follow Victoria into lockdown.
It’s bad enough that NSW will get an indirect buffeting from Victoria; if it joined Victoria in Lockdown 2.0 that would have well over half the national economy back in deep recession.
We can survive six weeks; 12 weeks — or worse, more — would be utterly devastating, JobKeeper or no JobKeeper.
DOWNUNDER HONG KONG FANTASY
The idea that Australia could replace Hong Kong as a major financial centre sits somewhere between “clutching (desperately) at straws” and complete fantasy.
The idea’s been around for more than 35 years and if we could go back to 1985 we might have a chance. But not in the online, 24/7 digital reality of 2020 and certainly not both “post virus” and “post China”.
What do I mean by “post China”? Well, the “opportunity” is supposedly opening up because of China’s crackdown on HK.
But the entire basis of HK’s 21st century success as a financial capital has been precisely as the key entry point to China, the fastest growing and now world’s second biggest economy.
So after cracking down on HK, China is supposed to happily embrace Australia as its new “partner”? And we are supposed to happily embrace China — did I mention Huawei — in return? In your dreams.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: Ignore ABS figures, Victoria’s hotel quarantine debacle a jobs killer