Tory Shepherd: UnAustralian dole bludger myth won’t work this time
The PM is selfishly reviving Australia’s habit of pretending good work is on every corner while bludgers smoke bongs on their couches. He should do a better job, writes Tory Shepherd.
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Remember the Paxtons? They were the original celebrity “dole bludgers”, the family A Current Affair dragged into infamy and acrimony in 1996.
For various reasons these kids were not keen on moving to the Whitsundays, cutting their hair, donning uniforms, and taking up menial jobs.
They were made scapegoats by people who wanted to argue that young people should be forced to take whatever job was offered to them or be kicked off the dole.
From the reaction at the time, the Paxtons were akin to a bunch of Christopher Skases, absconding with other people’s money to live a life of wealthy indolence.
Since then there have been various poster-children wheeled out to show that the dole is far too generous, and those on it too lazy.
At about $550 a week the new dole – JobSeeker – is more generous than the old dole, an unliveable $280-odd a week.
The Federal Government says the nation can’t afford to keep that increase up.
(While announcing $270 billion over a decade for defence, mind you. It’s not clear how much of that is new money, but the spend serves to highlight that when the Government says “can’t”, it means “won’t.)
So we can expect to see the return of the Paxtons, or their ilk. Caricatures created to convince Australians there is a viral load of dole bludgers refusing to take jobs.
To get people to believe that you have to paint a picture of a world where decent jobs are on every corner, waiting to be snapped up, but that there are busloads of people who’d rather smoke bongs on the couch.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison got the oils out this week.
He said JobSeeker could be an “impediment” to getting people into work. He had a lot of anecdotal evidence, he said, that this was happening.
Yes, anecdata, the bane of good policy.
A story on dole bludgers in The Australian was illustrated with the case study of Eddy Nader, a proud Liberal voter who runs cafes at four Sydney BP service stations.
He said he’d been unable to fill barista jobs.
The 46-year-old businessman told the paper the gig was about 20 hours a week, at $28.38 an hour, so a total of $567.60 a week.
“If I was to take out the weekly tax – that’s 52 bucks – they’re on $515.60. But they’ve got $550 (a week) on JobSeeker. They say, ‘why would I come to work?’,” he told the paper.
“People are just taking the mickey out of the scheme. It’s become a farce.”
The outcome was “unAustralian”, he said, deploying that most meaningless and abject term.
It’s a term used to cast shame on people.
I did my time working overnight at a McDonald’s drive-through window, copping consistent abuse for a pittance. And I’m not ashamed to say that, if that were today, I’d take JobSeeker in an instant.
Surely most people would.
But, hey, enough of the realm of anecdotes. Let’s look at some actual data.
Do people even dole bludge?
According to the Federal Government’s latest Jobs in Demand Employer Survey, about one in four of those companies surveyed were having trouble recruiting people.
Of those, about half were facing a lack of applicants.
So one in eight companies are struggling to attract applicants.
But that doesn’t mean people are shirking work. It means what it says. Companies are struggling to attract applicants.
The survey says it’s harder for regional employers, because of where they are. It might also be that the jobs themselves are not attractive. Maybe they’re insecure, or casual, or involve overnight shifts, or unwanted exposure to coronavirus.
Maybe, before calling job seekers “unAustralian”, we should first see if the employers are being unfair.
More data. The Australian Council of Social Services says there’s just one job available for every 13 people looking.
The Australian Unemployed Workers Union reckons it’s now closer to one person for every 17 jobs.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data show there are 1.6 million Australians on Jobseeker, but just 125,000 vacancies after COVID-19 smashed the economy.
Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs.
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Hundreds of thousands more lost hours at work, and are probably on JobKeeper.
The Grattan Institute reckons about 2.3 million people lost their job or hours. And it is calling for a JobSeeker increase of at least $100 a week, alongside a boost to Commonwealth Rent Assistance and increases to the Child Care Subsidy.
That would not just be nice, but would help our economic recovery as those people can pump more money back into the system.
What we need is a Goldilocks set-up. Not too much, not too little, but just right.
Newstart, JobSeeker, or whatever its name is in the future, obviously has to be capped somewhere. But it can’t be so miserly that it actively stops people getting work – because on $40 a day it’s hard to traipse all over town looking presentable.
The Government will (conveniently after this weekend’s Eden-Monaro by-election) announce its plan before too long. Sending people back to that $40 a day seems politically and humanely impossible, so there will likely be an increase on the old system.
Along with that reset, it’s time for a reset in the shame narrative, the sort that saw the Paxtons pilloried.
There are 2.3 million Australians likely to have a little more sympathy this time.