No New Year jobs confidence

There is a discernible unease about job prospects for the coming year.It has gripped small and large business operators around the nation, except those involved in the mining industry.The uncertainty is palpable.The complete distrust of the Gillard-Labor-Green-Independent minority government has fed into the general uncertainty about the economy, triggered in part by the failure of the US and the European Community to show any global leadership.Top research firm CoreData has suggested the number of unemployed people in Australia will jump by nearly 106,000 next year, assuming the labour force grows at its current rate and the unemployment rate rose to 5.75 per cent, as predicted, according to The Daily Telegraph today.

CoreData boss Andrew Inwood told the newspaper the problem would be felt nationwide. "One in five Australians now think they are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 months," he said. "That's particularly true in all industries outside finance and mining. Interestingly, our research has found levels of Australian confidence in the economy for the first quarter of 2012 is looking to be roughly the same as it was at the height of the global financial crisis." Westpac chief economist Bill Evans, one of the few economists who correctly predicted a rate cut in November, agrees saying lead indicators pointed to a very weak employment growth next year. But he says the upside is that the Reserve Bank would have to cut the cash rate by at least half a per cent to counter the job losses. That would have an effect on all those forgotten Australian retirees and others living on fixed incomes overlooked whenever a bank rate cut is celebrated. Redundancies are rife across the nation. Business is quicker to hire staff than it is to cut numbers when there is an economic downturn but with flat or lower-than-expected turnover, businesses are now starting to take the hard decisions. The federal government’s industrial relations policy is heavily loaded in favour of the unions and against employers leading to the increased casualisation of the work force. It is clear Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan don’t have a clue about the real world, taking their cues from the failed European and US “borrow and spend” models. Only the Chinese are confident, and they abandoned the Western socialist economic model when they needed to turn their economy around. Confidence needs to be restored, the current government, trapped by its own incompetence, can't do the job. The annual wish for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year is even more heartfelt this year.