Terry McCrann: Pressure on Andrews as JobSeeker end in sight
The race is on, with the JobKeeper end date rapidly approaching yet no end to lockdown in sight. Unless Daniel Andrews loosens his stranglehold on the economy, more Victorians will become officially unemployed, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
Don't miss out on the headlines from Terry McCrann. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A month ago 12.5 million Australians had jobs. That included 3.5 million being paid JobKeeper – only 9 million actually had real paid-for jobs.
At the end of last month JobKeeper was cut; it will be cut again at the end of December; and it will be terminated completely at the end of March.
We are now in a very real race between that taxpayer support for those 3.5 million jobs being reduced and then taken away completely, and the economy picking up to generate the revenue for the businesses to keep paying and employing them.
Otherwise, who knows how many of those 3.5 million will move increasingly from the “employed” to the “unemployed” column — and that would in turn trigger yet further job losses.
The big thing that’s got lost in this is how the 3.5 million on JobKeeper hurt the job prospects of those who are actually jobless.
Why would a business employ a new worker when they’ve already got people “working” only because their pay is being subsidised?
This is the very basic but real jobs story — both for those who have jobs and those that do not — as opposed to the meaningless and misleading and completely out-of-date (they were for the first two weeks of September) ABS figures yesterday.
Normally, you would laugh at the claimed 6.9 per cent national jobless rate, when Roy Morgan Research has already told us the real figure was nearly double that, at 12.9 per cent.
That’s more than 800,000 jobless Australians who are literally invisible to the bean counters in their Canberra ivory tower.
But this month, the ABS had an even more laughable figure — that Victoria’s jobless rate was actually the (equal) lowest of any state, at 6.7 per cent compared with NSW’s 7.2 per cent and Queensland’s 7.7 per cent.
Further, not only was it the lowest, but that it actually fell by an impressive 0.5 per cent on the previous month.
And this, despite the fact that the entire total of all the 30,000 jobs lost in Australia — itself a laughably small number — were lost in Victoria.
The truth is that many more than the 30,000 in Victoria just gave up looking for work. Not exactly surprising behaviour, in Chairman Dan’s lockdown state.
Keep it up, Chairman; why, you could officially eliminate unemployment in Victoria by making the lockdown permanent — wiping out more and more jobs but driving more people out of the workforce and the statistics!
Originally published as Terry McCrann: Pressure on Andrews as JobSeeker end in sight