Credlin: It’s time out-of-work Australians stopped waiting for the job of their dreams

How can there be close to a million Australians getting unemployment benefits at the same time as there are half a million registered job vacancies, asks Peta Credlin.

With almost half a million jobs currently going begging, coinciding with just over half a million Australians officially unemployed, only one explanation is possible: that along with our freedoms, the work ethic of Australians has been a major casualty of the pandemic.

Just think, for the best part of two years, we were told to stay at home for our own good.

People whose jobs were on hold received $750 dollars week, regardless of how much they normally earned. Unemployed people had their benefits doubled and their obligations to seek, and to take work, suspended.

Everyone who could, was told to work from home. And even now, for a vast number of public servants, that’s still where they are.

Is it any wonder that on top of $300 billion plus in extra federal debt alone, we’ve now got a population that doesn’t want to work as they might have before, or to do a wide range of necessary but lower-level jobs?

You want to know why your favourite restaurant is no longer open on Monday nights, or why hotels no longer have coffee shops open in their lobbies, or why service in the pub is so slow, or why the queues to get through security at airports are so interminable, or why our CBDs are still so quiet – well, what we’ve discovered is that if you put people’s lives on hold for the best part of two years, many will never go back to what they did. Or at least, not go back until they’re made to.

This is the great tragedy of the pandemic – at least as much as the people who died – it’s the people whose lives have been permanently disrupted by government policy to deal with it. And, the corrosive social changes that the pandemic has brought on, with mental stress high among young people who’ve lost two years of their schooling, old people who’ve lost two years of what life they had left, and everyone who had what could normally be taken for granted – weddings, holidays, medical treatment and so on – taken away from them on the say-so of medical bureaucrats.

Farms shouldn’t have to rely on overseas workers, especially when there are so many Australians currently receiving the dole.

Last month, registered job vacancies reached a record 480,000, a jump of 14 per cent since February, and more than double average pre-pandemic levels.

Last month, one in four businesses reported at least one job vacancy; compared to just one in ten, in the month before Covid struck. At the same time, the ABS shows that there are 548,000 people officially unemployed.

This isn’t the whole story, though, by any means. Because the official statistics count as employed anyone who’s worked an hour in the previous month, a better figure for unemployment is the 935,000 Australians currently receiving the dole and who are supposed to be applying for at least 20 jobs a month, or risk losing their benefit. And here’s the real problem: How can there be close to a million Australians getting unemployment benefits at the same time as there are half a million registered job vacancies, let alone all the other jobs that could be created if there were willing workers, if we didn’t now have a culture that’s so work-shy?

Something else that’s become glaringly obvious during the pandemic is the reality of Australia’s immigration system. We like to tell ourselves that it’s based on skills. But when immigration stopped for two years, it wasn’t technicians, doctors and computer programmers that we were suddenly short of, it was cleaners, bar staff, drivers and agricultural labourers. It was dramatic confirmation of what most of us know from experience – there are lots of necessary jobs from aged care workers, to security, to waiting on tables, to fruit-picking that Australians increasingly don’t want to do.

Peta Credlin.

Predictably, in response, big business is demanding an immediate resumption of even higher immigration.

I’m all in favour of welcoming migrants where we have real skills shortages, but the last thing we need is a large influx of so-called skilled workers from countries with different professional standards who, the research shows, mostly don’t work in their areas of skill, five years on.

For big business, ever-higher immigration isn’t just about filling jobs; it also drives up demand for their products and puts downward pressure on wages. If not done carefully, more migrants just allows lazy businesses to get away with not training locals plus lets reform-shy governments off the hook by using migration to boost GDP rather than solid economic improvements in efficiency and productivity.

The first and most important step to filling all these current vacancies is expecting more of Australians who are now collecting the dole. No one should be living off the taxpayer if there’s a job he or she could reasonably do.

People with degrees shouldn’t be too proud to be labourers, or to wait tables, if that’s what’s needed to get them off the dole, while they’re searching for their perfect gig. For too long, too many Australians have been job snobs. The pandemic has made that much worse and it’s way past time to call it out when there’s decent work available.

MELTING POT DATA SHOWS NO NEED FOR NEW VOICE

EVERY Australian should feel encouraged by last week’s census data that just over half of us were either born overseas or had at least one parent from overseas.

Of all the developed countries in the world, we have by far the largest proportion of immigrants – and these days, they’re at least as likely to be from India or China as from Britain or New Zealand.

But if all these people – increasingly from Asia – are choosing to make Australia their home, how can we be the illegitimate, racist country people like Adam Bandt and the Greens insist we are?

People don’t leave their homeland to move far way unless they’re convinced it’s worthwhile. Millions have come here – and many millions more would like to come – because they’re convinced this a land of opportunity, freedom, and justice where they will find a warm welcome. It gives the lie to the “black armband” view of Australia, pushed in our schools via the national curriculum alas, that we’re essentially illegitimate invaders, despoiling the environment and with an inadequate derivative culture.

Obviously, the last thing we should want is to make newcomers who have pledged their allegiance to Australia feel like second class citizens, as if some are “more Australian” than others based on the time they’ve spent here. This is yet another reason to resist the establishment of a constitutionally entrenched Indigenous “Voice to the Parliament”.

Being an Australian should be a matter of commitment to this country; not where someone was born, or where their ancestors lived, or what race they are. Like the fact so many people want to come here, that there are now 11 individual Indigenous voices in the parliament as MPs, shows there’s nothing inherently racist about our country, and there’s no need for a race-based Voice.

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