Why my bosses are both out of a job. But spa builders are doing OK

Earlier this month, my occupation disappeared.

There I was, strutting around Parliament House as a print journalist, pen behind my ear, a dog-eared notepad in my back pocket, and a fedora emblazoned with “press” on my head – and then suddenly, nothing.

Credit: Dionne Gain

It wasn’t just print journalists that, in the world of statistical measurement, have gone the way of fullers*. Barbers, clinical psychologists, urban planners, ambulance officers, immigration officers, kennel hands, and radio and television journalists also found themselves out of an occupation in recent weeks.

Of course, these jobs still exist in a practical sense. But according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and its list of occupations? Not so much.

About 300 new occupations were added to the list, and about 250 were “retired” as of December 6. We now have a separate occupation entitled “electric vehicle technician”, for instance, as well as swimming pool and spa builders, garage door installers, shed builders, and window furnishing installers. These have been carved out of a broad category of “home improvement installers”.

In my industry, though, the opposite has occurred. Until a fortnight ago, under the joint Australia-New Zealand list, print journalists were designated as occupation 212413, radio journalists were 212414, and television journalists were 212416.

Now though, after decades of work, the ABS has lumped us into one lot – “journalists” (31332). This designation includes print hands like myself, as well as online journalists, bloggers, digital content writers, and photojournalists.

Newspaper editors, such as The Age’s Patrick Elligett and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Bevan Shields, have also had their designations changed. No longer are they newspaper or periodical editors (212412). Instead, their occupation is now “print or digital content editor”, designated as 231333.

All these shifting numbers might sound like a lot of nothing. But they highlight the ever-changing nature of our nation’s workforce and the jobs that people carry out.

Like many other industries, technology changes have seen the work that we journalists do and the way we do it change to the point that there’s no longer a delineation between print and radio and TV.

As time and standards change, so do jobs and their descriptions. In its first occupation list, published in 1986, the ABS listed jobs such as “girl/man Friday” (to describe a faithful assistant) and “despatch” to describe army delivery riders (a job that hadn’t really existed in decades).

But, the changing nature of our occupations reflects our economy’s evolution and is befuddling plenty of economic commentators, who seem to believe that we are, at our core, a nation of widget makers, miners and print journalists.

Everywhere you turn, commentators are bemoaning the “collapse” in Australian productivity, which is then invariably connected to an “explosion” in public sector jobs. Productivity, as measured in the national accounts, has fallen, while the numbers of people in work – particularly in the care economy – have soared.

But there’s a big reason that the care economy, which encompasses the health, aged care and disability sectors, has grown so much. The Royal Commission into Aged Care revealed that years of poor outcomes for our elderly were based upon profit-making and cost-cutting. As much as it might hurt the nation’s productivity levels, we needed more staff to cook edible food or care for dementia-affected patients.

There have been extraordinary cases of fraud within the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a failure of both sides of politics (which, to his credit, Bill Shorten, as minister, did a great deal to clean up before his departure). But productivity isn’t officially increased if a person who uses a wheelchair gets a ramp built to their front door or a parent gets a break from the constant care of a disabled child.

The royal commission into the banking sector was also revealing. It showed that some of our biggest financial institutions had made money from selling products to dead people. It’s easy to be productive if you’re taking money from a client in the local cemetery.

The Coalition has bemoaned the increase in public servants under Anthony Albanese, who went to the last election promising to get rid of the bureaucracy’s dependence on labour-hire companies.

The impact of this change has played out in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Public servants have worked through a backlog of 60,000 claims that had not even been appraised for financial support by the contracted labour-hire staff then employed by the Morrison government.

Processing those claims will cost taxpayers about $8.3 billion extra over the next five years in assistance to Australian veterans. The coldest of cold-hearted may have no qualms in denying money to veterans, claiming it is “unproductive” extra cost to the budget bottom line, but it’s part of the social contract a government has with those who it sent into battle and one that should always be honoured.

Overlaying all of this, as the nation’s job market has got tighter and tighter, businesses have employed people whose skill levels are below those of existing staff. As the young waiter who struggled with my order for black tea at a restaurant last week (apparently, “black tea” wasn’t on the menu) showed, it can take time to train staff.

As a society, we decided to do something about the treatment – and mistreatment – of the frail, the disabled, the financially fleeced, and our veterans. That requires changes to our workforce, which, while it may pain a gumshoe print journalist to admit, continues to evolve.

*A fuller was a person employed to clean impurities from wool so it could be turned into a cloth. Fulling was traditionally done by walking on the wool in tubs of human urine.

Shane Wright is a senior economics correspondent.

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