Coronavirus: eliminating JobAid will be when the heavy lifting really begins

Multiple stores remain closed along Richmond’s Victoria Street in inner city Melbourne. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ David Crosling

Weaning the nation off JobKeeper, and a supercharged JobSeeker, will be among the most difficult challenges any Australian government has faced. We’re meant to be a worker’s, not a bludger’s, paradise.

Yet calls to extend them will be loud and emotive, while the low cost of borrowing — and the votes — will make it tempting.

August’s better-than-expected jobless rate perhaps encouraged Scott Morrison to insist on Thursday that they would be pared back.

Yet the government must be honest: there are very few jobs around. Across Australia, there were fewer than 110,000 job ads in August, according to ANZ.

Even before the pandemic, the highest number of job ads in the past 10 years was 180,000, in 2018.

If 1.35 million JobSeeker recipients, in order to keep their payment, have to apply for, say, eight jobs a month, a torrent of 10.8 million job applications or, simplistically, 100 applications a job will descend on business.

Aside from the administration cost of processing pointless, desultory applications, it’s dispiriting for individuals to have to apply for jobs they know they won’t get.

Lifting the regulatory and tax shackles off businesses so they can and want to hire is a far preferable to lumbering many thousands of despondent unemployed people with paper work.

And this is particularly the case to the extent government is responsible for creating this particular recession, and the enduring surge in unemployment it will inevitably generate.

Governments, state and federal, create unemployment by a raft of taxes, occupational health and safety rules, and an absurd system of “modern awards” that deter job creation. This isn’t a uniquely Australian problem, and there aren’t easy answers. The gap between available jobs and the pool of unemployed has been gaping for years.

Recipients of jobless benefits should demonstrate they aren’t bludging but imposing arbitrary if politically popular requirements is far from the optimal solution.

For the bulk of the unemployed who make do on a relatively meagre income, that is incentive enough to look for work, quite aside from the social stigma.