Labour market policy 101 - victimise the most vulnerable

From Paul Norton's letter to the Fairfax press - published in Larvatus Prodeo today:

The Federal Government’s response to the National Welfare Rights Network’s call for an increase in the unemployment benefit is, predictably, to reject this call on the grounds that the best way to help the unemployed is to help them to find work. This is humbug, for two reasons.

The first is that the unemployed are hindered, rather than helped, in their job seeking efforts by things such as undernourishment, lack of medical care, poor mental health, bad teeth, underspending on clothes and grooming, and unstable housing situations, which are all predictable consequences of having to live on the current level of unemployment benefit.

The second is that the Federal Treasurer is on record as claiming that an unemployment rate of 4.75 per cent – that is, about 500,000 people on the dole – is “consistent with full employment”.

The result is that the unemployed are currently being crucified between two metaphorical thieves which have robbed modern Labor of its intellectual and moral fibre – on one side, economic policy orthodoxy based on neoliberal dogma concerning the supposed “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”, and on the other, tabloid and focus group mythology about “dole bludgers”.

I also liked this contribution by 'Huggybunny' at comment #8 to Paul's post:

When I started work the unemployment rate was about 1%, Menzies was in power and all the “reffos” were working two shifts. You could walk out the gate of one factory and into the gate of the next and change jobs in five minutes.
Now you need an email account, a CV, a resume and a degree in Horde(Horse?)Management as well as some smart clothes. Nice tits and teeth help if you are a female.
Oh yes it was a brave new world back then, the free market and Capitalism had triumphed over despotism and despair.
It was to be only a matter of time before the socialist revolution took over and we would all be free.
So what have we got?
Despotism rules in most of the globe.
Imperialism runs rampant.
The bees are dying
The fish are dying
The wildlife is dying
The water is polluted
The air is polluted
The climate is on the cusp of thermal runaway.
Sorry Pandora, Ben, Meg and Nell, I will do my best to fix it before I go.
Huggy

Playing the race card in Townsville - again!

Dale Last moved his Mayoral campaign up a notch today just as it looks as if Lez will have to do a humiliating backflip on water rates.

And what a better way to move your campaign along than by playing the race card - it's an old trick, 'sucessfully' deployed by Mooney for years after he'd learnt it from the old CLP in the Territory.

Last's latest effort here in today's Bulletin shows him and his tactics for what they are:

• " ...investors were raising serious concerns about developing in the city." Last claims!  Of course, the investors are unnamed and, as such, the claim should be treated as nonsense.  I defy Last to produce one investor who's pulled-out of the inner-city (or any other part of the city) because of small groups of parkies - because of the lack of speed in increasing population densities in the inner-city or because of the lack of parking or simply because the inner-city can't compete with suburban shopping malls maybe, but because of a few parkies - no way.  If there was money to be made, they'd be there, parkies or no.



• The "...Urban Quarter (is) on its knees with businesses going broke because of the public disorder and the problems associated with this group of people there, constantly harassing people." Last proclaims.  This is not just nonsense, it's bullshit.  Businesses in the Urban Quarter are going broke because if its location.  Completely predictable before it opened, until the redevelopment of the old rail yards is complete there is not the population to support two supermarkets in the city centre.  With Coles (the most poorly located of the two) not able to attract enough punters into the building, the rest of the tenants in the Urban Quarter have been pushing it up hill ever since it opened.

Blaming bad planning and business decisions on a few parkies is laughable simply playing the race card.

As for the reporting of Last's campaign launch, the Bulletin could not have made him happier than with the headline "Shops 'go bust' in city of drunks".  Of course neither the Bully or Last were game to admit that if the city deserves such a tag it is because of what happens in Flinders Street most nights.

Had they looked at the source of most serious alcohol related crime and hospital admissions in the city - you won't find a few parkies - you'll find middle-class kids and boy soldiers (predominantly white) behaving badly and a few club owners (and supporters of Last and major advertisers in the Bully) getting rich! 

And of course they wouldn't see any irony (or is that contradiction) in the Bulletin running at least 1 1/2 pages of liquor adds today while also running Last's latest little race-card play

The furture of the Australian health system?

One American's $76,000 bill for an emergency appendectomy.  From the market controlled health system that Tony Abbott use as the model for Australia

...and the things that make you shake your head

Parkies done for drunk driving? I don't think so...

You may have skimmed over this small page-7 article in todays' Bulletin.  If so, read it again.

If the article is correct, you have to wonder why the coppers would be targetting "homeless people and itenerants" (whatever they look like) and not just anybody breaking the law in the area?

And anyway, why wasn't the operation also carried out in the nightclub precinct? Or is anti-social behavour ok in Flinders St but nowhere else?

I'd also love to meet the five "homeless people and itenerants" that got done for drink driving - none that I'm aware of have cars!

Public drunkenness and public posturing

I wasn’t at the Forum on Homelessness/Public Drunkenness yesterday so can only respond to The Bulletin’s reporting of Mandy Johnstone’s press release and Councillor Dale Last’s throw away comments.

A few things struck me about the report:

• The idea of mandatory (forced) alcohol rehabilitation (presumably the issue requiring legislative change) is a nonsense – mandatory detox perhaps but nobody can force anybody to be rehabilitated (except perhaps former Chinese Governments).



• Will such mandatory rehabilitation also apply to the nightclub drunks regularly arrested in Flinders St East?



• Dale Last’s proposed 6pm curfew got knocked on the head – presumably because someone with some smarts at the meeting pointed out that to do so would in all probability be illegal under Human Rights and/or Anti-discrimination legislation – especially as it presumably wouldn’t apply to the drunk whitefellas roaming Flinders St East and filling up the coffers of the club and pub owners at all hours of the night and morning.



• There are apparently about 60 rough sleepers in the Town - from my understanding, about the same number there were about five years ago (and probably well before that). Not exactly the “burgeoning” issue that The Bully likes to beat up.



• There was no detail provided about housing responses to the needs of the rough sleepers – perhaps the one response that would get this group “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” as our civic leaders so desperately want.

Credit where it's due

A few days ago I got stuck into Mary Vernon over her article on bullying but credit where it's due. Today she has an excellent and timely article in the Bully (not available online) about the child slaves on whose backs the chocolate manufacturers prosper.

Google will find you plenty of stories on the issue including these:

• From World Vision:  What is the real cost of chocolate? and The Good Chocolate Guide to Australia
• From BBC News: Meeting the 'chocolate slaves'
• From The Age: Bitter life of chocolate's child slaves

Think before you buy this Easter

The pop star solution is just what they need

I see that Australia is likely to get a new pop star today (Australia's first saint a new era for nation's Catholics).  In true pop star tradition, I'm sure she'll provide many with a welcome distraction from reality

You have to wonder what dear old Mary would have to say about her church and her (at least) 117 brother priests who have been convicted of sentenced in Australian courts in Broken Rites cases in recent years.

Given what I understand about her committment to the poor and attitude towards the church power structure, I also wonder whether she would today agree with Anglican, Kenneth Leech's conclusions about the church:

“What matters most to the churches as institutions is adaptation to, and acceptance by, the power structures. They take seriously the words of Jesus, ‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’, and they have opted for Mammon.”

Murdoch's Townsville Bulletin – bigotry, bile, bad english and incomprehensible bullshit

I have long held that the most influential section of any paper's editorial pages is the cartoon – it is the one bit of any paper that everyone reads and absorbs.

Partly for this reason and partly because too many journos over the years have told me that you don't get to the top of the press food chain (i.e. to be Editor) because of your investigative or writing skill, I make a habit of never reading editorials – the only people who do are other journos and politicians.

But in order to top and tail this earlier post, I had to read yesterday's editorial in Rupert Murdoch's Townsville Bulletin. And what a piece of incoherent racist bile it is! You won't find it online but I have included a scan of it here so that you can judge for yourself (click to enlarge).

Leaving aside the criticisms listed in that earlier post, statements like “indigenous crime in Townsville is out of control” and “...as a society we're losing a generation of young Aboriginals, and this is borne out by police statistics on juvenile crime” need to be shown up for the lies and factual nonsense they are:

• In the five years to 2008/09 arrests of indigenous juveniles for crimes against the person (surely, the most serious crimes) in the Townsville Region (Townsville and Mt Isa Police Districts) rose it is true - by a 14 or a massive 4%. Not exactly out of control, especially when you consider that arrests of white kids for similar crimes rose by 191 or 39%

The Editorial goes on with: “A significant percentage of youth crime in North Queensland is perpetrated by young Aboriginals”.

• At 37% of all juvenile arrests for crimes against the person in '08/9, this is actually true but there is (as you’d expect) no recognition in the editorial of the fact that this rate has fallen significantly from the 44% it was in '04/05.

Perhaps a more accurate angle for the editorial would have been “Crime by white kids out of control”

The rest of the editorial gets very confused. I’m not sure whether this is intentional, representative of a racist streak or just plain bad writing.

The Editor goes on to segue from youth crime into a diatribe about “mandatory rehabilitation” for young offenders and then on to criticism of the effectiveness of expenditure ”...on rehabilitation services for drunken Aborigines”:

• “mandatory rehabilitation” is of course a oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Any psychologist (and anyone who battles with giving-up the fags or the grog) will tell you it is simply not possible to rehabilitate someone unless they want to.
• I’m not sure where they get their “nearly $10 million is spent every year on rehabilitation services for drunken Aborigines” but this is more like the figure spent on homelessness and public intoxication programs in the city – services which of course are targeted to and used by both whitefellas and blackfellas alike. As a matter of contrast I’d love to know how much it costs the public purse to subsidise on the one hand and police on the other Townsville’s drink, drugs and fight area (Flinders St East).
• You also have got to wonder what any of this has to do with juvenile crime

One final but key criticism of the editorial relates to their assertion that “for reasons that welfare and mental health experts are still trying to establish, there is a generation of young Aboriginals who are at war with the world. They are angry and disenfranchised from mainstream society”:

• It is true that there many young people (of every colour imaginable) who could be described thus and there are copious amounts of research to show that the one common and by far most significant contributing factor, now and over the ages, is poverty – pure and simple. If young aboriginal people are over represented in this group, then it is for one reason – they are seriously over represented amongst the poor in our society.
• To correct the editorial’s English and further to this last point – one can’t be disenfranchised from mainstream society, you are disenfranchised BY mainstream society.

I know that the staff at The Bulletin read this blog and I hope they are suitably embarrassed by the diatribe published in their editorial yesterday.

PS:  I’ve included Rupert Murdoch’s name (now three times) here in the hope that his minders will pick up this post in their daily scan of the net to see what is being said about their master and his empire. Perhaps as a result Murdoch will take a look at the editorial quality of his Townsville bull-sheet.

Alternatively, you could email him directly here: rmurdoch@newscorp.com

You won't read this in the Murdoch press

Posted in Fairfax's National Times site by Michael Perusco, Chief Executive of Sacred Heart Mission:

"I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government's goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no.


In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ''The poor will always be with us,'' he said and referred to the fact there is little a government can do for people who choose to be homeless..."

"...Abbott's comment about people choosing to be homeless is another old and inaccurate cliche. It is a convenient myth that continues to be perpetuated by those who wish to avoid taking appropriate action to reduce homelessness..."

Read Perusco's full article here

Change is never easy but paternalism is

I’ve done a fair bit of work with and for Indigenous organisations and communities over the years and could say a lot about how Governments have got it right and (more often) got it wrong over the last couple of hundred years.

But for anyone to expect significant change (for poor blackfellas or poor whitefellas) in things like infant mortality rates or education outcomes in one or two years as Tony “the woman’s friend” Abbott seems to suggest is plainly ridiculous (or disingenuous as the Minister for Indigenous Health, Warren Snowdon, has a habit of saying).

Crisafulli is gonna have to learn to do better

With all the talk around of Cr Crisafulli replacing Peter Lindsay as the Libs candidate in Herbert (if the missus agrees), it’s time that the pretender refined his political skills bit.

The gross hypocrisy he has displayed this week has been just a little too blatant, too obvious – On Monday he bashed the State for its ``blatant disregard'' for the city’s Town Plan when it comes to the location and building of social housing.  On tuesday he aggressively spins the Council’s decision to vary the Town Plan to enable the Railway Estate Boat Ramp to go ahead over-riding the wishes of local residents.

The art of successful hypocrisy is a key ingredient in political success. When it comes to hypocrisy Crisafulli is a natural, but he is a long way from mastering the art.

More broadly on the social housing issue, I thought that Housing Minister Struthers’ response to Crisafulli was excellent but not as to-the-point as this article by Paul Syvret in the Courier Mail

The most sobering sentence I've read this week

Cross-posted from Andrew Leigh at Core Economics who found it in the New York Times:

“We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent of schools. “An affluent 5-year-old has about the same vocabulary as an adult living in poverty.”

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