Australian Politics, Mark II

That would be fine if a government would foot the bill for it, just can’t see it happening

So doing a council job for free. Awesome. Shame that you don’t get paid like the council guys do for the same work.

Let’s see; spend time with your job search company so they earn money (handed out hand over fist by the same government trampling your clients no less) for practically nothing, apply for the mandated number of jobs, attend interviews if you are fortunate enough to get one, and do 10 hrs (2 days) of free work per week, all for your princely $280. Sounds reasonable to me … not. Double their income and you might have a case. But putting them on a starvation income that freezes them out of society, or any quality of life, and then demanding they perform for their pittance because they owe the society that is purposely marginalising them is a bit rich.

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Sounds dandy but who is going to pay for this fantasy world?
I do have sympathy for the ones who do the right thing but for simply can’t find work. I have absolutely zero sympathy for people who want to sit at home and smoke bongs all day or hang out at the beach with their mates with no intention to work. I’ve found people are far too picky with their jobs at well, fair chance you won’t ever find your dream job so wind back expectations. I interview far too many people who aren’t interested in the 5am starts or working every second weekend because it interferes with their social life

You really are a miserable person.

Have you been unemployed, have you spent hours and hours being harangued by Centrelink and their lackeys like your Wife. Have you had your dignity smashed and lost all incentive to find work because of constant rejection.

Not everyone has your talent or motivation, or opportunity.

Compassion is a wonderful human trait, go and find some.

I’ve never been unemployed. I’ve always worked and that includes some horrible jobs that I hated just to pay bills. I had to give up on a football and cricket career at a decent level to work at jobs which required weekend work.
I have plenty of compassion for people who deserve it but zero compassion for bludgers

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Sometimes the language here is strong but I bet if we all met up in person there wouldn’t be one person here who was a complete ■■■■■■■■ or unreasonable.

Words on a screen never convey tone.

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What fantasy world?

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You have the ability and motivation to have choices.

Many who you will call bludgers, through no fault of there own don’t.

I know able bodied blokes in their thirties who served their country, who now cannot leave their homes, struggle even to get out of bed, but their position is not recognised as illness, and many even in their own families call them bludgers.

Your ideas are great in principle but who is paying for it?
It would be great if everyone who wanted to work could get work but where are these new jobs coming from and who is footing the bill?
It still doesn’t solve the problem of those who don’t want to work either unfortunately

I would never call those types bludgers. I fully sympathise with people who are unable to get jobs through no fault of their own. My issue is with the ones who openly declare they don’t want to work or are picky with jobs because it might mean you have to do the occasional weekend shift. As I said I’ve had to hire plenty in the past and as soon as Saturday morning work is mentioned they flee faster than Usain Bolt.

The Government, by getting Centrelink to do what it was set up to do, and did until the liberals decided to outsource so private companies could spring up to take plenty of taxpayer dollars for there owners. Take the billions spent on that and redirect it to the welfare recipients. Pretty simple.

Those who legitimately try and avoid working/refuse to work should absolutely lose their benefits. But to design a whole punitive regime around a very small percentage of people is just stupid. Or in this case, vicious, fact ignoring ideology.

And as for the non bolded bit. Yes it would be nice if everyone who wanted work could get it, but seeing they actually can’t, why the hell should they be persecuted for not finding what isn’t there to be found?

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There may be some who will never want to work, but the system you champion and your Wife works in, doesn’t discriminate and destroys the lives it is meant to sustain.

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Maybe we could stop throwing away billions in subsidies to multi-nationals hmm?

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My experience from the ‘client’ side is from a long time ago and possibly atypical, but i found the Job Network profoundly useless.

I had an IT degree and had been made redundant from my first job after a couple of years, which i spent doing routine scutwork and didn’t gain any useful experience. The IT job market was flat, especially for juniors (early 2000s, just post the tech crash), and I spent nearly a year unemployed. So I had to keep my dole diary and report to my job network office (i can’t say ‘case manager’ because it was never the same person twice) at intervals to keep the rather paltry benefits that I got (which were not remotely enough to live on even then, and which just helped me drain my savings a bit slower than I might otherwise have done). As i got more desperate later on in the year i started applying for all sorts of service jobs etc completely unrelated to IT, except that pretty much everybody I applied to took one look at my resume and (rightly) concluded i’d be out of there as soon as I got a better offer, so wasn’t worth employing. I did some short term contract laboring etc (all of which I found myself, no help from Job Network), but nothing lasted longer than a few days.

For someone in my position, the Job Network had nothing to offer. They had handy sheets on how to write a CV and tips like ‘wear nice clothes to a job interview, and make sure you get there on time’ but other than that? Dunno how much the govt were paying them to ‘handle’ my case, but it was too much.

Maybe the network is optimised for people with high school or less educational qualifications, or people who come from backgrounds where they don’t really understand the expectations employers have of employees, so they focus on the real basics. Life skills etc. Maybe they have no script to handle professionals whose industry is in a downturn (I mean, admitting that your unemployment is not your fault would go entirely against the ‘take the bludgers’ dole away!’ ethos that really seems to drive welfare policy after all). Or maybe the people running the joint just don’t give a ■■■■. The people I spoke to obviously had no grasp of the job market or my industry and I never spoke to the same person twice so they didn’t have the chance to learn between interviews. All they did was read from a script and ask me to summarise my ‘employment plan’ (keep applying for every damn vaguely relevant IT job that showed up on Seek etc, which they seemed to be happy with despite me explaining how many of the ads on there were just fakes by CV-harvesting recruiters) and then tick their form and pat me on the head and tell me to come back in a month or whatever. They had no ideas, no useful suggestions, no meaningful advice, no relevant knowledge, and certainly no leads on possible positions.

I hope it’s better now. Because it was utter garbage then, and a massive waste of time and money. Formulaic patronising horsecrap with zero relevance to me or the situation I was in.

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That is sadly still the case.

The irony is that we do all we can to get kids to stay at school and then widen Tertiary Education, giving access to thousands, who diligently work to get that qualification with no farking opportunity for a job at all.

And Aceman wants them to clean up graffiti !

And it is not just LNP that let us down. I asked the Labor Employment Shadow Minister what plans we had for job for those out of work from the car industry. He only answer is more education programs.

What about real job creation programs?

Used to love going to the CES back in the day to peruse the job listings I wasn’t qualified for.

Before my time but I recall a mate’s older sisters signing up for the dole after finishing Year 12 and receiving their fortnightly dole cheque in the mail, no questions asked. Sign up once and they kept sending money until you, that’s right, you told them to stop. Most of the locals would sign up for the dole then get a full time job. There was no cross-referencing. You could keep collecting the dole and the Government had no idea.

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Yep, it was a bit different then. Although it wasn’t quite that easy. But they had to find you a job in your chosen field. I took a 6 month sabbatical from work and collected the dole whilst they tried to find me a job as a magician.

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Lot of unemployed lion tamers around in those days, as well as surf lifeguards looking for work in Alice Springs.

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Labor pledging an AFL team for Tassie…?