The Australian Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, has come up with a novel idea - novel if you think finding a job is a crazy concept. Tony looked around and noticed two things, the first being there are a lot of unemployed people getting our money for being unemployed.
You can make a living - not a real great one - by being unemployed, and it's a way of life for some families who honestly don't know about working. The idea gets passed on from one generation to the next until nobody can remember how to screw in a light bulb.
The other thing Abbott observed was the huge shortage of skilled workers in Western Australia. There is a shortage because the Chinese, among other things, realised the Copenhagen conference was a big joke before the Copenhagen conference even happened. So they want coal and iron ore and stuff like that, which for some reason of geography, they don't have but we've got in Western Australia. Except we don't have all the right people in place, literally, to get the job done.
So Tony is tossing around the idea of ... well, encouraging unemployed people to go west by cutting off welfare for under-30-year-olds who won't head where the jobs are. This way you've got two problems solved with one solution, which, because of its simplicity, is probably headed for trouble.
For starters, you can bet Abbott's idea will get the whole welfare lobby going because, down deep, it realises the fewer people who are on welfare, the less you need a lobby for them. So if Abbott's plan works out, then the welfare lobby will have to go west for a job too, and who knows what the cappuchino is like in the Pilbara right now?
(Source Weekend Australian Financial Review)
