Heres another reason to March in March. Reading this brought back memories of the mid-90s, when I myself suffered a period of unemployment. The country was still experiencing a recession, and many unemployed folk were being pushed into work-for-the-dole type schemes, often labelled as retraining. I effectively ended up as a low-paid slave to a local government contactor who had won the economic development contract with our local shire council. I was a personal assistant, sitting in an office doing equivalent clerical work to other full-time shire employees sitting at adjacent desks earning real wages while I received the dole and a few dollars travel allowance for an equivalent time/work commitment. I was working full-time and being paid the dole. I found it difficult to smile in those days, unlike those shire employees. Yes, I appreciated feeling useful but my sense of self-worth, already undermined by months of unemployment, went down the gurgler. I was a disposable commodity, easily replaced and apparently worth so little. It seems to me that the Abbott government brings a totally ham-fisted approach to the unemployment issue. The relatively small contribution per capita which would have been needed to keep Holden in Australia, for example (somewhere around $18 per voter), will now be spent on social security payments while this government demonises and punishes those liberated (in Tony Abbotts words) workers whose jobs they killed off. Conservative governments so often seem intent on creating a peasant underclass to do societys menial work for little reward, as some sort of punishment for existing. Under Abbotts regime, misery for many will prevail, and the question will remain unanswered: Why not encourage job creation through tax concessions and industry support, rather than creating, through austerity measures, a huge pool of citizens who will be punished for needing social security assistance by being treated as slaves? The article below details some of Abbotts plans.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 03:01:59 +0000
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