UNEMPLOYMENT

The unemployment benefit, known as JobSeeker, has sat at less than $56 per day for years, and it needs raising.  Even prominent economists and business leaders have said that it is too low.

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Critics argue that the best form of welfare is a job.  They say that raising the unemployment benefits would discourage jobseekers from looking for work.  But this criticism ignores harsh facts.

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Countless jobseekers simply cannot find work, because they lack "experience".  They face a depressing catch-22, of needing a job to get experience and yet needing experience to get a job.  How can you get experience when you cannot find a job?

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Because of inadequate training opportunities, we have a great mismatch between the skills that employers need and what the unemployed can offer.  How can employers complain about shortages of skilled workers, when they insist on someone else doing the skilling?  Who is taking responsibility for skilling the luckless jobseekers stuck on the unemployment scrapheap, no matter how hard they try to find work?

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I know how it feels, having been stuck in unemployment myself many years ago.  I applied for job after job, studied at TAFE, and did unpaid voluntary work.  None of this really helped me.  The only work that I could ever find was in the form of occasional temporary assignments, with little or no chance that the work would become permanent.  Doing everything right made little difference for me, simply because I lacked some particular skill or type of experience.

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I have been working permanently in fulltime work for years, but memories of my past struggles to find work are still raw today.

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Instead of simply looking overseas for skilled workers, we need to properly skill local jobseekers and give them a fair shot at emerging jobs.  After all, is it really productive to leave people stuck in unemployment?

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We must also raise the unemployment benefit rate above $60 per day to aid luckless jobseekers, who need the benign hand of the welfare state to lift them up, when the unsentimental hand of the job market keeps beating them down.

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