Scotty From Marketing

Hard to imagine a more ScottyFromMarketing move than disappearing whilst Covid-19 breaks out across Sydney (I don’t hold a respirator, mate), to suddenly pop up at minutes to midnight on NYE with this diktat about the anthem. No discussion with anyone (certainly no-one from any indigenous leadership group), just this rebranding exercise. In the meantime the appalling Indue card gets rolled out further, and welfare payments are cut again, further marginalising the already most marginalised in our society.

But as long as the anthem’s inclusive, eh?

The Simple Solution to Both Problems

So I was listening to ABC Sydney this afternoon, and the dulcet tones of Sarah Macdonald. In two more or less contiguous segments, she interviewed

  • Mike Kelly, MP for Eden-Monaro
  • Margie Osmond, CEO of the Tourism & Transport Forum

Mr Kelly was on to talk about his vision of a standing army of volunteers to assist the rebuilding of all the towns devastated by the bushfires. He was at pains to point out that his plan was entirely voluntary, and no-one was going to get conscripted into this Green Army.

Ms Osmond followed, talking about the ramifications of the bushfires on tourism in Australia and the east coast in particular. One anecdote during the course of the conversation was an operator that owned four caravan parks on the south coast, who was facing a 90% drop in occupancy rates over the next twelve months as a result, again, of the bushfires.

I wasn’t able to call up during the latter interview, but I was shouting at the radio: “the government can solve both these problems at once!”

Forget the idea of campaigning for volunteers to do this work. We have no shortage of volunteers doing useful stuff already. In the SES and RFS (obviously), but also the likes of Erin Riley’s accommodation hub for people offering rooms and houses to others who’ve lost their homes.

Think bigger. What better opportunity could there be to stand up a Federal Job Guarantee? Like we had in the post-war period, when the CES would find a job for anyone who needed one. Anybody who is unemployed or underemployed, and is willing to work could rock up to the newly formed National Bushfire Recovery Agency, and be given meaningful work, for the minimum wage. That might be environment rehabilitation, or repair of public infrastructure, or anything else that Local Councils in bushfire affected areas request. If Job Guarantee participants have specialist skills that can be put to good use in this recovery, so much the better!

And to Ms Osmond’s Caravan Park mogul? If volunteers are willing to travel to affected areas, then they can get a living allowance on top of their minimum wage. That way they can fill the accommodation vacated by tourists, but they are also effectively replacement tourists as well! A big proportion of what they earn in the town will get spent in the town, which will help all the other impacted local businesses. Just like fruit picking back-packers, but these are proper paying jobs for unemployed Australians.

But how are you going to pay for it?

Well, that’s the brilliant part. (And the Federal Job Guarantee isn’t my idea, I’m not claiming that. There’s plenty of finer minds than mine that have written on this topic. I’m just laying this out in the context of the bushfires and the interview on the radio.)

Every person who wants to work but cannot find work is a commodity with zero demand. And they are already on the federal government’s payroll, because they receive NewStart or whatever.

So the Federal Government buys their labour at the minimum wage. Because no one else wants their labour, it cannot be inflationary to do this. And now those people have an opportunity to participate more fully in the economy: buying goods and services, creating demand and stimulating the economy. This will eventually lead to increased demand for workers from the private sector, and so these Job Guarantee workers in time get enticed back to private sector work that pays at least the minimum wage.

The FJG is the perfect countercyclical tool for the economy. A devastating natural catastrophe like this is going to put a lot of people out of work. This is how you keep them working, improve the environment, keep their towns from dying, and permanently solve unemployment.

Because even when this disaster is behind us, there will never be any shortage of useful things that can be done to utilise the labour of anyone unable to find work in the private sector. Local Councils can continue to offer suitable community-led programmes for inclusion in the FJG. Eventually, the National Bushfire Recovery Agency transforms into the National Employment Agency.

Because surely it’s better to pay someone a living wage to do something really useful, than pay them a pittance to do nothing.

It’s Just Not That Simple

So, someone shared the following pic on Facebook:

Some things are a red rag to a bull. I replied:

Um, Jacqui Lambie has been out of parliament since 2016, but more importantly, this is a stupid idea. Perhaps run it past the ADF? They may not be all that keen on an influx of 100,000+ youth to house and train! (Spoiler: they hate this idea. ADF is very selective about who they take.)
Unemployment is rarely personal failure. We all know people who don’t want to work, but the overwhelming majority do, and cannot find it. This country has over 750,000 unemployed and around 150,000 advertised jobs. You can’t tell me they’re all dole bludgers. That scale of wasted labour is just hopeless economic management.

They replied:

This post is not claiming unemployment as person failure? And what she said a number of years ago isn’t the issue. The idea of requiring unemployed youth to do military service (army reserves could be an option) could give this demographic, experiences and better equip them for their future and help them develop. (It would also get them away from technology long enough to learn to think for themselves, and develop their brains, decision making, self discipline etc). If you work with people on Youth allowance/Newstart it gives you a perspective that political statistics don’t!

All well and good, but there is a cost to implementing such a programme that needs to be considered. It’s asinine to expect that the ADF (or Reserves) can just accommodate this number of people without provision of resources. And why on earth would ADF want to deal with 100K youth who want a real job, and simply are not army material? It’s just not in anybody’s best interest. EXCEPT THOSE WHO VIEW UNEMPLOYMENT AS PERSONAL FAILURE and wish to make that state even more unpleasant than it already is, based on the misguided idea that you can penalise people into jobs.
There are plenty of useful things that people who don’t have a job could be paid to do that don’t involve military service.

There is a cost involved in any case! I believe it is in the countries interest to have the younger generation resourced to be productive members of society. If they aren’t then the future generations will were the consequences. I can’t speak for the ADF as I am not qualified to do that. 
Like any large scale change it would be wise to do it in increments, not all at once ?
As we are discussing this, I need to clarify, I do not see unemployment as a personal failure (you don’t have to yell). 
If there are plenty of useful things that people could be paid to do, were would the money come from to pay them?

To answer your second question “where would the money come from?” first, it comes from the same place all money comes from. The federal government authorises the spending and Treasury instructs the RBA to increase the numbers in various people’s accounts. Money is the one thing the federal government can never run out of, any more than Coles could run out of Fly-Buys. Of course they could issue too much, but they can also issue not enough, and both scenarios create problems: too much creates inflation, too little creates unemployment.
But to your main question, consider that the unemployed are already on the federal payroll. Instead of paying them a pittance to do nothing, we would be far better off paying them a decent wage to do something useful. There’s no shortage of worthwhile things that could be done to improve our communities: things that no private business will do because there’s no profit in it.
Imagine if you went to the Mayor of Dubbo and said, “if you had a standing army of people willing and ready to work and the federal government would pay them $20/hour on your behalf, what could you do to improve the Dubbo community?” I daresay it wouldn’t take long to come up with ideas. Obvious ones are land care, aged care, child care, but there are plenty more community programmes and other services that we can provide each other.
Anyone who truly wants to work will take that offer and be found work that suits them and allows them to use or develop their skills. Anyone who truly wants to be a layabout still has the choice to do that too. You’d soon see how many people really want to be layabouts.
All these people now earning a decent wage have the opportunity to participate in the economy, spending those wages (which in turn becomes the wages of others), paying taxes etc. That increased demand for goods and services leads to more private sector employment opportunities, which draws people out of this Job Guarantee programme again.
This is not something I’ve dreamt up, by the way. It’s been developed, researched and costed over several decades, by serious economists. Yes, paying people who want to work and cannot find private sector employment will cost the government money, but so does paying unemployment benefits, and so does dealing with the results of poverty: crime, malnutrition, domestic violence, alcohol and drug dependence, homelessness and so on.
I’ll finish with this last point. How many people leave rural and regional areas for the big cities in search of work, by necessity and not by choice? Instead of talking about forcing migrants to come to regional areas, what if the federal government offered paid work to regional locals who want it?
If you’re interested I can post some links to more material on these ideas.

Such as: A Job is the Best Form of Welfare, by Joe Zabar, the deputy CEO of Catholic Social Service of Australia.

The AWU and GetUp!

This week’s extraordinary AFP raid on the AWU over donations made twelve years ago to GetUp! has all the hallmarks of a Godwin Grech Utegate overreach. Watching the thoroughly odious Michaelia Cash squirming in Senate Estimates over the role her staffer played in the fiasco was particularly enjoyable.

It’s almost a pity that Barnaby Joyce’s eviction by the High Court swept this story of the front page. For all Cash’s protestations about the purer than snow motivation of the ROC and the ABCC, so far neither organisation has exactly covered themselves in glory.

But the point of this post is just a comment on the funding of GetUp! that I think has been missed by the media. There’s been a lot of conjecture about whether the decision by the union to provide the seed funding to launch GetUp! was properly documented and approved, but it seems to me precious little as to why they might have done it.

I think it’s constructive to look at the decision in the context of the time it was made. Remember 2004-2007 was the term that followed the disastrous Latham-led election campaign, that resulted in Howard winning a majority in both houses. Cue WorkChoices, the sale of Telstra, and a lot of other legislation that ultimately proved the downfall of Howard.

Under those circumstances, with the federal ALP completely neutered, developing new methods of galvanising support and calling out the actions of the government seem quite reasonable, and I daresay that’s what prompted the union to look beyond the ALP to outfits like GetUp!

It’s easy to look at these decisions through the lens of how things are today, but sometimes a bit of context is necessary.

GST: It’s not a pie

Greg Jericho writes in his latest piece “Scott Morrison’s next trick – selling a GST revenue cut to every state bar one” that:

Perhaps the most accurate statement in the Productivity Commission draft report on horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) is when it notes that “there is a dearth of public understanding of how HFE works, and this is compounded by the lack of a strong neutral voice in public discussion”.

He’s probably right, but all the graphs and charts in the article don’t really cut through to the heart of the matter. And that is that all this banging on about “zero-sum game”, “winners and losers” and fighting over an equitable share of the GST is predicated on the complete falsehood that tax payments fund government spending. They simply don’t – dollars are not a resource that gets recycled. Every dollar of federal government spending is the birth of a brand new dollar that exists because the government spent it into existence, and every dollar returned to the government through taxation is the death of that dollar. A dollar not currently in the economy does not exist, for all intents and purposes. The federal government cannot run out of dollars, any more than Coles can run out of Fly-Buys, or Qantas can run out of Frequent Flyer points. Now of course, if your economy is overpopulated with dollars, and you have more of them currently “living” (in circulation) than things to buy with them, you get inflation. And that – inflation – is the real limit on government spending.

Money is being issued constantly by the Federal Government. Every pension day, several million bank accounts have their balances increased with a few keystrokes. With every tax return, PAYG paypacket and BAS statement, bank balances get reduced again. (To be clear: this is nothing to do with note-printing. The RBA’s role as the physical printer of currency is not what I’m talking about. There is vastly more money in the economy than there are notes and coins. The decision to physically manifest dollars as paper money is purely a function of demand from banks, when their customers want to convert money as recorded in a bank account to its physical equivalent, for personal commerce.)

It’s crucial to understand that the issuing of money is not inherently inflationary. To assume that you must assume that the size of the economy is fixed, or its productive capacity is maxed out. And clearly neither of those things are true today. As I said previously, inflation occurs when the dollars available outstrip the things you can buy with them. Too much money chasing too few goods. There is no other sane definition.

There is no reason whatsoever that GST should be a pie the states fight over. To switch metaphors, Federal Government spending is actually more like a magic pudding – you can eat too much, but you cannot run out.

And this is what makes me so angry about this hypothecation of “GST revenue” as income of the individual states. When you get down to it, what is the role of government? Is it not to ensure the security, health, education and welfare of its citizens? So the idea that we must fund our education and health – the nation’s investment in its own future – from the vagaries of the consumer spending cycle has got to be one of the most idiotic economic own-goals ever kicked. Even by Costello’s standards as a thorough economic charlatan, this is epic stupidity.

Ahead of the Curve

I came across this article the other day. It’s a fascinating glimpse of the future from the past. The Executive Computer; ‘Mother of All Markets’ or a ‘Pipe Dream Driven by Greed’?

It was written a shade over 25 years ago, and begins:

Sometime around the middle of this decade no one is sure exactly when — executives on the go will begin carrying pocket-sized digital communicating devices. And although nobody is exactly sure what features these personal information gizmos will have, what they will cost, what they will look like or what they will be called, hundreds of computer industry officials and investors at the Mobile ’92 conference here last week agreed that the devices could become the foundation of the next great fortunes to be made in the personal computer business.

The business uses the participants describe – using your phone to order pizza, to “wirelessly fax”, to “plug in the latest disk-based novel” and so on are so adorably quaint.

But what I find fascinating about this article is the gulf between opinions. I’m reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story about Thomas Watson, the president of IBM who said in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”. Look at the comment by Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel Corporation. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”

It certainly contrasts with John Sculley, then CEO of Apple – a company who at the time was routinely described as “beleaguered”. He said these personal communicators could be “the mother of all markets.”

Now Sculley’s tenure at Apple was nothing if not controversial. He was, after all, the man who sacked Steve Jobs from the company he’d founded. And the company survived – just! – some pretty difficult times in the early 90s.

Today of course, the iPhone is ten years old, and along the way has completely revolutionised the smartphone market. Blackberry and Windows Mobile are nothing more than memories of another time, skid marks on the technological highway. (Remember the boss of Blackberry saying “these PC guys are not going to just walk in here and figure this out”? Good times.) Apple has grown to become the most successful company on the planet. So from the perspective of 2017, Sculley’s words are extraordinarily prophetic.

Peter Lewis’ article is a crazy echo from the past. Do go read it.

Sinister

I wrote this just over four years ago, when I was blogging somewhere else. With the postal survey currently running and all the raging unpleasantness that’s come along with it, this seems like a really good time to revisit it.

They had a name for it, once upon a time. Sinister. People who wrote with their left hand. In every way, it was not right.

For ages, the majority of right-handed people tried to force the left-handers to be like them. Young people who showed a preference for writing with their left hand were forced to try and write with the “right” hand, to be like the rest. This was no more effective than it sounds.

Although it took a very long time, eventually most of the right-handers came to recognise that left handed people were just born that way, and there was no good to come from trying to make them be something they weren’t. It just made the left-handers miserable, and really did no good to anyone right or left-handed.

So left-handed people were allowed to write with their left hand, and most people went on with their lives and hardly thought about it again.

The hard-line right-handers continued to resist, and gritted their teeth and tried to ignore the left-handers and their writing in public left-handedly. But you have to draw the line somewhere. They sure as hell weren’t going to allow these left-handed freaks to paint left-handed. No way. Painting was the province of the good, right-handed folk. To let left-handed people paint would be the end of the world as we know it.

And many of the left-handed people didn’t care. They looked at the majority of the painting they saw that the right-handers had done, and said we don’t need to paint. We’re happy with our writing.

But some of the left-handed people did care. They had a strong desire to paint, to express themselves through painting. They wondered why their painting was forbidden. And when they asked, they were told “because it was decreed many years ago”. But many other things decreed then are no longer rules we live by, why is painting so important? “You might paint things that good right-handed people won’t like, and good right-handed people’s children might see your paintings. Your paintings might tempt right-handed children to be left-handed!”

And the left-handed people felt this was deeply unsatisfactory reasoning. Many right-handed people’s paintings were awful, just as many were good. And each painting was unique. The value of a painting was intrinsic to itself, the left-handed people said. The quality of our paintings doesn’t change the value of your paintings. They’re just our paintings. “No, only right-handed people can paint!”

Why? Will the left-handed people use up all the paint? “Well, no…”

Will letting left-handed people paint devalue your painting? “Yes it will.” Why? “Just, just because! Only right-handed people can paint.” Even if their paintings aren’t always good? Even if their paintings don’t stand the test of time? “Yes.” You realise that is very discriminatory? “Yes, but there are people who don’t want you to be allowed to paint. Important people who tell other people what to think and how to vote.”

But in more and more places, the right-handed majority began to realise that what they were espousing wasn’t fair. And the left-handed people who wanted to paint had a point. So in some places, they changed the rules and let the left-handed people paint.

Some of the left-handed people’s paintings were beautiful. Some of the left-handed people’s paintings were awful. But most of the left-handed people’s paintings were just average. Just like the right-handed people’s paintings.

And in those places, most people went on with their lives and hardly thought about it again.

Couch Potato

There’s a reason people say “ignorance is bliss”. Ignorance would stop one from getting riled up when one reads utter rubbish like “Scott Morrison finds $4 billion down the back of the couch“. According to The New Daily’s Money Editor, James Fernyhough,

The federal government has stumbled over an extra $4.4 billion, thanks to an unexpected boost in tax revenue and a drop in expenditure. The news, announced by Treasurer Scott Morrison and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann on Tuesday, reflected an unforeseen boost in economic activity in Australia.
The multi-billion dollar bonus does not mean that the government is out of the red – far from it. The budget for 2016-17 was still a massive $33.2 billion in deficit, meaning the government had to borrow that amount in order to fund its spending commitments.
But it means it had to borrow $4.4 billion less than it expected to back in May. As a result, the overall government debt expanded at a slower rate than expected. In total, the government now owes its lenders around the world $322.3 billion.

To suggest that the government “stumbled over” some money and has had to borrow less as a result is just factually wrong. The federal government does not borrow money. The federal government is the currency issuer. It is the only player in the economy who has that ability. If anyone else attempts to issue $A they will get a visit from the constabulary and a charge of forgery. So the idea that the federal government has to go out to “lenders around the world” to borrow the currency it – and only it – can issue is akin to saying that Qantas has to buy or borrow Frequent Flyer points from some market before it can issue them to its customers. Of course it doesn’t. Qantas can issue as many Frequent Flyers as it pleases, and it doesn’t need to get them from anywhere. They exist because Qantas issued them to someone. When that someone trades them back to Qantas in return for a service, they cease to exist again. So too every dollar exists because the federal government issued it into existence.

The back of that couch goes a long, long way. There is an infinite number of dollars down there. They are not a finite resource like gold. The only limit on their issuance is real resources and production: more dollars in the economy than idle productive capacity to absorb them and you get inflation.

Fernyhough goes on to say:

Where the money came from

In 2016-17, the government coffers took in a total of $409.9 billion, compared to the expected $405.7 billion. The lion’s share of that – $379.3 billion – came through taxation. The outperforming taxpayers were companies, consumers (via the GST) and importers (via customs and excise).
High income taxpayers contributed more than expected, while lower income taxpayers contributed less, bringing the overall income tax intake to sit around what was expected.
Non-tax receipts, which came from the sale of goods and services and interest on investments, stood at just over $30 million for the year.

Again, utter tosh.

There are no “government coffers” – the federal government does not run a bank account in a conventional sense, any more than Qantas have stocks of Frequent Flyers for a rainy day. The government does not recycle dollars – there’s no warehouse of them that must be stocked up before they can be issued on pension day. Every dollar the federal government spends is a new dollar that exists because it was spent by the federal government. So what stops all this money issuance causing inflation?

That’s where taxation comes in. It’s not the source of government funds, but the release valve that counteracts inflationary pressure. It’s the drain at the bottom that stops the flow from the tap at the top from overflowing the bath.

I have no idea what Mr Fernyhough thinks an “outperforming taxpayer” is. It’s not a term I’ve heard before, and I am hoping I don’t hear it again.

Where the money went

Over the 2016-17 year, the government spent a total of $438.9 billion, which was $1.3 billion less than it expected.

The savings came from slow take-up of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, lower-than-expected payments to states for infrastructure projects, and lower-than-expected spending on wage subsidies, among others.

These are not savings. There is no bank account to store such savings in. A more accurate way of stating this sentence would be:

the government reduced the size of the economy by $1.3 billion by withholding money from the disabled that they could have otherwise re-spent in the economy, by failing to invest in infrastructure projects and the employment that they would create, and by deliberately suppressing the spending capacity of wage-earners.

The article finishes with some quotes from Morrison about how he’s “keeping expenditure under control”. Nothing new there, our Treasurer has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. But Jim Chalmers (ALP) manages to keep the idiocy bipartisan, by blathering about “budget repair” and the size of the deficit.

The size of the deficit is not important. It is what it is. What matters is the level of unemployment and the level of inflation. To extend the earlier metaphor: do you care how many Frequent Flyer points Qantas have issued? Of course not. What matters is that there are not so many of them that Qantas could not provide the services to which holders of them are entitled when they want to claim them. That’s the employment/production equivalent in this metaphor, and if it’s not there when demanded, the value of those Frequent Flyers declines. You would need more of them to obtain the same service than you used to. That is the literal definition of inflation. It’s not the number of dollars in the economy that matters, but their stable purchasing power.

If the government allocated their resources and efforts in getting both unemployment and inflation below 2%, the economy would be in rude health. Focussing on the fiscal deficit or surplus is like a footy coach obsessing about the number of inside-50s their team takes, and not the scoreboard. It’s losing sight of the main game.

UBI gets the city press, but the bush wants a JG scheme

UBI continues to capture the imagination of people searching for ways that the status quo could be improved. As I’ve argued before, UBI is superficially a good idea, but ultimately will fail to produce the outcome its proponents suggest.

A perfect example is Tim Dunlop’s ‘Something big has to change’: could Australia afford a universal basic income? that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian. In arguing the pros and cons, he hits the problem on the head:

Although at first blush, UBI sounds like some idealistic, leftwing idea, the reality is it has long had support in rightwing politics and economics. Richard Nixon nearly introduced a type of basic income when he was the US president, while Milton Friedman – one of the most influential champions of “free” markets and small government – promoted a basic income scheme known as a negative income tax. Even today, right-of-centre organisations such as the Adam Smith Institute argue for the introduction of such a scheme.

This rightwing pedigree makes many on the left suspicious of UBI, and former union head Tim Lyons speaks for many when he says he is “deeply unconvinced by the push for a universal basic income”.

What the left fear, not without some justification, is that instead of UBI being used as a supplement to other forms of service provision, it would be used to replace them. Citizens would then be forced to use their UBI to buy health, education and pension services from private providers. This sort of rightwing UBI would simply be a transfer of public wealth to private businesses, a further marketisation of democratic society.

Of course, a UBI needn’t work that way, but such concerns mean the design and implementation of a scheme – the politics – are as important as the economics.

It needn’t work that way, but you know that’s what will happen. The demonisation of the unemployed as the architects of their own penury, refusing to work and just bludging off the taxpayer are neoliberal mythology that has become very hard to shake.

The problem with the UBI is that it does not directly solve the problem of unemployment. Yes, additional spending power at the lowest echelons will lead to increased sales and therefore might result in more workers being hired. But it can just as easily lead to price increases for the more inelastic products and services, as demand increases but supply cannot meet it. A good example of this is dental services, something that the poor are known to skimp on due to cost. There aren’t too many unemployed dentists that can be brought into “production” to meet an increased demand for their services if there is suddenly more disposable income that could buy it. The natural outcome will be a rise in price for dentistry.

And it strikes me as fanciful that giving everyone a living wage is going to somehow lead to some nirvana where we all just do charitable works and produce creative output, as people allegedly have their basic needs met by the UBI and can spend their time doing other worthwhile things. This argument is often linked to the rise of the machines – that robots are going to do all the work anyway, and there won’t be any need for jobs.

Well, for a very narrow definition of the word ‘job’, maybe. Automation has been happening since the industrial revolution, and there are always new jobs to replace old ones. I’m not sure why we simultaneously panic about automation and the ageing population issue: the idea that there won’t be enough workers to support the retired. Surely one offsets the other to some extent?

The Job Guarantee Concept.

If you’re going for radical change, a Job Guarantee scheme is a far better solution than UBI. Most advocates of a JG recommend that it be federally funded and locally administered. So that the local community can make the determinations on what services they require.

Put it this way. If you said to your local council: “here’s a standing army of people that the federal government will pay the wages for as long as you can put them to doing meaningful work, what services could they perform to improve your area?” Look around – what could be done to improve the amenities, functions and services in your area if there were people available to do them? Pretty much anything that would be considered socially “good” but won’t ever be done by the private sector because there’s not a quid in it would be a candidate for JG programme.

A JG scheme sets a minimum price for labour, and effectively buys all excess labour off the bottom. It is not competing with the private sector for labour, it is just mopping up the excess labour that the private sector cannot employ. As a result it’s not inherently inflationary (beyond some adjustment to its initial implementation – the likes of 7-11 might get a rude shock when no-one is prepared to work for less than the minimum wage offered by the JG scheme). Like the Wool Board, it buys excess when it exists so it can be released when demand returns, to smooth out the effects of the business cycle.

And of course there’s no coercion here. If you really are a bludger, you’re likely to stay in your current circumstances. On the other hand, if you don’t have a job but you do want to work, JG employment will be given to you. In the best possible scheme, a job that makes use of your existing skills, or trains you in new skills. Ultimately it keeps you job-ready, and employable, for when a better paid private sector opportunity comes along.

None of this is my idea, far brighter minds than I have been developing the JG scheme for years. The Centre of Full Employment and Equity and the work of Dr Bill Mitchell is largely the home of this concept, and there’s no shortage of research material available. Including costing, which shows such a scheme could be implemented for less than what a UBI would cost.

But it was very interesting to hear ABC PM yesterday, and in particular the segment Aboriginal groups call for alternative employment model. Unfortunately the ABC has cut their transcription of news stories, so the piece is only available as audio. (Another example of a socially good job that someone could be doing!) There is also a related article here.

The crux of the story is that rather than penalising or “breaching” the unemployed in aboriginal communities who are expected to travel vast distances to work for the dole, the local community has no end of useful things those people could be doing in their own area, and are calling on the federal government to allow them to find work for their unemployed community members. Breaching them (denying them welfare) is leading to greater hardship, and increased property crime. What this community is asking for is the Job Guarantee Programme!