'DOLE BLUDGER' NARRATIVE HAS ALWAYS BEEN DESTRUCTIVE AND THAT'S WHY SOME PEOPLE LIKE...
0'Dole bludger' narrative has always been destructive and that's why some people like using it
It's a strange phenomenon. Experts are trying to figure it out. Currently. there are 125.000 more people relying on unemployment payments than there were before the pandemic. How could that be. when employment has hit record highs? We don't know. We'll have to be patient while the experts investigate it. However. in the meantime. we should all be wary of people who rush to fill the information vacuum. That happened in the 1970s. with a similar phenomenon. and we're still paying the price. An unexplained phenomenon See the graph below? The blue line shows the number of officially 'unemployed' people. In March. there were 580.300 of them (in original terms). The red line shows the people receiving JobSeeker and Youth Allowance (Other) payments. There are currently 935.280 of them. Notice what's happened? The number of people considered officially unemployed is in 'original 'terms (i.e. it hasn't been seasonally adjusted) to match the Department of Social Services data For 25 years before the pandemic. there were roughly 10 per cent more people. on average. receiving unemployment payments than the number of people considered officially unemployed by the Bureau of Statistics. But that relationship has broken. The volume of people needing financial help jumped sharply at the start of the pandemic. and it hasn't returned to pre pandemic levels. In March. there were 61 per cent more people receiving unemployment assistance than were officially unemployed. Why? Read more Professor Peter Whiteford. from the Australian National University. says he's been looking at these sorts of numbers since the late 1970s. And it's one of the most complicated things he's ever researched. Last week. he co wrote an article with Associate Professor Bruce Bradbury from the University of New South Wales that mentioned how more people were relying on unemployment payments today than before the pandemic. 'The reasons for this difference are complex. but a significant factor is that a very large share of people receiving unemployment payments are not required to seek jobs and have a reduced capacity to work.' they wrote. 'Among them are people whose access to the disability support pension has been cut and Australians who would have been of pension age before the age was lifted.' On that last point. the pension age used to be 65 but is in the process of being increased to 67 (which it will hit next year). It means many older Australians. who already face age discrimination when looking for work. are being forced to rely on the abysmally low JobSeeker unemployment payment for longer before they qualify for the age pension. Michael Klapdor. a social policy researcher. says recent data show Australians aged 55 and over are also struggling more than other age groups to live without unemployment assistance in the post lockdown era. See the purple line below. And that's just one dynamic. Professor Whiteford says a major barrier to understanding what's going on is that researchers are trying to work with different datasets that aren't in sync. He says policy changes in recent years. and the economic impact of the COVID 19 pandemic. have also impacted the data. Beware of the information vacuum So what can we do with the knowledge that it could take some time to understand the phenomenon? Well. we can be on the lookout for people who want to jump to conclusions. We saw that happen in the 1970s. when 'dole bludger' hysteria exploded in Australia. Read more The 1970s was an important decade in Australia's political and economic history. It was the decade in which policymakers abandoned the 'full employment' model of the post World War II era — from 1946 to 1975 — and embraced a new one. Under the new model. cemented in the 1980s. policymakers deliberately allowed a much higher level of unemployment. That higher level of unemployment was used as a policy tool to suppress wages and inflation. And that shift in models coincided with a shift...
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