Attacking the worst unemployment crisis
Comment by Allen Myers
Stop worrying about the young people who can't find jobs. Cancel the programs to help the long-term unemployed (okay: they've already been cancelled). There's a far more deprived section of the Australian population we should be concerned about, a minority with an absolutely astronomical unemployment rate.
Federal politicians, that's who.
Figure it out for yourself: in the last election, there were often six or eight candidates for each House of Representatives seat — and of course, only one of them gets the job. Similarly in the Senate; as I recall, in NSW there were something like a hundred applicants for just 12 positions.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics doesn't publish the figures on politicians' unemployment (the government would be too embarrassed by them), but the rate must be somewhere around 80 or even 90%. Those are real crisis figures.
If we're going to deal with the federal political unemployment crisis, we first have to take a hard look at the causes of this catastrophe.
It seems indisputable that politicians have made the mistake of pricing themselves out of a job. For example, a backbencher gets a basic salary of $81,856 a year. Then there are various allowances and benefits, superannuation and all sorts of other add-on costs. Is it any wonder that employers of politicians (the taxpayers) don't hire more parliamentarians?
To get a bit of flexibility and reality back into this particular job market will take some drastic changes. At the very least, the basic salary should be cut in half immediately, and all special allowances abolished. This would probably more than halve political unemployment at a single stroke.
Such a move would leave employed federal politicians with an income still slightly above the national average, so further wage cuts might be necessary to bring the political unemployment rate down to somewhere around the national average.
There may be some resistance to this rationalisation of the political labour market from the more selfish minority of employed politicians. But surely the big majority of parliamentarians will recognise that their high wage is a fellow politician's lost job opportunity, and will be honourable enough to support greater flexibility.