By Lachlan Malloch
Kerry Packer's Channel Nine has teamed up with arch-rival Rupert Murdoch in an apparent effort to solve Australia's unemployment crisis. The result was "Jobs for Australia", screened nationally on September 17. It was four hours of feel-good illusions and nationalist indoctrination.
With Ray Martin at the helm in the "national jobs centre", employers were urged to ring up and do their bit by pledging job offers on the spot. Viewers were "plugged in" to their state-based "window" where local hosts broadcast job offers directly from the telephone room as they came in.
An impression of feverish activity was created as the hosts and telephonists struggled to keep up with the barrage of employers' calls from around the state. Every position from an apprentice hairdresser in Sydneys north-west suburbs to a badly needed doctor in the country town of Condobolin, to Coles' national pledge of 1450 jobs was broadcast. By the end of the night nearly 20,000 jobs had been pledged.
The up-beat night, which included live performances from pop stars Tina Arena and Jimmy Barnes, was reminiscent of the African famine "telethons" of the 1980s — designed to give people the illusion that they are helping to make the world a better place.
Similarly, Jobs for Australia gave viewers the illusion that all that is needed to solve the unemployment crisis is for employers to show a bit of Aussie heart and respond to Martins appeals to "give us a rev up". If only the real world was as simple as that!
While it was made out that the jobs "pledged" by employers were new, they were more likely to be already existing job vacancies. The Jobs for Australia circus thus became one enormous free advertising opportunity for the companies involved.
Even if the jobs were genuinely new, the 20,000 pledged would be dwarfed by the real unemployment rate. Officially, around 850,000 people are looking for work. That figure doesn't take into account those who either want to work hours (such as part-time and casual workers) or those who would look for work if they thought they had any chance of getting a decent job. With these thousands added in, the national under-employment rate is more like 17%.
Not surprisingly, Martin's "rev ups" did not include any such facts and when PM John Howard delivered his wooden message of support, he certainly didn't explain what his government had done to worsen unemployment — namely cut 30,000 public sector jobs. But Martin did give us a clue to the fundamental cause of unemployment — albeit accidentally — when he said, "We want employers to think about other things, not just profits".
It is precisely private enterprises' drive for higher profits that causes unemployment — not their lack of Aussie heart. But such an idea was, of course, far from Channel Nine's collective mind when the Jobs for Australia farce was dreamed up.