North needs help

AUSTRALIA’S unemployment rate is hovering just over 5 per cent. But the unemployment rate for Geelong’s northern suburbs, Norlane and Corio, has now nudged a shocking 20 per cent.

When you consider what counts as employment under the definition used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the situation is even starker.

As the ABS website explains, to be classified as unemployed a person needs to be not working more than one hour a week, actively looking for work, and available to start work.

So if you are working four hours a week but are desperate for 40 hours you are still counted as employed.

This underemployment, which is largely obscured in the official figures, is likely to be an issue for a while yet as the modern workforce gets more atomised and the ‘gig economy’ — where jobs are increasingly paid for on a task by task basis — continues to rise.

We often trumpet the success of Geelong’s flexibility and adaptability particularly in our embrace of advanced manufacturing largely based around futuristic carbon and metal technologies.

We should rightly be proud of what we have survived as a regional city and the way we have been able to reinvent ourselves.

But we also need to acknowledge there is also a less happy side to major disruptive change such as the loss of large scale heavy industry job factories like Ford and Alcoa.

Unemployment in the north is partly a legacy of these jobs being lost.

While there are many excellent community groups including Northern Bay College trying to tackle this socioeconomic disadvantage, it is a long way from fixed and none of the political representatives for this area should be too proud of their record in this area.

Creative ideas such as that proposed by G21 in today’s report are at the very least worth considering.

We need big ideas, as our city progresses, to stop our brothers and sisters in the north from being left behind.