Time to call out work snobs

WITH almost half a million jobs currently going begging, coinciding with just over half a million Australians officially unemployed, only one explanation is possible: that along with our freedoms, the work ethic of Australians has been a major casualty of the pandemic.

Just think: for the best part of two years, we were told to stay at home for our own good.

People whose jobs were on hold received $750 a week, regardless of how much they normally earned. Unemployed people had their benefits doubled and their obligations to seek, and to take work, suspended. Everyone who could was told to work from home. And even now, for a vast number of public servants, that’s still where they are.

Is it any wonder that on top of $300bn plus in extra federal debt alone, we’ve now got a population that doesn’t want to work as they might have before, or do a range of necessary but lower-level jobs?

You want to know why your favourite restaurant is no longer open on Monday nights, or why hotels no longer have coffee shops open in their lobbies, or why service in the pub is so slow, or why the queues to get through security at airports are so interminable, or why our CBDs are still so quiet – well, what we’ve discovered is that if you put people’s lives on hold for the best part of two years, many will never go back to what they did. Or at least, not go back until they’re made to.

This is the great tragedy of the pandemic: at least as much as the people who died; it’s the people whose lives have been permanently disrupted by government policy to deal with it; and the corrosive social changes that the pandemic has brought on: with mental stress high among young people who’ve lost two years of their schooling; old people who’ve lost two years of what life they had left; and, everyone who had what could normally be taken for granted – weddings, holidays, medical treatment and so on – taken away from them.

Last month, registered job vacancies reached a record 480,000, a jump of

14 per cent since February, and more than double average pre-pandemic levels.

Last month, one in four businesses reported at least one job vacancy; compared to only one in 10 in the month before Covid struck. At the same time, the ABS shows that there are 548,000 people officially unemployed.

Because the official statistics count as employed anyone who’s worked an hour in the previous month, a better figure for unemployment is the 935,000 Australians currently receiving the dole. How can there be close to a million getting unemployment benefits at the same time as there are half a million registered job vacancies – let alone all the other jobs that could be created if there were willing workers – if we didn’t now have a culture that’s so work-shy?

Something else that’s become glaringly obvious during the pandemic is the reality of Australia’s immigration system. When immigration stopped for two years, it wasn’t technicians, doctors and computer programmers that we were suddenly short of; it was cleaners, bar staff, drivers and agricultural labourers. It was confirmation of what most of us know: there are lots of necessary jobs that Australians increasingly don’t want to do.

Predictably, big business is demanding a resumption of higher immigration. I’m all in favour of welcoming migrants where we have real skills shortages; but the last thing we need is a large influx of so-called skilled workers from countries with different professional standards.

For big business, ever-higher immigration isn’t just about filling jobs; it

People with degrees shouldn’t be too proud to be labourers, or to wait tables ... to get them off the dole

also drives up demand for their products and puts downward pressure on wages. If not done carefully, more migrants just allows lazy businesses to get away with not training locals plus lets reform-shy governments off the hook by using migration to boost GDP rather than solid economic improvements in efficiency and productivity.

The first and most important step to filling all these current vacancies is expecting more of Australians who are now collecting the dole. No one should be living off the taxpayer if there’s a job he or she could reasonably do.

People with degrees shouldn’t be too proud to be labourers, or to wait tables, if that’s what’s needed to get them off the dole, while they’re searching for their perfect gig. For too long, too many Australians have been job snobs. The pandemic has made that much worse.