Blaming the unemployed

John Hewson presents us with an ethical conundrum (“Welfare thin margins”,

August 21-27) . Is the prime minister’s utterance – “we can’t allow the Jobseeker payment to become an impediment to people going out and doing work” – a personal prejudice or one more widely held? How often I have heard the unemployed maligned for their unemployment. And yet, when the maligners are challenged to share their work with those they critique, stupefaction is the usual response. Ideological antipathy may of course be an influencer in this space. Scott Morrison et al could recalibrate their moral compass by acknowledging that every unemployed individual has sacrificed their own welfare to provide someone else with a job. For this reason alone, those employed need to adequately recompense the unemployed. If this is too ideologically ambiguous, the state could instead mandate that all work be shared to the point that no one is unemployed – permitting the redundancy of the miserly Jobseeker...

– Peter Doelle, Mount Gambier, SA

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