Australian Politics
So THAT'S why it's so hard to get people off the dole! The 'unworkable' system jobseekers have to battle with to find vacancies
Bureaucracy is a big enough problem at any time but bureaucracy online is murder
Australia's official 'jobs board' website is 'unworkable' and fails those seeking employment, a frustrated recruiter who has abandoned the service says.
Graham Wynn, who is the founder of Superior People Recruitment, told Daily Mail Australia that Centrelink's Workforce Australia jobs portal, which the unemployed use to apply for advertised vacancies, was an example of 'bureaucracy gone mad'.
The glaring flaw with the website is that it does not provide recruiters with contact details for job seekers, rendering it almost pointless.
Mr Wynn claims the site, which replaced the JobActive website on July 1 last year, is so bad 'many recruiters are just not using this service' and his own firm no longer posts vacancies on it.
'They have made it much more difficult for people to find work and made it much more difficult for us to find candidates because of how it functions,' he said. 'That to me is the real challenge we are facing right now, it’s just unworkable.'
The previous JobActive system sent an email to a recruiter with an application and resume attached when someone applied for an advertised job.
However, now recruiters must log into the system to see if applicants have created a profile, which does not provide contact details.
The only chance a recruiter has getting in contact using the site is if the job seeker has attached a resume, which is optional. 'They might have some good experiences but if we don't get a resume there is no way to get in touch,' Mr Wynn said.
Job seekers who have been tracked down by recruiters through LinkedIn and other means have been startled to find out the Workforce Australia site does not give out contact details.
'No one has explained that to them, so if they are looking for work they've made it more difficult for them,' Mr Wynn said.
Despite 'numerous discussions' had by recruiters with the Department of Employment about fixing the glaring flaw the bureaucrats won't budge, citing 'privacy reasons'.
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Australians paying thousands more income tax than a decade ago
Australians are paying on average 30 per cent more income tax per person than a decade ago, even after accounting for inflation, confirming a long-term trend towards workers having to bear more of the burden to fund bigger government.
Analysis by The Australian of budget figures reveals personal income tax payments in real per capita terms have jumped from $6556 in 2013-14, to a projected $8617 in 2023-24.
Economists said the “hidden tax hikes” of bracket creep were partly responsible for the per capita tax take rise, as the commonwealth has become increasingly reliant on revenue from more Australians in jobs and working more hours at higher wages.
Budget figures also show the net national debt is estimated to be worth $15,574 per person by June next year – almost double the $8500 figure in 2014. But years of falling interest rates have helped lower net interest payments on a real per capita basis – from $440 in 2013-14, to $363 in 2023-24, the budget papers show.
Anthony Albanese on Monday tried to deflect accusations from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that Labor’s second budget, which included almost $14bn in cost-of-living support for financially vulnerable households, had done nothing to alleviate pressures on middle-income earners, who pay a large share of the national tax take.
“Last week’s budget was a budget aimed at assisting vulnerable Australians, taking the pressure off families whilst not putting pressure on inflation. It was aimed squarely at middle Australia,” the Prime Minister said.
“Nothing says middle Australia like making it cheaper to see a doctor. Nothing says middle Australia like making it more accessible to see a local GP.
“Nothing says middle Australia like making childcare cheaper – that will happen on July 1. Nothing says middle Australia like having fee-free TAFE – 300,000 additional places added to the 180,000 … included in … October’s budget. And nothing says middle Australia like taking pressure off inflation by producing a budget forecast … the first surplus forecast for 15 years,” he said.
In a sign of the government’s shifting budget sales pitch on Monday, Mr Albanese used the phrase “middle Australia” five times and Treasurer Jim Chalmers used it six times in their respective press conferences.
6PR Radio Broadcaster Oliver Peterson says Treasurer Jim Chalmers is being ‘loose and selective’ with his word…
The 30 per cent increase in real per capita personal income tax receipts over the past decade is three times the 10 per cent increase in real GDP per capita, using the latest available Australian Bureau of Statistics national accounts data.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, workers will contribute 52 per cent, or $319bn, of the estimated total $616bn federal tax revenue in 2023-24, versus 21 per cent from company taxes.
Dr Chalmers has refused to put a cap on tax receipts as a share of the economy, but has repeatedly said Labor’s “position has not changed” on the stage three tax cuts, which start from the middle of next year and mostly benefit middle- to high-income earners who pay the most tax.
Labor ahead of last year’s election promised not to touch the stage three changes, and when in opposition voted in favour of the Coalition’s tax reform in 2019.
The Treasurer on Monday said “we support tax relief, particularly for people on low and middle incomes”. “We want people to get a fair reward for their efforts; that begins with wages, and when the budget can afford to return some bracket creep, that’s a worthy and legitimate aspiration as well.”
CBA head of Australian economics Gareth Aird said the steady creep higher in average tax take from workers was the price Australians were paying for bigger government. “Basically we are all paying more tax as a result of bracket creep. If you’re not giving tax cuts in line with CPI (consumer price index) or WPI (wage price index), then you’ve got people incrementally going into higher tax brackets … they are handing over a greater proportion of their income to the government,” Mr Aird said.
Tax as a share of household income has increased from a low of 12 per cent around 2010, to more than 16 per cent at the end of last year, Mr Aird said, and was now at its highest since 1999, before the income tax relief associated with the introduction of the GST.
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More insanity about women in Australia and elsewhere
Note that the Wong below is Rachael Wong, not Leftist apparatchik Penny Wong
In the guise of trying to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘tolerant’ and ‘accepting’, some folks are willing to do and say the most brainless things imaginable. This practice has been going on for some time. I offer just three examples, all concerning radical trans activism that is, in my opinion, destroying the West.
Who can forget what happened in March of last year regarding US Supreme Court Justice nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson? As I said back then:
The Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked a rather simple question on Tuesday night as part of her Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, asked Jackson a question that most five-year-olds could easily answer: ‘Can you provide a definition for the word “woman?”’ Her reply was this: ‘Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t. Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.’
Such is the madness that we live under when seemingly intelligent grown-ups cannot answer the most basic of questions. It reminds me of one meme making the rounds that shows two people standing in the pouring rain. The woman asks the guy: ‘Is it raining?’ He replies: ‘I don’t know, I’m not a meteorologist.’
A similar circumstance played out in New Zealand recently. That sad episode I also wrote up at the time, so let me share that here:
Recently the uber-woke New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern stepped down. That was great news, but many of us wondered if her replacement would be any better. Well, now we know.
When a journalist asked him [Chris Hipkins] what a woman is, he said: ‘Um… to be honest that question has come slightly out of left field for me.’ When asked again he said, ‘It is not something that I have a pre-formulated answer on.’ What utter madness.
You can watch the whole, embarrassing and appalling episode here.
With ‘leaders’ like this the West doesn’t have a chance. As one friend said on the social media: ‘I just asked our 8-year-old grandson, and he certainly knows women are different to boys and men and briefly explained to me why anatomically.’ To which I replied, ‘Well, he would do a better job of running NZ than this clown would!’
But not to be outdone by America and New Zealand, we have another case of this moral breakdown occurring in Australia. It involves – of all things – the Queensland Minister for Women. Rachael Wong of Women’s Forum Australia had this to say:
Things are looking dire for women in Queensland. This week, Queensland’s Minister for Women Shannon Fentiman (who is also the state’s Attorney-General and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence), took to social media to decry a sticker placed on a sign outside her office. The sticker included the word woman, and its definition: adult human female.
According to the Minister, ‘For some people in our community, these stickers represent much more – they represent a movement which discriminates against [transgender people] and denies their existence.’
‘I want to be very clear – I don’t stand for these sort of views, our community doesn’t stand for these views, and Queenslanders don’t stand for these views,’ added the Minister."
So, the Minister for Women ‘doesn’t stand for the definition of woman’, which, as the Minister for Women, she finds offensive? It’s like we’re living in an alternate universe.
Rachael Wong also tweeted the following:
QLD ‘Minister for Women’ @ShannonFentiman answers Q ‘What is a woman?’ ‘Let’s be inclusive. Anyone that identifies as a woman is a woman… It’s not one group advancing at the expense of another.’ Tell that to the actual women whose rights you are giving away under self-ID laws.
This caught the attention of Jordan Peterson. He tweeted in reply:
"I'm responsible for something with no definition" how convenient for you @ShannonFentiman"
In an email to supporters Rachel Wong said this:
My tweet has since been shared by none other than Canadian commentator Jordan Peterson, who in raising the issue with his 4 million + followers, has now done more for women in Queensland than the one person whose job it is to represent them.
How does the Minister know someone is identifying as a woman if she can’t define what a woman is? How can she represent women if she doesn’t know who they are?
And ‘one group advancing at the expense of another’ is exactly what Fentiman’s self-ID laws will achieve.
Well done Rachael and Jordan. The complete reality meltdown that we see in our Woke leaders is the most shocking thing I have witnessed in my long lifetime. And it looks to only get worse. Who is voting in these utter nincompoops? When will this insanity come to an end?
The level of stupidity here is mind-boggling, and the big losers are women and children. As Candace Owens put it recently: ‘Telling children they can pick their gender is as fundamentally stupid as telling children they can choose their species. If we did, we’d have classrooms filled with mermaids, aquamen, wizards, gnomes, fairies, and aliens.’
But adult activists do not give a rip about the harm and confusion they may be causing to children. Heaven help us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/there-are-nincompoops-among-us/
************************************************************Unattainable energy targets
"It is bullshit". Former Snowy Hydro boss Paul Broad is far from alone in his expert, if refreshingly colloquial, view that Australia’s farcical state, federal and corporate greenhouse gas emissions targets are simply unattainable – and never were. And now, the head of the world’s second-biggest miner, Rio Tinto, says his company’s scope 1 and 2 emissions targets were a mistake – and he won’t join rivals BHP, Vale, Glencore and Fortescue (with its ambitious net zero by 2040) in pretending he can set achievable targets for the scope 3 emissions of Rio’s overseas customers, over which Rio has no control. He likens such scope 3 targets to greenwashing.
Even some stock-market tipster sheets are confidently promoting a surge in demand for fossil fuels, ie. coal, oil and gas, as the growing recognition that politically correct emissions targets cannot be achieved, will provide soaring share prices as the current green virtue-signalling by banks and investment managers of superannuation funds, is replaced by the pragmatism of market forces – and the national need for reliable energy.
In regretting having set his company’s emissions reduction targets of 15 per cent by 2025 and 50 per cent by 2030, Rio’s CEO, Jacob Stausholm, warned that it would take ‘hard choices’ to meet them as it is now clear that ‘decarbonising at scale is a lengthy process’. This follows his Davos warning earlier this year that governments and corporate executives were ‘fooling ourselves’ on how long the process of de-carbonising would take. He followed up last week in Perth with the view that, ‘People still do not understand how much work was required to meet these goals…. You have to be realistic on what it takes.’ And added that for solar power, ‘I don’t think people have realised the amount of land that is necessary.’
Paul Broad, former-CEO of Snowy Hydro 2.0, the chaotic, massively delayed (planned for 2021 and may be ready by 2029) and hugely over-run costs (from an estimated $2 billion to the current $20 billion including transmission and still rising; economically it will never pay for itself), says Labor’s ‘unrealistic’ renewable energy plans would ‘risk the lights going out…. The notion that you’re going to have 80 per cent renewables in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, bullshit. This transition, if it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. There are massive changes that need to occur’.
On top of all this, the former Snowy Hydro boss warned that more than $10 billion in electricity transmission projects were unlikely to be built on time, threatening the transition from coal generation to renewables. ‘Not enough would be in place by 2030 to allow Australia to reach its target of tripling the current level of renewables by the end of the decade.’ So coal will be needed: ‘You can’t close Eraring and Vales Point; closing Liddell was bad enough…. And we need more gas.’
But will we be able to get enough coal and enough gas?
Labor governments, state and federal, face a dilemma at a time when their priority is gaining popular support for the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Do they approve contested gas and coal developments on economic grounds or oppose them in support of Aboriginal objectors who in many cases appear to have been manipulated by climate activists into drawn-out costly lawfare that is aimed more at meeting activists’ zero emissions agendas than bringing the benefits of income, jobs and prospects to remote areas?
After years of toing and froing, two multi-billion gas developments with governmental approval still face uncertainty. This month’s announcement by the Northern Territory government that it would approve fracking in the massive Beetaloo basin, has generated strong opposition that will inevitably lead to further delays on top of the five years between the Territory accepting fracking in principle and doing so in practice. The federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources says Beetaloo ‘has the potential to rival the world’s biggest and best gas resources’ and provide gas for the next 20 to 40 years.
But in an open letter to the Territory government, almost 100 scientists have urged it to abandon its fracking plans for Beetaloo, warning of ‘the damage it will inflict on our climate’, with one claiming the rise in emissions will intensify bushfire seasons and floods and accelerate the death of coral reefs.
Significantly, in the context of prospective lawfare, the scientists assert that fracking poses risks to Aboriginal people and their culture ‘at an unacceptable level’.
The other major gas project on hold is the Santos’ $US 3.6 billion Barossa offshore development 130 kilometres north of the Tiwi Islands, some of whose traditional owners demonstrated successfully in the Federal Court that they had not been satisfactorily consulted as required by law when Santos dealt directly with the Tiwi Land Council.
Now that Santos is taking action to meet this requirement (even with nationwide newspaper advertisements) there is still no certainty that drilling, which was suspended by last September’s legal action, will resume so that Santos can meet its commitment to deliver gas by the first half of 2025 to its Japanese and Korean partners, both of which are increasingly concerned about energy security. With the personal assurance from Prime Minister Albanese to the Japanese Prime Minister late last year that Australia would remain ‘a steady and reliable supplier’ of energy to Japan, the Albanese undertaking will be tested against his support for indigenous rights if further traditional owner legal action causes more delays.
One traditional owner has made clear his continuing opposition: ‘We have fought to protect our sea country from the beginning to the end and we will never stop fighting. Our sea is like our mother – we are part of the sea and the sea is part of us.’
And other traditional owners, who had lodged human rights claims against the group of banks, including ANZ, Westpac and NAB, involved in a $1.5 billion loan to the project, have followed it up by targeting superannuation funds for ‘failing to meet international human rights standards [by] investing in the companies’ as the project breaches ‘the economic, social and cultural rights of the Impacted Tiwi communities’, with a spokesman adding, ‘We do not want Santos to build a pipeline or to drill off the coast here… and we want the super funds to hear us and act.’
This combination of the pursuit of unachievable emissions targets and the unrestrained use of lawfare against major fossil fuel projects (even before the Voice provides an added weapon) means that Australia’s much-needed $20.5 billion coal and gas-led improvement over the past six months in the budget bottom line is unlikely to be repeated.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/business-robbery-etc-113/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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