Prime Minister Julia Gillard says government subsidies for car manufacturers are intended to help those businesses make the necessary changes rather than a form of protection.

"We always analyse very closely how we are going to work with industry and why we're going to work with industry," Ms Gillard said.

"When we're working with the car industry it's not a question of propping up an industry we think doesn't have a future; we think carmaking's got a great future in this country."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-17/treasury-says-australians-should-be-happier/3836144?WT.svl=news1

Yes Gus,

Thank god for Mr Parkinson’s refreshing optimism ….

It will doubtless be cherished by many Australians as they confront a daily existence where, in the past 5 years, electricity prices have risen by a staggering 139% & are still rising; bread prices are up by 12%, movie tickets & insurance premiums by 25%, petrol by 34%, council rates by 39% & the overall cost of living by 22%, whilst average weekly earnings crept up by only 14%.

Of course, living in our nation’s capital, as he does, Mr Parkinson could be forgiven for thinking that we should all be optimistic. Canberra is a place where no taxpayer expense has been spared to ensure that the nation’s fat cats enjoy the very best of everything …. you won’t find any dirt roads in Canberra; no streets without footpaths, no homes in need of maintenance, no decrepit infrastructure, no shelters for the homeless & where the only sign of anyone missing out is at the aboriginal tent embassy outside parliament house, which stands in sharp & inconvenient relief to the rest of the place.

As Mr Parkinson pulls down a lazy $500,000 a year & contemplates his wonderful future, perhaps he might spare a thought for the 40% of Australians who today are forced to subsist on casual or part-time work …. perhaps he could find time to read the latest research undertaken by David Richardson (no relation) of the Australia Institute, whose paper Casual Labour - A Stepping Stone To Something Better Or Part Of An Underclass delivers a sobering insight into the world of the real “battlers” adrift in the conspicuous consumption of our very rich nation?

Using Xavier Herbert’s wonderful turn of phrase: “poor fellow my country”.

As fairytale career opportunities go, the job advert was right up there: a permanent position on a night shift at Tesco's superstore in Bury St Edmunds for which you would be paid precisely nothing but Jobseeker's Allowance and travel expenses.

The ensuing storm on Twitter yesterday morning quickly prompted a statement from the company blaming an IT glitch by Jobcentre Plus. The advert should have said it was an offer of work experience, not a permanent role. Apparently, more than 300 people have already gained employment at Tesco's through such government schemes, the company claimed.

Before the explanation came, one Tweeter had urged: "Everyone go out & steal from @UKTesco. If they challenge you, explain it's a Taste Experience Programme and 300+ food items have been bought."

At least the erroneous ad has helped shatter the surprising silence surrounding the growing number of young people working unpaid in the private sector.

Although some of the schemes have their roots in New Labour policy-making, the coalition has greatly expanded the programmes which effectively compel – through the threat of benefit suspensions – people to work for their welfare cheque.

Job centre advisors can demand claimants put in 30 hours per week of "mandatory work activity" (MWA) that is "of benefit to the community" for four weeks. Or they can ask people to do up to eight weeks of "work experience" with a guaranteed job interview (but not necessarily a job) at the end.

Originally, the thinking was that charities and the public sphere might be the obvious places for some jobless youngsters to learn lessons in "employability" (turning up, being polite etc.) Instead, some of the mightiest names in retail have led the way in creating a new model of private pseudo-employment – which some call "slave labour".

Argos, Asda, Maplin, TKMaxx, Matalan, Primark, Holland and Barrett, Boots, McDonald's, Burger King, Sir Phillip Green's Arcadia Group (owners of Topshop and Burton, amongst others) and of course Tesco – Britain's biggest private sector employer - have signed up.

Others, notably Waterstones and Sainsbury's, have pulled out, saying they do not want to undermine the principle of paid work. More will surely follow as bad PR stalks the programme, especially after yesterday's debacle.

Principles aside, there remain doubts about the scheme's usefulness. One 22-year-old graduate who worked at Waterstones - before they withdrew – told The Guardian recently how he was given "grunt jobs" that others would not touch, such as shifting entire sections of a book shop around. Another was known at his workplace as "our free one". 

Some complain that the exhausting manual work leaves them without the time or energy to apply for the sort of work their education had prepared them for – or that will offer the kind of rewards that will enable them to begin repaying their tuition fees.

The numbers working unpaid on coalition wheezes has grown surprisingly large. Some 34,200 have now gone through work experience; 250,000 will do so in the next three years. A total of 24,100, meanwhile, have undertaken MWA. Under the vaguely sinister-sounding Community Action Programme, planned for national rollout from 2013, the long-term unemployed will be compelled to work for no fewer than six months.

Notably, Tesco omitted to mention in yesterday's statement that while 300 may have gone on to gain employment in their supermarkets, a total of 1,400 had given the firm the benefit of their labour for free during the past three months.

Every little bit helps, of course. · 

Tesco Twitter Storm Lifts Lid On Number Working For Benefits

 But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.

First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.

Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/opinion/krugman-moochers-against-welfare.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print       

In Aussieland we've got the choice of the Labor management that the media keeps on poopooing — thus Labor must be doing something that works well enough despite the rumbles — or picking a worse repeat of the conservative Rattus years — with a little lying upstart opportunistic crappy former monk — when while enjoying worlwide economic good times all around, Rattus spent his time bashing workers and augmenting the bonuses of bank managers — and investing bugger all on infrastructure...

The choice is easy... The NBN, the school program, the insulation program, the education program, the carbon tax to start tackling global warming which has not gone away despite record snows in Yourp and "not a day without rain for the past three months in Sydney"...

The stratospheric Aussie dollop is creating problems for exporters, manufacturers and out tourism industries... Why?... Because, despite the whatever of the gloom faces, Aussieland is doing far better than other Western countries... due to China. Thank you China... At least Labor is trying to make this industry help the rest of us, while the young Rattuses and their painful Pynes would make workers suffer more to protect the super-rich miners who are digging up OUR resources...

The choice?... Yes I know shoot ourselves in the foot or the head...

Behind the hype of Australia’s mining boom and “economic stability” lies the very real crisis affecting rural Australia. While the impacts of droughts and floods (aggravated by capitalist-induced climate change) are part of the explanation, the real culprits for the devastation being wrecked on community after community is big business and the free market fundamentalists running the country in their interests. And unless a fundamental shift in priorities take place, the situation is set to worsen.

Speaking at the annual Outlook conference organised by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resources Economics and Sciences (ABARES) on March 7, business consultant David McKinna said the Australian food industry is undergoing one of its most profound structural shifts ever.

The March 8 Australian reported that he said: “And it is regional Australia and small country towns that will bear the brunt of this shift; jobs will go, schools will close, the local doctor will leave and there will unfortunately be suicides - we are talking about a massive social impact here.”

McKenna said the “immense power” of Coles and Woolworths - which together control 80 per cent of the market - was responsible for the fact that “multinational food companies are being driven out of business” and relocating offshore. He also pointed to consumers chasing cut-price specials as a contributing factor.

But McKenna’s outlook confuses the symptoms for the disease.

These problems are the logical outcomes of the profit-at-all cost policies being pursued by state and federal governments, regardless of the party in power. Take, for example, the January closure of the Heinz tomato factory in Girgarre, a town of about 150 people located in the Goulburn Valley, Victoria.

In May last year, Heinz announced it would close down Australia’s second last tomato processing plant and transfer its operations to New Zealand. The move left 146 people without a job, although this is just the tip of the iceberg. Overall job losses are expected to be closer to 700 due to the run-on effect that the closure will have on the 53 suppliers.

Writing in the March 11 Age, Gary Tippet said locals were angry: “The place was running efficiently, making money. About eight years ago, according to [former Heinz worker] Ken Covington, it was the most profitable site in the global Heinz empire and one of the most profitable in Australia. “‘We could understand why they’d shut it’ says his wife Ruth. ‘I think they threw a dart at the map’.”

Heinz Australia’s explanation has been to garble some nonsense about “productivity initiatives to accelerate future growth”.

For the free market fundamentalists that place “productivity” above all else, responding to meet community needs is out of the question. The federal Labor and the state Liberal governments have sat on their hands.

All local Liberal Federal MP Sharman Stone has done is issue vague calls for “financial support” for Heinz (which has already received a number of government hand-outs) and pretend that the factory closure was due to the yet-to-be-introduced carbon price.

The only response it seems that the state Labor opposition could muster was to call on the state government to ensure government caterers no longer used Heinz tomato sauce.

And the best local state MP Paul Weller from the Nationals (the so-called party of rural Australia) could come up with was his May 30, 2011 promise “to ensure the transition for workers into other industry and jobs is as smooth and as painless as possible”.

The problem, of course, is that decades of “productivity” focused 
policies in Australia means this “smooth” transition is impossible.

Whenever governments and bosses talk about “productivity” what they really defending is slashing jobs, wages and conditions to boost corporate profits. The costs of “productivity initiatives” are always borne by workers.

This is not just the case with Heinz. The Goulburn Valley has been hit hard by the loss of 600 jobs in the six months leading up to March, following the closure of several other fruit and dairy factories. Add to this the impact on producers and other affected industries and you can see what the pursuit of “productivity” has led to.

And as Tippet noted in his Age article, the future holds more pain for these communities. Take the example of Chris “Dickie” Lloyd, who worked at Heinz for 18 years. Lloyd has found new work, but he told Tippet that his income has fallen by $4 an hour - close to $15,000 a year.

“I’m grateful for the job”, Lloyd said, “but the thing is, you haven’t got sick leave, you don’t have holidays or super, you don’t have all the trimmings of a permanent position, and that adds up.”

Lloyd is not alone, as all the other former Heinz employees that have found jobs have done so as casual placements and it is seasonal work. Lloyd said: “Seasonal work you go seven days a week, you work hard, no certainty, and you’re in there for a couple of months and out and into the great big casual pool again.”

A recent ACTU survey found 40 per cent of workers nationally are engaged in insecure work arrangements such as casual work, fixed term work, contracting or labour hire, all of which are essential ingredients in a economic strategy focused on “productivity”.

Then there is the string of job losses in other industries. “Sometimes you wonder what’s going on in this country,” Simon Fraser, another former Heinz worker, told The Age. “Alcoa, the car industry, 
jobs lost everywhere. Every time I open the paper now it’s, ‘I know what those poor bastards are going through’.”

This is a big part of the reason why most Australians are forced to buy the cheapest products they can find at the supermarket, as they struggling to pay off mortgages and rising bill costs at the same time. And it’s why Coles and Woolworths, who control so much of what we can buy, are raking in the profits.

These are the consequences Labor and the Coalition’s commitment to make working people in the city and country pay for capitalism’s never ending drive to accrue more profits.

The fate of rural communities, workers lives and the food we eat are too important to be left in the hands of market fundamentalists who profess the virtues of “productivity” at all cost.

What is needed is an emergency plan that can turn this situation around - one that is premised on placing peoples’ lives before profits. 

How Productivity Is Destroying Rural Australia