Contributed from Victoria

Beware. Australia is facing a mayor public relations offensive to spread the lie that the Morrison government has a great record in creating jobs and shaping up to do even better.  The aim is to throw sand in our eyes and stop us from seeing  that the opposite is true.

The case for the government’s achievement lies in the JobTrianer scheme. More than 100,000 young Australians are supposed to have been trained and equipped to get jobs. It is supposed to funnel in 450,000 over the next couple of years.

It is running short of the target. Even if this was not so, the reality is that fir many this has been about substandard courses. They provide a piece of paper, but no qualification that is acceptable to a prospective employer. The winners have been the private operators able to access and pocket generous government handouts.

Job-Trainer is a scam. It is also founded on the premise that unemployment is caused by the unemployed being faulty and the way to overcome it, is to fix the unemployed. This completely disregards that it is the state of the economy that is the main determinant.

A $4 billion JobMaker Hiring Credit program introduced last year proved to be a flop. With this, employers $200 a week if they hired an eligible employee aged 16 to 29, or $100 per week if they hired an eligible employee aged 30 to 35. Few took it up. It was supposed to create 450,000 jobs. In managed to create 1,100 jobs.

Despite this, the scheme will continue.  

Taken together, JobTrainer, the JobMaker Hiring Credit scheme, and other measures we may see in this year’s budget, will continue to be designed to give the appearance that something is being done about the serious unemployment problem, particularly when it concerns young Australians.

Expect to hear a lot about how much the government is doing.

Frydenberg is bragging that Australia is doing better than other nations and has already brought the unemployment rate down to 5.6 percent. Besides not being true, the claim only measures those removed from income support, which is different from those who really did  find work.

In the government’s public relations effort, no clear distinction is being made between training and finding jobs.

There is really nothing to suggest that the Morrison government is seriously considering the unemployment problem.

It will do what it can to increase the growing scourge of underemployment. Most of the job creation that has occurred within the economy has been the replacement of full-time work with underemployment. This brings benefits to the Morrison government. It enables the manipulation of figures, to make it look like unemployment is going down, and fits in with aim of pulling down the wages share in national income.

Underemployment brings cheap labour to those employers prepared to exploit those at a disadvantage.

Extending exploitation of wage earners is the real content of government policy, based on the false assumption that this is  the way to grow the economy. Don’t be surprised if the promised tax cuts for big business are made good this time around.