Skills Gap
The federal government has made a lot out of the dearth of unskilled workers and young people going to trades, but little has been done to improve the situation, unsurprisingly. Still, with the industrial relations protections about to suffer the heavy hand of the Coalition (and don’t expect much out of the Senate hearings, if any), you might be forgiven for thinking the government’s claims of productivity increases, should they actually be realized, would gladden the [black] heart of any Liberal. Instead, a new effort to increase immigration by skilled workers is now being undertaken. After all, once the protections for existing workers have been removed, additional competition for jobs should see amazing gains in productivity – through increased depression of wages, anyway.

And while we’re on the subject of what Howard and his cronies are doing to screw the population, they want to sell Medibank, too, the government-owned “private” medical insurance scam, I mean, supplement to Medicare. Well, they’ll need to sell something in order to fund the losses they’re likely to incur when they sell the remainder of Telstra and have to come up with more than the projected AU$3 billion for bringing rural services into line with what’s on offer in urban Australia, not to mention that putting the scheme (truly) into the private sector is the only way to even potentially achieve the kind of competition necessary to relieve the premium burden presently loaded onto every citizen sucker enough to sign up to get the tax rebate.