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The strategic myth of the job snob
A personal take on politics and media I’ve been The Echo editor for eleven years now, and am the third, after founder Nicholas Shand. Michael McDonald was the second. It’s a very privileged job where you act as a conduit, or curator, to the community and the many visitors who holiday here. The Echo comprises a dedicated team of passionate longterm locals. Some sell the advertising and design the pages, others throw the paper onto driveways and others do the book keeping and debt collection. Deciphering and questioning the sophisticated messaging from the governing and monied class is part of this job, as is reporting on the better angels in the community. The better angels do remarkable things, yet are not necessarily looking for accolades. Beware of the self-serving attention seekers! Since its inception in 1986 by a bunch of ratbag hippy locals, The Echo has championed the voice of the afflicted, not the comfortable. That should be the aim of every media organisation. ‘Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’, as Finley Peter Dunne was supposed to have said of a newspaper’s role. While the national and international optics are carefully curated by mainstream media to protect corporate interests, locally, the optics from The Echo have, and will hopefully always be, independent. Free from the stench of compromise. Yay! Anyway, what I learned early on in this job was that politics/governance is like a poorly rating TV game show, generally presented by the least among us. Behind the curtain hide the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, who run almost everything. There’s generally two types of political actor: Reformers are rare, for they soon realise they are no intellectual match for the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. And besides, they generally can’t outspend the monied class. Instead, most political actors, with their thin skin and overinflated egos, will dive headlong into the job with ambitions to become careerists, welded to a political party’s values. These party values, of course, are largely at odds with the nation’s interests, and are not geared for independent, critical thought. And anyway, business, without question, needs to be done. Big business donate to the major parties, so fancy footwork and smoke and mirrors are deployed to convince the public that the actors act in the public interest. Instead, they provide their donors/masters with solid returns on those investments. The two interests are generally not compatible. It would be hard to argue that integrity, empathy and trust in politics and media is improving. It appears to be becoming more tribal, if anything. Yet while it’s easy to dismiss most political actors as selfcentred, shallow, ineffectual and greedy, it’s not always the case. And this is where we come to Mandy Nolan, who will be the federal Greens candidate for the upcoming election. She has been part of community and The Echo for decades, and has been consistent with her beliefs and actions. Unlike careerist politicians, she is self-made, smart and entertaining. That presents a threat to the establishment. Good luck Mandy! (Pity it’s the Greens party, but hey). Thankfully, local politics is about to get a lot more interesting. Hans Lovejoy, editor
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hy do MPs keep telling the unemployed to move to the regions? Because they know they can’t. Whenever a coalition government wants to avoid awkward questions about why so very, very, very many people are without work, or why they’re removing support for those at the bottom of society’s pile, you can bet that they’ll immediately deploy their classic comeback: it’s the unemployed’s fault for selfishly remaining unemployed. Warren Entsch invented the term ‘job snobs’ back in the Abbott era, and it’s been the favourite go-to bad-faith lie of the federal government ever since. Former Employment Minister Michaelia Cash insisted that there were jobs ‘for those who wanted them’ back in 2019, even as unemployment soared and retail shed workers like sprinkles atop an unaffordable cake. And in July last year, when much of the country was still in lockdown, ex-Liberal MP Craig Laundy did a lap of the Murdochracy to talk about how the real problem was employee laziness and not [checks notes] that incurable global pandemic which was really starting to hit its stride. The rhetoric has ramped up ever since, especially with the regular coverage of noble farmers loudly bemoaning today’s lazy jobless refusing to leave their city to pick fruit, and then going very very quiet when asked ‘…and you’re offering proper wages for that, right?’ In fact, any time some lefty socialist troublemaker like the unions, the Bureau of Statistics (ABS), or someone with eyes and a window notices that the jobless are doing it tough, the Liberals immediately dispatch someone to prissily declare that the problem isn’t poor economic management or deliberately punitive government policy, but that the unemployed are all feckless and indolent sluggards who simply won’t give those bootstraps an adequate pulling. And thus, like clockwork, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham was trotted out last week to respond to criticisms about his government’s decision to remove JobKeeper and slash JobSeeker next month, at a time when there are 129,000 job vacancies to be shared, loaves and fishes-like, between 1.3 million unemployed people. And his
The idea that an enthusiastic seeker of work could simply up stumps from a state capital and lob into Geraldton to see what’s shaking is a transparent and cynical lie Andrew P Street contention? That ‘there’s plenty of jobs in the bush’. Specifically, Birmingham gave a speech (conveniently dropped to the Australian Financial Review) in which he declared that people could just move to regional Australia where jobs are appearing like cane toads after a rain – in agriculture, but also ‘mining and drilling companies who can’t find workers for drill rigs, or parts of the construction industry… Vacancies also exist in those tourism regions that have seen a resurgence in domestic tourism. Cleaning companies have openings that may previously have been filled by international workers, while demand continues to grow in the crucial care sectors’. (www.afr.com/politics/federal/ plenty-of-work-in-the-bush-birmingham-tells-jobless-20210211-p571fx) The thing is that even if that was not a remarkably optimistic overstatement of the case, there are plenty of reasons why the ‘just move to the bush’ argument is not a serious suggestion – starting with the fact that today’s unemployed are not in fact loveable cartoon hobos cheerfully riding the rails with a bindle over their shoulder and a pocket fulla dreams. And it’s not that people might have family obligations, or local support networks upon which they rely to survive, or have medical conditions which require specialist services hard to access outside of a metropolitan centre – although those are all great reasons which are incredibly common. Neither is it the obvious yet never-mentioned fact that moving is incredibly expensive and would require finding new accomodation – and Anglicare’s 2020 Housing Affordability survey concluded that even with the increased pandemic rates, a single person on JobSeeker could afford a grand total of nine rentals in the entire country, so best of luck with finding cool new digs. (www.thenewdaily.com.
au/news/national/2020/12/01/ rent-affordability-australia) No, the reason that MPs suggesting the jobless should go bush is deliberate victim-blaming horseshit is simple: a person on JobSeeker will be kicked off benefits if they up and move to the regions. You can read all about it at Centrelink’s webpage: ‘Moving to an area of lower employment prospects’, where the very first sentence runs as follows: ‘If you move to an area with less jobs, a 26 week non-payment period may apply’. (www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/ individuals/topics/moving-area-loweremployment-prospects/35851) There are exceptions, like if you have a job offer or can prove to Centrelink’s satisfaction that there are better prospects where you’re moving – but the idea that an enthusiastic seeker of work could simply up stumps from a state capital and lob into Geraldton to see what’s shaking is a transparent and cynical lie. And MPs know this, obviously. It isn’t a serious recommendation so much as the federal government dodging responsibility for its handling of the economy. Creating full employment is hard, and building a robust social safety net is expensive. But blaming unemployed people for their own predicament? That’s always cheap and easy – and for this government, apparently fun too! Q Andrew P Street is a Sydney-based, Adelaide-built journalist, columnist, author, editor and broadcaster. Apart from his monthly Echo column, he pens a regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald. Mr Street is also the author of the acclaimed The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott, and The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat. For more info, visit www.andrewpstreet.com.
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