remember the phenomenon of long-term unemployment has only existed since the phenomenon of mass unemployment - it is a symptom of that.
enhancing labour demand is the crucial issue.

incidentally i’m hearing a lot of temping/recruitment company advertisements lately - is this linked to increasing job-anxiety?

I disagree. You are misrepresenting Green Policy, if it is the Eco-Tax policy you are thinking of.

It was Green Party policy to exempt the first $5,000 of income from PAYE tax IN EXCHANGE for introducing a carbon tax and increasing Diesel taxes. It was meant to be tax neutral, with the vain hope that the lower incomes would be better off.

The Greens brochure for this didn’t even have any sense of urgency about this:

We will remove all income tax on the first $5000 of income, for everyone. We will do this in three stages over the next three years.

[Greens Eco-Tax Policy Review]

I haven’t caught up with any completely revised tax policy for this election, and so much has happened since this initial policy that I’m expecting significant revision.

I would like to see a tax free threshold of around $24K advanced by the major parties - it would make things interesting. It would also be the required sort of threshold (IMHO) for the Greens to advance if their Eco-Tax offset of taxing the bads were to have any significant effect.

I say, what’s stopping you? Why don’t you all do it, spend more of your money on helping the less well off, dedicate time to doing it, stop campaigning to force everyone else to do it, and just do it with your own money, and then fund raise. Why do you need to wait for the state to help people?

For it to be fixed there need to be more brackets and some higher ones for those who have incomes in the stratosphere. I predict that this will happen exactly when and if I manage to achieve such an income.

respectfully
BJ

But when the lower classes drink, gamble, smoke or fornicate, as they may, then the more privileged strata of liberal society become understandably resentful of having to deal with the consequences.

Liberal capitalism will not act to impose consistent and comprehensive moral rules on society, and neither will it be willing to fund the social costs of the resulting moral vacuum. The solution to this conundrum will only come when the poor themselves voluntarily adopt a rigid moral code as a means out of their predicament - in other words expect to see the resurgence of militant fundamentalism among the working classes as their social and economic condition becomes more acute.

And then the champions of liberalism may wonder why they chose to make such a fuss about a few thousand solo mothers on the DPB or dope addicts living on sickness benefits.

… and the Public Service became the way it is now because of the big drive from those outside the Public Service to make it follow the “business model”.

And you are partly right about the over-stuffed public service. But as an ex-policy adviser myself I can tell you that the public servants at the coal face did a great deal of work. The reason why we had to shuffle paper and not get anything meaningful done was because everything we did had to go through about 3 levels of bosses before it got to the minister. These managers had to read through everything and make sure it was what the minister wanted to read before passing it on to the next level. One of my colleagues was an expert in molecular biology and the minister wanted some advice on GM crops. Was my colleague allowed to see the minister and explain it directly? That would be too simple and too democratic. She had to first explain it to the boss, who knew nothing about biology, who then explained it to the minister.

So yes, get rid of the parasitic government bosses, but leave hard working public servants and politicians alone.

And you’ve enabled those conditions for the past nine years.

What conditions did you think low growth, low productivity, abundant welfare, and wasteful government spending would create? Prosperity?

You’ve got exactly what we’ve been predicting all along.

How much do you get a year Sue B ?