It’s farcical that the Federal Government continues to flood the jobs market with migrants when there are more than 1.3 million people who are unemployed and underemployed.
Many of whom are over 45 years of age as well as countless others who have dropped out of the workforce due to age prejudice.
There are also about 400,000 people on the aged pension who want to work more.
A few years ago, a MAX Solutions study showed that 30 per cent of Australian employers won’t hire older workers, even though they are highly skilled.
People aged 55-64 were the largest unemployed group receiving social security payments during the pandemic.
More than 100,000 older workers are looking for a job and this does not count the approximately 50,000 people over 50 who have dropped out of the workforce and are not counted by the ABS.
Age prejudice condemns thousands of older workers and their families to a life of poverty and penury. It is an insane prejudice because one is born in a certain year.
Executive general manager of employment services at MAX Solutions Fiona Lamb said 17.8 per cent of Australians are aged 50-64, yet they represented 28 per cent of MAX’s 116,899 unemployed customers in May 2024
According to a MAX survey, more than half of employers said they found mature-age workers to be more skilled compared to their younger peers in dispute resolution (57 per cent), mediation (55 per cent) and managing others (55 per cent).
60 per cent of employers said other benefits included their “wealth of experience”, followed by “maturity and stability” (48 per cent) and “reliability and dependability” (43 per cent).’
Employers and the Federal Government have got to wake up and get older job seekers in to work.
The state of the state
- Migrants are exhorted to come to SA but once they are here, they realise there are very few jobs for them and they spend their savings. It’s a rort which is fully supported by the SA government.
- Salaries in SA are on average $9000 less per annum than in the eastern states, yet we pay some of the highest utility bills in the world.
- The website ‘Poms in Adelaide’ is flooded with complaints by migrants that they can’t find work. Many are returning to the UK. Who is advising these people to come?
- Liquidity is so low that Adelaide concert goers ‘hedge’ on ticket prices, forcing promoters to frequently cancel major international acts. http://www.glamadelaide.com.au/main/solving-adelaides-big-bands-bypass/
- From 1984-2024 about 120,477 Crow Eaters fled the state permanently. Most were in there 20s and 30s. On average, between 20-30,000 South Australians actually leave the state every year and mainly lesser skilled immigrants make up the short fall. This has contributed to a raft of psychosocial problems, such as under whelming leadership capabilities and the creation of regressive and under-performing organisations.
The problems are wicked to solve: a lack of economic diversity, failure to transition to the new economy, lack of competitive drive, an ongoing decline of the manufacturing and construction sectors, low exports, shrinking private investment, an ageing population, high taxes on small business, extreme public sector ossification, policy blocking and workplace bullying, youth brain drain, and recruitment nepotism and age prejudice.
The deep structural problems in manufacturing go back to the Hawke/Keating Labor government. The lowering of tariffs and deregulation saw living standards soar. The price for these economic reforms was structural change as the most protected economic sectors were exposed by a lack of competitiveness. The state government fought to hold on to jobs – and especially at Holden – by introducing ‘co-investment’ to shore up a product that was losing market share hand over fist. Those days are gone.
This strategy also depended on a large Commonwealth-funded defence sector and a disproportionately large allocation of Commonwealth grants under the formulae used by the Commonwealth Grants Commission.
SA gets about $7 billion in Commonwealth Government monies, comprising more than half of its total revenue. Of that, about $4.5 billion comes from the GST. SA gets about $1 billion ‘free’ from horizontal equalisation. Its money not earned because SA, relative to the other states, is battling.
Changes within the population have altered the cultural demographics of Greater Adelaide over the last 30 years, but it’s the forces of globalisation and the ‘top down weight’ of population ageing that will have the biggest long-term impact. A local example is domestic undergraduate applications are falling in SA – especially for non-science disciplines – forcing academics to lower tertiary entrance standards.