Thank you.

ALL JOBS ARE NOT EQUAL

‘Jobs and Growth’ is the three word slogan claimed by the government to be their economic policy. But not all jobs are equal, indeed it is demonstrably clear that some jobs are more equal than others.

If you are a world-renowned, prize-winning scientist researching climate change, arguably the most important threat facing the planet, you can be dismissed without a second thought.

If you are one of the Australian scientists hailed for their contribution to the revelatory discovery of gravitational waves, your group was already disbanded before international recognition arrived.

If you are a scientist working in CSIRO, once Australia’s internationally esteemed and envied premier science organization, you may have survived the 2014 sacking of five hundred scientists only to be tossed aside in the latest senseless round of cuts and retrenchments.

Or you may have been one of the dispensable scientists already cast adrift by this government’s cuts to DSTO, ANSTO, AIMS and CRCs, necessitated by funding reductions of at least $420 million to a number of iconic agencies and programs in its first budget. As for the scientists engaged in the new, innovative, twenty-first century industries of renewable energy, forget it! Your jobs are not worth worrying about.

If on the other hand you are engaged in the highly subsidized forestry industry, cutting down our remaining old growth forests to be exported as wood chips at a financial loss redeemed only by heavy government subsidization, your job is indispensable.

If you are operating an excavator or any other employment in the fossil fuel industries, your job is highly valued by our government as it continues to spend billions of dollars subsidizing this favoured industry.

If your job forms part of Australia’s Cultural Industries, whether as a visual artist, musician, dancer, administrator, or an employee in one of Australia’s major cultural institutions, it doesn’t matter how many statistics you produce of your value to the economy, the number of visitors, the size of the audiences, the rate of citizen participation, the bad news is that your jobs are at the bottom of the values scale for this government. Your job security is zilch!

We appear not to have advanced from our primal frontier instincts of cut it down, dig it up, ship it out, the mentality of Australian being the quarry for Asia, its settler citizens being incapable of scientific innovation, advanced manufacturing, of participation in the sophisticated new world industries of the twenty-first century.

I believe our government is selling Australians short.

Jo Vandermark 16/1 Daly St Larrakeyah NT 0820 0409 699 170