The Impending Depression

Scott Longden

With special guests:

• Professor Bill Mitchell
• Scott Longden and
• Sue Price.

This week we feature a fascinating interview with Professor Bill Mitchell from the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle. He is one of the academics who is predicting that there could be a million Australians on the dole queues by the end of next year. On this week’s show he explains just how easily this could come about and also talks about the devastating social consequences for the nation - how severe the impacts are on fathers, families and children. He also talks about the hidden unemployment concealed in the official figures. One hour of work is enough to have you classified as being employed, but more than 100,000 Australians are “underemployed”. That is, their talents are being wasted.

While marginally more women than men are classified as being unemployed, we also talk about the gender complexities of unemployment. The latest unemployment figures showed that while the overall unemployment rate remained steady at 4.5%, the male unemployment rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 4.4%, while the female unemployment rate decreased by 0.3 percentage points to 4.5%. Already the tightening labour market is having a severe impact on Australian families and while the number of full time jobs are declining rapidly, casual jobs are increasing. Traditional full time jobs in manufacturing, largely a male domain, are the jobs which are disappearing first. In contrast, the service sector is dominated by women who often work insane hours holding down several part time jobs - with negative impacts on both their children and their relationships with their husbands. But in Australia today, you can’t maintain a family in such perilous conditions.

Professor Mitchell argues that the only way out of the looming depression in Australia is by massive public investment in the jobs sector. He argues that much of the infrastructure - including ports, roads and the internet - were allowed to decline under the previous conservative Howard government, who he argues had the mistaken belief that these resources could be maintained entirely by the private sector. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastucture through public investment is one sensible and productive way of fighting off recession.

Also this week we run extracts from an interview with Scott Longden from the Fatherhood Project in Northern NSW. He talks about how important it is for fathers to get involved with their children from birth, and how men can help each other in prenatal classes to become the best fathers they can. For too long fathers have been seen as an almost irrelevant adjunct to the birth, whereas in reality fathers are vital to their children from their earliest days. More can be found at http://www.fatherhood.com.au/.

We finish the show with Sue Price from the Men’s Rights Agency, who talks about the frequency with which men are being jailed for alleged abuses which occur sometimes decades before they are actually jailed, often on extremely flimsy if not non-existent evidence. In particular she talks about the case of Bill Darcy, a former Labor MP who has been convicted of a number of highly improbable child sexual abuse offences alleged to have occurred some three decades ago in front of the entire class, yet no complaints were made for many years afterwards and it is now claimed the woman making the complaints wasn’t even working at the school at the time. Sue Price argues that senior retired police officers have investigated the case and if asked will declare Darcey to be an innocent man. Despite petitioning the Queensland Governor, the Attorney General of the day Linda Lavarch rejected his petition on the grounds of reports prepared by the original investigating officers, which, unremarkably, found their initial investigation was without fault. Sue Price believes these alleged travesties of justice, usually targeted towards men, could be avoided by the implementation of a truly independent Criminal Case Review Commission.

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