Great News: Unemployment Hits 4.7%

No, seriously. This is great news. I mean people from the RBA are on record as saying that unemployment will have to hit five percent before we get inflation under control so we’re nearly there, which makes the next rate hike totally unnecessary but you can’t be too careful with inflation so we probably need to kill off a few more businesses and make a few more workers destitute before the good folk at the RBA relax and say, “Australia’s in recession; we’ve done enough!”

Economic news is always a bit confusing to the average person. I guess that’s because a lot of the time what the newspapers are telling us is the exact opposite of what we’d think was good news or – if not – the exact opposite of what the same people were telling us just a few moments before.

If you go back a few years, we were being told that automation would free people from those dull, boring jobs and that sending production overseas would make goods cheaper for everyone. Of course, once enough firms had done this, we had to complain about all those lazy people who no longer had jobs as though they were the ones who’d decided to eliminate the very jobs that they would have once had.

Back to the present and we’re in the very interesting economic situation where the sudden rise in the jobless is the direct result of the Albanese Labor government and policies. Of course, inflation was also the direct result of their policies and a fifty percent rise in the price of oil had very little to do with it because our inflation was higher than a lot of countries and, even if it isn’t, that doesn’t matter because it shouldn’t be and all that government spending was what was fueling the economy and without that, we were told, we’d be in a recession.

Of course, now that unemployment has hit the highest level in five years, it’s the fault of the government because growth is slowing and we need something to stimulate it… but not government spending which is inflationary. We need business confidence and the way to achieve that is to have the sort of hands off Liberal government who would argue that governments shouldn’t be intervening in the market. It’s about time that Labor got off their backsides and started doing nothing so that business will feel that better times are just around the corner.

Instead of fixing things by removing the sort of regulatory red tape which stops business from doing whatever it needs to do to make a profit, Labor have been focused on our algorithms…

Just in case you’re one of the few people who don’t understand how the algorithms on social media work, they’re designed to keep you online as long as possible. For example, if you were to have quite reasonably wondered about the Covid vaccines being rushed out and looked up something to see if any had side effects, then you would have been flooded with more and more stuff about vaccine side effects and all sorts of other things until all your feeds were telling you that Elvis was alive and living in Neverland with Michael Jackson. The algorithms have been designed so that it’s easier to get off crack cocaine than to get out of the rabbit hole you’ve descended into.

So while some people are attacking the legislation as an assault on free speech, the more contentious aspects have been shelved and it seems like a rather strange thing to be opposing… Sort of like when people oppose truth in political advertising. Sure, there’s a problem about who gets to decide what what’s true and how they decide it, but it still seems strange to hear any politician say that they oppose anything that requires truth in political ads.

Whatever, I’m sitting back and waiting for the next interest rate decision and whether or not the RBA will be insisting that this rise in unemployment is really good or whether they’ll think that it’s still not high enough because too many people still want to have food and shelter.