Will work for food

"I understand you're not happy with the terms of your employment."

Clearly John Howard knows something we don't. Unemployment is at 5% and dropping, yet we require changes to workplace relations to improve employment. Silly me, I always thought jobs were created by people with cash in their pockets, apparently they spring from direct government intervention. On the face of it, it makes no sense. Why would you want to break up collective bargaining? Wouldn't that drive wages down? Exactly, that will create more jobs because employers will be more likely to hire people. A fair argument, if we lived in a manpower dependent manufacturing economy. If we were producing Hello Kitty dolls in giant factories to be exported to China it would be logical to keep wages as low as possible, seeing as how it would make our exports more competitive. Unfortunately we don't export all that much compared to imports, though if it would help I'd be finding the capital to flog Amanda Vanstone to the Japanese.

Our economy is a service economy, mostly. It runs on disposable income. You make money, and after spending on your basic needs you have enough left to go buy a plasma TV, renovate your home or buy that iPod. Long may it continue for it keeps people in jobs. However if we skew the balance of power in the job market towards employers they will, quite naturally, depress wages, because people are short sighted and don't see the big picture. They don't understand that fewer people with less disposable income will cause our economy to shrink. People will spend less and employers will sack people to cope with the reduced volume. It won't happen over night, but it is happening.

John Howard has always admired Reagan and Thatcher, not as people, or even as visionary (please, don't throw up on the tiles) statesmen. He admires their economic policies. Yes, it's true. That would be this Margaret Thatcher and this Ronald Reagan. Everything that John Howard advocates today policy wise can be divined from his opinions in the 80s. Of course they're never alluded to by name, he's learned that people don't take it well when you declare your intentions to impoverish them and "take a scalpel" to their family's health.

One might also ask, Isn't messing with a market in such a heavy handed manner the very antithesis of conservative policy? The answer of course is yes. It's not conservative, it's not even particularly clever, but, because we're back in the 80s the right is right and so far right that the centre looks right too.