To: The Hon. Bob Horne
Member for Paterson

Sent: 19 February 1996

Dear Mr Horne,

I refer to your recent mailout to residents in your electorate. In particular, I note that job creation is your ‘highest priority’. This invites some comments.

Firstly, may I suggest to you that Labor, should it gain re-endorsement, have a cold, hard look at its own labor market schemes and their ramifications?

When I was still a journalist on XXX, some two decades ago, a certain Gough Whitlam led a triumphant Labor team to power. His victory electrified people, with even this non-voting but proud AustrAlien cheering from the gallery, as it were. Yet I did not hesitate to dish out criticism when I thought it was due, as in the case of the ‘stampede’ triggered by the creation of the Arts Council, whose aspirants I collectively libelled as “cultural carpet-baggers”.

More recently, having become a sort of displaced person in these parts, I had occasion to enjoy the ministrations of assorted Government-funded organisations whose overt function is to make the unemployed more employable. In fact, the Jobskills scheme I was inducted to first was quickly thrown together in the run-up to the 1993 Federal election, when anything that ‘reduced’ the number of unemployed was considered worthy of a quick cash injection. I passed on my impressions of this exercise to the Canberra labor market officials when they did a ‘follow-up study’.

Since then, I have had further exposure to similar schemes, and it is my considered opinion that they are, overall, a misdirection of resources and generally a total waste of tax revenue - at least as far as the intended target ‘market’ is concerned.

Of course there are ‘hidden’ benefits of such schemes, including job creation for a coterie of client-services providers and their multiplier effect directed toward the ‘marginalisation’ of an electorate (I am referring here to the avowed effort of your neighbouring hopeful...). But to my mind the hidden costs, to a society, of such ostensibly quite defensible schemes are more worrying than the waste of money.

Should Labor make it into a perhaps salutary opposition, I would be quite happy to contribute to a candid re-assessment of such schemes.

Still on the subject of job creation (as in: jobs by all means, but not at any, e.g. environmental, cost!):

You saw fit to allude to the “future of the wonderful region in which we live”. I have been concerned about environmental issues since coming to Australia more than 25 years ago, and I bought a thin slice of this wonderful region more than 20 years ago. I applauded State Labor’s then Coastal Protection policies even then (during a brief interlude with The Manning River Times), and have argued in favour of conservation since. (Come to think of it, I sent you a copy of my submission to Great Lakes Council on its draft development control order for the Pacific Palms area only recently...)

Great Lakes Council, as most residents would agree, could be fairly described as “an informational black hole”. Not only has there been scant mention of this plan ever since, but the administration has - for reasons best known to itself - begun to pre-empt any findings or suggestions of its own draft development control order by producing a separate local environmental study on a small section of that area - with a view of permitting zoning changes there that would create an (unrequired!) 600-odd lots in an environmentally fragile area (but think of the jobs it would create! Temporarily...).

I now have pleasure in including my own fully searchable hypertext version of this LES for your information. (I had also sent it to the local “black hole” last November, with some suggestions on what could be achieved with such technology...).

Perhaps you can find the time, sometime after March 2, to look at that document and assess its merits (ignoring if you wish all my rantings in the margins - hidden under those Post-It icons)? All you need is access to a PC running MS Windows 3.1 and perhaps a computer-literate 9-year-old to help you install the program.

[In a nutshell, this is how it’s done: under File Manager, select Run, type a:setup in the dialog box and away you go. The program sets up its own Program Manager group, and an Icon, Pacific Palms LES, in that group. Click on that icon and you’re in medias res...]

The program is fairly self-explanatory in use, but I encourage experimentation. Feel free to pass on the original disks, I have authorisation to that effect from the program’s copyright holders (as long as such distribution is not-for-profit).

To return to the issue of job creation once more -- seing that this writer is among those the ‘Clever Country’ can afford to discard - I should perhaps point out that my letterhead reflects an earlier incarnation, courtesy of one of those much-maligned labor market schemes. Unfortunately, there is scant demand for sophisticated IT services where I live...


Best luck come the Ides of March!

Sincerely yours