A Plan for Australian Jobs

At the movies last night I caught an Australian government advertisement entitled “A Plan for Australian Jobs”. I have just Googled the thing and have now read the precis which is available in 11 languages.

This is a work of distilled bullshit that quite tidily summarises all that is wrong in Australia.

In a nutshell here is the plan;

(1) Introduce trade barriers for government purchasing to ensure that our local suppliers get lazy and never export anything,

(2) Invest in ten innovation precincts to simultaneously (a) keep the Labor Party’s developers mates happy and (b) to keep the middle class welfare piling into the non-functioning high-tech sector, and (c) make a splash in some marginal electorates,

(3) Further bloat the public service by providing some new government services to small businesses rather than just giving them a tax break so they can decide what to do with their own money.

I also wonder what fraction of the expenditure associated with this plan has previously been committed under other plans, and has simply just been re-badged into this new plan as a means of election advertising?

Oh, and the part on Australian Innovation is supported by two of my favourite chestnuts, the Hills Hoist and WiFi.

Don’t you think its time we stopped talking about the Hills Hoist as if it was an invention we should be proud of? Its a 70 year-old clothes line for god’s sake and not a particularly smart one at that.

And CSIRO has propagated a myth that they invented WiFi, which is a factual lie. In fact they sneakily got some patents for some enabling technology that combined a number of existing ideas and then later made a lot of money by handing these over to the Texan patent trolls who sued the pants off everyone for a quick settlement. Not exactly an effort in creating jobs now is it?

We really need to take policy and planning off the politicians since they are too wedded to their political process to either have the time to think straight or even care about the outcomes.