There is nothing so futile as speaking truth to bureacracy, but here I go again:

Walk into any "Job Services" provider and look at the services they actually provide. There are posters on the wall telling young people to dress smartly; men to polish their shoes and women to go easy on the make-up. Does anybody seriously believe that persistent, widespread unemployment is to any significant degree caused by an epidemic of poor fashion sense?

The huge parasitic industry that has been peddling such fatuous advice since the abolition of the Commonwealth Employment Service is designed to police, punish, and brainwash the unemployed into destitution and subservience.

The federal government could eliminate all unemployment in a matter of months, if not weeks, were we to demand they do so. The government's 1945 White Paper on Full Employment declared that "governments should accept the responsibility for stimulating spending on goods and services to the extent necessary to sustain full employment. To prevent the waste of resources which results from employment is the first and greatest step to higher living standards." The policies proposed in that paper worked, at least until the monetarists used the opportunity of the OPEC oil crisis to take control of the public debate and ransack everything that had been achieved.

You cannot train away the unemployment and underemployment of about a fifth of the working age population. There is useful work to do and people to do it. Refusal to mobilise the resources to put people to work is nothing but class warfare.