Last week we saw the announcement of winner of “the best job in the world” up in Queensland. What a great job. $150,000 for six months “work” telling the world how beautiful it is staying on those beautiful tropical islands. What a lucky “you-know-what.”
That was one of the great marketing campaigns. The whole world found out what a lucky country we are living in. But I have found out some info to truly knock your socks off and realize just how lucky.
How would you like a $260,000 job? Don’t think you have a chance? Don’t worry there are 200,000 of them. Got your interest yet? Where do you apply?
Well looking at the reports on the impact of the Federal Government’s stimulus package, that is exactly what has happened in Australia in the past year.
The Prime Minister yesterday announced that an estimated 200,000 jobs have been saved as a result of the two stimulus packages in the past year. Great news headline. When I heard that it sounded great. But hang on a minute, I worked out that given the cost of the packages totaled $52 billion, that equates to $260,000 per job potentially saved.
The headline doesn’t look so attractive now, does it? Imagine the cost per job if we find out that only 100,000 jobs have been saved.
With record deficit budgets, perhaps the Government would have been better off doing nothing at all. Instead wait and see if there would have been an extra 200,000 on the unemployment line this time next year and provide extra Centrelink benefits to those people then. Based on current Centrelink rates, the extra unemployment could be carried for more than a decade for the same cost.
Perhaps it would have been better for businesses to have been the direct benefactors of the stimulus packages. After all they are the ones that need to incentivized, via grants or lower taxes, to create more jobs and kick-start the economy again. If you can’t make a decent profit when you run a business, why take the risk in the first place?
As I say there is no point paying someone $900, if they are going to lose their $50,000 job.
What do you think the Government should have done last year? Should they have tried to stimulate the economy?
