Kevin Rudd's 50,000 fake green jobs

More of the dishonesty and spin that so characterises this man. This is clearly the product of another one of his thought bubbles. No real plan, just an announcement made as soon as the idea popped into his head. Great politics of course. Large sections of the public will be suckered by this talk about lovely and huggy green jobs that don't exist yet and which probably never will. How many years now have sundry greenies and other carpetbaggers been promising us a green future full of green collar jobs, even as the promised jobs just never seemed to quite happen? So the proposition is that to make a small cut in Australia's small greenhouse gas footprint, (and yes, less than 1.5% of total global emissions is small Virginia), we are going to destroy tens of thousands of real jobs held by real people right now for vague promises about green jobs in the future doing, well, doing something or other. Nobody's really all that sure what. Never mind that every one of any of these jobs that actually does come into existence will do so only because the government has diverted your tax dollars away from education and health and the like, because none of them can happen in the real world without massive government subsidies. Never mind that a recent Spanish study showed that the creation of every one so-called green job resulted in the loss of over two real jobs elsewhere in the economy, and at a cost of over $1 million per green job. Employment Minister Mark Arbib stumbled yesterday over Kevin Rudd's central ALP national conference promise to create 50,000 new green jobs by saying they were just work experience and admitting he didn't know the details of the payments for unemployed youth. Julia Gillard says today that Arbib made a mistake yesterday. Yes, he made the political mistake of telling the truth. Andrew Bolt breaks down this number of 50,000 while trying to find any real new jobs in it: First, he’ll train 4000 jobless to install his free pink batts, a skill you can pick up in days for jobs that can last only as long as Rudd’s cash. No real jobs there. Second, he’ll pay to teach 30,000 trainees and apprentices “green skills”—which actually means, say, just having a plumbing apprentice learn how to hook up a solar water heater. No real jobs there, either. Another 10,000 jobless people will get 26 weeks of training in “job ready green skills”, presumably so they can plant trees and the like should a government pay them. Again, no real jobs. That leaves only the 6000 “new jobs” that Rudd says will contribute to “environmental sustainability in priority local economies”. Eh? Translated, that’s 6000 young jobless set to work planting trees, making walkways on wetlands, and other taxpayer-funded trivia. Jobs, yes, but real ones? So, there's the green future for your kids. Planting trees and clearing walk ways in a glorified work for the dole scheme.

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