An idea that’s gaining traction, in a pandemic where international travel has stopped and many Australians are losing their jobs, is this notion that the unemployed (aka: everyone on JobSeeker payments) should go out into the regions and help the farmers pick fruit.
It’s been reported that unemployed people are refusing work, including fruit picking. Tales of woe have been circulated about fruit literally ‘rotting on the ground’ and farmers destroying entire crops because no one will come to pick them. This is done in conjunction with stories of abuse and exploitation amongst backpacker seasonal workers being framed as ‘a stigma’, that these abusive farmers are little more than a few bad apples (if you’ll pardon the pun).
In addition to these attacks on the unemployed for being a lazy, farmer-hating section of the population, misconceptions and misinformation about the reality of the jobs sector and the lifestyle of the JobSeeker payment have spread wildly.
For every job vacancy, there are 13 people seeking a job. And the likelihood of making it to the interview stage for an entry-level role is probably not in your favour, especially if you have gaps in your resume or no previous experience as a bartender or a shelf stacker. Employers have reported being inundated with applications, even more than before COVID-19. Hundreds or even thousands of people might be going for the exact same role as you, and it’s estimated that this will continue for years. And while naysayers may insist that there are ‘plenty of jobs out there if you’re not afraid of hard work,’ it’s estimated that 400,000 more Australians will be unemployed by Christmas this year.
Even with statistics pointing to the lack of available jobs and evidence that supports a permanent rise to the JobSeeker rate, the current consensus in the Morrison government is that cutting JobSeeker will motivate people to get a job. According to the Prime Minister himself: ‘we can’t allow the JobSeeker payment to become an impediment to people going out and doing work, getting extra shifts.’
As entire industries have closed down or downsized, people have been applying for anything and everything. But not fruit picking, it seems, much to the chagrin of various ministers and leaders in the Morrison Government. Deputy PM Michael McCormack has tried to romanticise farming, having recently framed fruit-picking as something worthy of posting on social media, as though young Australians are selfie-obsessed, vacuous and lazy.