Posted: March 06, 2005

A lack of jobs is where it starts!

As a follow up to my recent blog on the Sydney riots, the Sydney Morning Herald's article When rage hits boiling point by Paola Totaro and Ellen Connolly argues that the view that the violence is because of a "couple of bad kids", which is the main claim of the mass media and public officials (including the Premier) is far too superficial.

They cite Mick Kennedy who is a former senior NSW policemand now an academic at UWS who is angry at the reponse of the "intellectuals and academics ... its politicians and opinion leaders" He is cited as saying: "When [Police Commissioner] Ken Moroney talks about growing up on a housing estate, about childhood disadvantage and making choices, I know what he is talking about. I was a Barnardos kid. I, too, left school at 14, got myself an apprenticeship, found a secure job. But that was then ... Even with very little or no family support in those days, you could always get a good job. When he and Bob Carr talk about making choices in life, about personal responsibility ... it just isn't that simple any more. Things have changed. Enormously. They talk about choices ... we had an abundance of choices. I went to tech four nights a week. It was hard but I wasn't anything exceptional. But what choice do they have now in Macquarie Fields? I was speaking to a friend [from Barnardos] this week and we both agreed that if we had grown up there in this generation, we would have ended up exactly the same: part of the mob.'

Kennedy and fellow academic, urban sociologist Michael Bounds say that this is not an isolated riot and there is a substantial research literature pointing to the source of the problems. Kennedy is cited as saying: "When you have marginalised people, low employment rates, a concentration of single, stressed parents and communities with poor access to resources and poor health care, difficult transport and little opportunity for meaningful employment, when you put all these things together, it is a recipe for disaster ... And it is the same all over the world."

The authors outline the context of the postwar public housing estate boom - which was a plan to "transfer infrastructure, industry and housing out to the green belts of ... [big Australian cities] ... The principle was a good one ... [and rapid growth occurred in the 1960s and 1970s] ... But ... its spread also coincided with the beginning of the recession in the early 1970s and complex societal restructuring. Youth unemployment began to emerge as a new pressure as did familial breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse." But Michael Bounds says that the rising unemployment meant that "... Increasingly people who were placed there were people who were classically in need of emergency housing ... what was intended as public housing evolved into what became welfare housing,"

I note that the largest employer of youth at the time, the public sector started to cut back on its role as an employer at this time (via the destruction of low skill jobs throughout the sector and also the apprenticeship scheme).

Message: a lack of jobs is a passport to disaster. A fully employed economy minimises these dysfunctions which affect us all.

Blog entry posted by bill