Beware! Grass is not greener in Aust.

Press, 23 February 1978, Page 17

Beware! Grass is not greener in Aust.

TERRY McGOVERNE,

formerly of

’’The Press’’ editorial staff, has returned from a stay in Australia with this grim warning for young Nev Zealanders...

Young New Zealanders — and older ones for that matter — should think twice about heading for Australia in search of work. While things are apparently going from bad to worse in New Zealand, they are appalling in Australia when it comes to getting a job. The bare statistics tel! a sorry story — 430,000 unemployed Australians and the prospect of 500,000 before the middle of the year. And these figures reiate only to peo’e who are drawing unemployment benefits. If ali the women who would work if they could get a job were added, the score would be somewhere near one million job seekers. The crushing scourge of unemployment in Australia is having dramatic and undesirable effects on the over-all fabric of its

society. The worst affected are people under the age of 22 who make up 38 per cent of all the unemployed. There is no place in New Zealand as soul destroying as the western suburbs of Sydney where at least 60.000 young people are jobless and totally without hope of getting one. Their only visible means of independent support is in the form of a $4B handout from the Commonwealth Government each week.

Among the unwanted workers are now 4000 school teachers in New South Wales. They were told at the beginning of this year that there would be no positions for them. But the lack of positions for skilled people does not stop at teachers. There are solicitors, engineers, scientists, farmers, and all manner of others are unemployed.

True, there is a hard core of people who do not want to work anyway. But Commonwealth employment officers are convinced that the “dole bludgers’’ make up only a fraction of the 7.2 per cent of the workforce who cannot get a job. During the last 12 months the Federal Government has cracked down on New Zealanders who have been found loafing about the winterless north enjoying the good surfing. Those who fly the Tasman in search of greener pastures or bigger waves are firmly but politely told that unemployment benefits are available only to permanent settlers after a qualifying period. _ The antipathy towards New Zealanders comes quickly to the surface in Queensland where so many have gone and left a trail of disgrace. The writer who identified him-