The main argument against tackling climate change is that we can't do anything untill we have figured out where all the people who might lose their jobs will work. A history review will expose past practices.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, employment in coal mining fell from 30,400 employees to 16500 in 1999. So in one decade, employment in the coal industry fell by more than half. Apparently, when the introduction of labour-saving technologies wreaks havoc on regional communities we don't care but if we are tackling climate change its quite a different story.
"Ah, but that was due to market forces", I hear you say. "The difference with the Carbon Pollution Rediuction Scheme (CPRS) is it's the introduction of governmnet policy that will cause the job losses. Responsible governmnets would never introduce policy that would cause job losses." Yeah right.
Lets start small. The introduction of National Competition Policy (NCP) and the associated privatisation and contracting out resulted in the direct destruction of tens of thousamds of jobs. This was not an unintended consequence: it was the specific aim of the policy. According to the Electricty Supply Association, employment in electricty generation in Victoria alone fell from 9382 employees in 1994 to 5420 in 1998. That's 4000 workers in four years and at the time when Australian unemployment was substantially higher than it is today.
The impacts of the NCP were small compared to the longer term devastation of the manufacturing industry associated with 20 years of tariff reductions and the pursuit of free trade. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in the search for a level playing field but, of course, these jobs were not seen as a barrier to the pursuit of this policy agenda. On the contrary, the language was that of 'freeing up' unproductive labour for employment in other areas of the economy. At the time, it was not seen to be necessary or even possible to forecast where these 'freed up' workers would end up.
And then we get to the big one, the recession we had to have. In the fight against rising inflation and rising imports, it was deemed necessay to drive interest rates so high that more than one million people lost their jobs. This was not just Paul Keating's folly: Treasury and the RBA was right behind the approach. We had to break the back of inflationary pressure even if it meant breaking the backs of many Australian families.
The point is..unemployment is destructive, wasteful and unequitable..but it is important to analyse the past in order to understand what is really going on in the current debate around mining jobs, green jobs and con jobs.
Firstly many industry groups, which are expressing concern about job losses, are crying crocodile tears to impress their workers. They were unconcerned in the past and will be unconcerned in the future. Nobody should think for one minute that, if some labour-saving technology were to be invented tomorrow, industries wouldnt install it at the expence of their regional workforces...
The simple facts are that no-one could envisage how many people would be employed in the mobile phone industry, or the internet industries and no one declared 'wait' we don not know were the photo lab workers will go- when we embraced the digital camera era.
If you want to read this article in full- go to Issue 29 of Green Magazine page 12.
