Centrelink & Employability: A Victim Blaming Descent into A Kafkaesque Nightmare
Centrelink is built from the ground up on the idea – a wrong idea – that unemployment is not a result from an economic system that is designed to exclude people by judging there worth on extreme hierarchies or that there is a simple lack of jobs and thus unless there is public intervention there will ALWAYS be a significant number of people (generally those at the bottom of the aforementioned social hierarchies). No, Centrelink and the thrust of the centre and right wing think-tanks/political-parties that engender this culture believe that unemployment is merely a ‘mistake’. A ‘mistake’ on the part of the job seeker. Apparently, we the unemployed have merely forgotten to search for jobs. We are just fools (or worse ‘lazy’) who are missing out on the ‘infinite opportunities’ by failing to ‘market ourselves’ properly in the ‘jobs market’. Never mind that you have to search for jobs to get Newstart in the first place; or the failure of the federal government to direct state invest...