Your stupid idea of the day!

[lizbee]

TONY Abbott has proposed banning the dole for people under 30 in a bid to entice the unemployed to head west and fill massive skill shortages in the booming resources sector.

1.  Being under thirty, and having been on the dole, I can only imagine how badly I would have coped in a mining town.

2.  I presume the mining towns would be THRILLED to have an influx of resentful, undertrained young people coming in.

3.  Somehow, sending women out west against their will seems like a particularly bad idea.

4.  Too bad if you can't drive, or want to stay close to your family!

5.  At least in ye olde England, you had to commit a crime before you were transported as forced labour.

6.  Abbott doesn't actually want to win the election, does he?  Which is fine by me, I just think there's more to being Opposition Leader than trolling.

Comments

[nixwilliams]

omfg, DIE, TONY ABBOT, DIE. clearly someone who has never been on the dole. ARGH.

I just think there's more to being Opposition Leader than trolling.

haha, quoted for extreme truth!

[jamethiel]

I... WHUT? I don't even... how can ANYONE think that's a good idea?!

[lilacsigil]

Howard also talked a lot about lazy people being unwilling to relocate (while he lived in two houses at once at our expense, mind you!) The Howard government also covered the reverse, by putting rules in place meaning that if you moved to an area with high unemployment, you can get your benefits stopped for up to 6 weeks (because obviously the first thing you do when you're on the dole is pack up and move to the beach woo hoo!)

So it's not totally out of the blue, but it *is* said in the most trolly manner possible!

[st_aurafina]

*headdesks* He's such a comicbook villain, which would be fine if he wasn't, you know, potentially able to be elected as head of state. However unlikely that is.

[danni]

6. Abbott doesn't actually want to win the election, does he? Which is fine by me, I just think there's more to being Opposition Leader than trolling.

So, I think this is actually 100% politics. Mr Abbott would already know that his friends in the resources sector who donate so much money to the Liberal Party would never support this as a policy; but if you look at breakdowns of voter intention by age, the Coalition is already weakest in the 18-30 bracket. He doesn't really have any more votes to lose here. On the other hand, he's trying to appeal to those "twas better when I was young", "kids these days" over 60s, which are the base of Coalition support, and who swung surprisingly strongly to Labor in the last election.

He's just playing a numbers game. He knows the groups he can't hope to win back (although you've seen him try to appeal to women, Greens voters, etc. it was hilarious), so he's trying to sure up as much support as possible in the groups he can appeal to; and to do so he'll say anything he can. Of course, the media have played right into his hand by reporting this non-policy.

[weaver]

I need to go clean out my brain now.